Even on a normal day, entering The Rave to see a show is gambling on your physical and mental health. That’s part of its charm. Of all our Milwaukee venues, one could argue that The Rave (and its sub-venues inside) knows itself better than any of them. Nobody goes to a show there because they want to sit down and drink a martini. I mean, sure, it’s versatile. I saw Regina Spektor there. A martini and a chair would have been nice. But The Rave doesn’t do “nice” with quite the same fervor they do “naughty”. The Rave was built for danger. And I was heading in to see Black Label Society on some “free” tickets my brother had scored. What’s more dangerous than a free metal show at The Rave during a pandemic?

I caught my first concert there almost thirty years ago and I remember, even then, wondering why it hadn’t yet been condemned. Every show I’ve attended there since, I’ve never felt completely sure it wouldn’t get bulldozed while I was in line to buy beer. And this night, well, it was almost certain I would die of something. The day of March 12, 2020 was not a normal one.

The news of COVID-19 had been ramping up all week. They were starting to cancel things around Milwaukee. Around the country. My brother Matt, my buddy Tim and I kept checking all the updates to see if the promoters were going to direct Black Label Society back onto their tour bus and ship them several miles away to, what I imagine, is Zakk Wylde’s skull and candle adorned basement. It didn’t happen. This show would go on. COVID-19 would be eradicated by metal riffs. With as little as we knew about what was to come in the following week, squashing a virus with incessant, ear numbing guitar solos didn’t seem all that far-fetched.

We’d done everything wrong, too. We took an Uber, hopped into a car with a stranger that we had no medical dossier on. Three of us on top of each other in the back seat of a Honda. There were COVID jokes, of course. All of them half dismissive, half in search of information. As all good jokes should be. Our Nigerian driver told us that he’d lived through the Ebola outbreak in his home country with “no worries”. That was comforting. I didn’t want COVID-19, much less Ebola, and this driver was the first disease expert I’d listened to in a very long time. Maybe ever. Hey, everything’s going to be just fine. We shook hands and touched just about every part of his car when he dropped us off. 

We jammed ourselves into the ticket line. I was close enough to the guy in front of me to smell the last decade of various weed strains he’d smoked. The guy behind my brother seemed to want to touch sweaty foreheads with him as he yammered about “Last time I saw these guys…”. We were second hand stoned and swapping DNA before we even got into the venue. And everyone who knows The Rave, knows that it’s only once you’re inside that the real panic sets in. COVID-19 or not.

We got a beer first. At The Rave, that means you’ve just spent whatever you had in your wallet (that, friends, is the justified cost of the “free” ticket). And the bars are “cash only”. There are a couple of convenient ATM’s spread around: Like looking for canned tomatoes at a Walmart, you’re going to have to walk around for half an hour and get yelled at several times by several people before you find them. But you will find them. Because at The Rave, you have to get a beers first. On this night it was especially important. Not only might we get bulldozed into the rubble, but there was a new virus lingering in the sweat steam hovering somewhere between all the trucker caps and the ceiling. This crowd, this band, this pandemic; you don’t want to be 100% cognizant when you wander onto the stage floor and challenge the Milwaukee mix to do their worst. You want to be one beer in and holding another.

And then they played. I kept waiting for the band to make some sort of COVID announcement to this crowd of limbs. Waiting for the group of dudes next to us wearing “Obituary” shirts to make some off-hand remark about everyone dying tomorrow while they kept stumbling into everything. But something else happened.  Something very Rave. Something very Milwaukee. The band played a full hour-long set. The crowd was head bangin’ and serious then smiling then calm then a contained crazy. 

Rinse and repeat.

The crowd was enjoying a metal show. And Black Label Society was enjoying playing a metal show. There was a ten-minute dueling guitar bit that included the band weaving their way in between the spectators for chrissake. Everyone would rub elbows tonight, folks. That night, COVID-19, or the idea of it, was relegated to its steamy purgatory between the hats and the high ceilings. It would, of course, have its day shortly. By the following Monday everything was different.

***

I don’t think it’s the greatest decision I’ve ever made. We easily could have not gone, after all it’s The Rave: the promotional tickets were free if you bought beer, and I wasn’t even really a fan of the band. But it was something to do. Like anything truly Milwaukee, you could spend nothing or a hundred bucks. It’s not hard to find a way to have a good time somewhere. But on that day, we didn’t know everything we didn’t know. So we gambled. We went to The Rave. We walked right into the Petri dish.

Later the following week, they shut down everything. Everywhere. The concert venues, the bars, even the small gatherings of friends like my brother and Tim. Hell, the very next day after The Rave show, Black Label Society immediately announced that the remainder of the tour would be postponed until late summer and The Rave closed their doors until further notice.  And it wasn’t because they were being condemned.

I now joke to everyone who will listen from a six-foot social distance that seeing a band like that, with a crowd like that, in a venue like The Rave right before the shutdown most likely means I both caught and killed COVID-19 in the same night. Maybe I did. Making a joke that’s half dismissive, half in search of information is the only normal thing left to do these days. I’m pretty damn confident The Rave will still be there when we’re ready for danger again. See you in the ticket line, Milwaukee.

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