I'm so proud of myself: I'm nearly 40 yet I went to a contemporary heavy metal concert! Yay for me!

Somehow I crossed paths with the machine known as Mastodon back in the earlier part of this decade, when they were a newly-formed metal band playing local bars. I only saw them twice and then didn't hear of them again until a couple of years ago, when I was stunned to hear they were on Warner Brothers Records and were considered to be the new contenders for Metallica's crown. So when I heard they were headlining the Center Stage Theater I had to be there (plus it was only $30 even after Ticketmaster surcharges; what a bargain!)

I put on my Doc Marten-style boots and black T-shirt thinking this was probably going to be a rough crowd of sociopathic metalheads. Instead it was a crowd of teens and twenty-somethings and lots of 30-somethings in Doc Marten-type boots and black T-shirts. To tell the truth, we were a pretty dorky-looking bunch. Yesteryear's metal fan looked like Jeff LeBarr from Cinderella, but today's metal fan looks like they would be walking around a science fiction convention looking for Mr. Sulu to sign their Star Trek baseball cards. Also, it would be interesting to read the average cholesterol level in the auditorium: virtually every T-shirt, young and old, male and female, had a burger bulge poking out from under it.

But onto the music! The opening band was called Intronaut. I know that because they said, "Hey, were Intronaut, from Los Angeles," at the beginning. It interested me that they were from Los Angeles, because they didn't look like what I thought a Los Angeles band would look like. For one thing, every band member had a beard, so they looked like a band of Paul Bunyans. Both of the guitar players looked like they had walked out of a Computer Science graduate class, and I half expected the bass player to offer to balance our checkbooks for an extra $10 after the show, just meet him in the lobby.

"What has this shit got to do with music, dude?," you may ask. I believe, as Saint David Lee Roth told us in the gospels of Crazy from the Heat, that music should look like it sounds. When these MIT types got up there and started doing their Cookie Monster growls about how they were gonna kick our asses and summon demons, or whatever they were singing, I couldn't take it seriously! Actually they were really adept at Messhugah-ish, whacked-out riffs and rhythms, and the drummer was smokin' beyond belief, but they've got to get their visuals together.

Put it this way: back in `80's, you got the impression Stephen Pearcy and Robbin Crosby were getting all the tail they could handle. I pictured them driving Camaro Z-28's that they spent all day Saturday polishing, and then they polished the pleather of the back seat with the homecoming queen's behind that night. James Hetfield's Camaro probably had some dents and primer showing through, and it was just him and Cliff Burton with a quarter bag cruising around, but still, he had a Camaro. They had cool.

However, I became convinced, when metal fell from grace in the `90's, the kind of guys who had that cool fled the genre, too. Now all that was left was the hardcore nerd fans, and therefore the hardcore nerds were the ones forming the bands, too. How else could I explain that a math major was howling at me in a Cookie Monster voice?

Anyhow, Intronaut was enjoyable. The next band, Kylesa, had a bit of the reverse problem. The bass player, at least, knew he was in a rock n' roll band and looked and acted like it. Their sound was messy, though. I think they were going for a Monster Magnet kind of "stoner rock" sound, but their open-handed strumming combined with a little too much treble in the p.a. was starting to fatigue my ears. The female singer (who also did the Cookie Monster thing...how feminine) needs to stop dressing like she's in a Bonnie Raitt tribute band. Goldtop Les Pauls just don't go with hardcore metal, either. They had two drummers, though, and they did a phenomenal solo that reminded me a lot of "Bonzo's Montreaux." Kylesa are from Savannah, though, so I'll support a homegrown act.

So there I sat with my theories about nerds and Mr. Sulu and what they had to do with Intronaut's beards. It seemed to me that today's metal scene was wide open for a band that had it's shit together to emerge and take over.

Then came Mastodon!

Mastodon looked and moved like a band. Whereas the other bands had a sort of "whatever" way about them, Mastodon walked on stage with a stride that said, "We are the SHIT!" And the way the crowd went apeshit said they agreed.

There was a rumbling in the p.a. like the engines of the Millennium Falcon on takeoff. The screen behind the band started showing stars and galaxies going by, and I got the idea: its like we're on a spaceship ready for takeoff, going along with their new album, Crack the Skye's out-of-body experience theme. Then they blasted into the first chords of "Oblivion," and immediately a guy on the floor was lifted up and body surfing over the crowd. Man, this was COOL!

They played their new album straight through, which is an event I have a feeling I'll be proud to say I got to experience one day, like if I had gotten to see The Who do Tommy all the way through.

After that the spaceship sound returned, and then the cover of Blood Mountain was on the projection screen, and we got several songs from that album, and then Leviathan. In the background the band's parents, cousins, neices and nephews had visibly gathered around, since this was the last show of this tour and a homecoming (Mastodon is from Atlanta). They all waved us off as Troy Sanders said, "Good night!" My only disappointment was they didn't play my favorite song of theirs, "Where Strides the Behemoth."

And then there was that cool, tribal feeling I haven't felt in a long time, where you filed into traffic and knew all of the cars around you had just been where you had been and experienced what you had experienced. "Where strides the behemoth?" Back home to write about a great concert.