Ah, the CMJ Music Marathon – that beast that pulls down its pants and squats over our fair city every September. For $445, you get a pass to all the CMJ shows in the city. Students pay only $295. (Show me a student with $295 and I'll show you my birth canal.) Admission is first come, first served. So even with that precious pass, you're not guaranteed jack crap. You can buy tickets, too. But somehow they sell out quicker than your mom. I look forward to bitching about CMJ every single year.

And this year I'm allowed to up my bitching factor because while I was CMJ slummin', Otto Luck was off seeing the Rolling Stones. You wanna know how much Otto paid for a beer at that show? A whole dollar less than I paid. Awesome. Then again, he subsisted on a diet of club soda and Cheerios for the past five months in order to afford tickets. I did not. Then again, Otto saw the Rolling Stones. I did not.

Moving on, since indie rock and scenester handjob conventions typically give me hives, I opted for the one show where you could smell the steam and sleaze rock and rolling off the amps: the Black Halos and Fireball Ministry.

Clad all in, yes, black, the Black Halos were skinny, dirty, and sported dyed-black hair and black eye make-up. They looked like a mixture of the Stooges and the Misfits. The Halos busted loose with gritty, lice-infested rock stuff from their album Alive Without Control (produced by Jack Endino who brought us albums by Nirvana, Soundgarden, and Mudhoney among others). Lead singer Billy Hopeless has been through so much rock-n-roll debauchery, he couldn't stand upright. It's like the guy's got taffy holding his joints together. And his recovering-junkie-from-the-Valley voice is bizarre. He sounds like the comic-book guy on the Simpsons if his throat were clawed by an alley cat. He ambled around the stage in his dog collar and fingerless gloves, twirling the microphone and peeling off layers of shirts until he was totally topless and sporting nothing but Iggy-ish scars across his torso. The snap-fly on his cheap-ass pleather pants came unsnapped so we could see his leopard-print bikini underwear covering what looked like the beginnings of a stinger. I can't remember much of the live-fast-die-whenever set, but it was hard for anyone to take their eyes off Billy. Someone shouted "Billy for president!" and the frontman quipped "Yeah, I shave that bush. Wax, actually." Niiiice.

After the punk portion of the evening, it was time to polish off the ol' devil horns and bang thy head to the first church of rock 'n' roll, Fireball Ministry. Hulking biker-dude/singer-guitarist James Rota makes some of the best psychotic faces in music. Jim Carey quality. His eyes bug out and his lips twist into a demented grin that's as gleaming white as his Flying V guitar. You'd think his mother read him Steven King at bedtime. Speaking of his mother, she was at the show – a petite lady who walked around after the set talking to fans.

FM's been compared to titans like Black Sabbath and Motorhead because they make beautiful metal with nods to classic rock. As heavy and doom drenched as the songs were, they moved with ample groove and sweet-ass harmonies, encouraging many to fling their hair to and fro. Rota's got a great voice – the dude can sing down low without disintegrating into boring growls. Though on the songs from the newest album, Their Rock Is Not Our Rock, he delved into scrappy grunts. He also felt the need to chide the crowd for not being metal enough. And to be fair, their set was heralded by a decidedly un-metal welcome. Continental played a certain prep-school band's album as Fireball Ministry's intro music. This was not lost on anyone, least of all Rota, and the frustration caught up with him mid-set.

"Cut it with the pussy shit!!" he bellowed. "This is heavy fucking metal. You put on The Strokes as an intro song. What the fuck?!"

More than once he had to summon fist pumping and rocking out. "Don't worry New York," Rota hollered, "the guy who works next to you at the graphic design firm won't know anything about what you did last night. It's okay to have a good time." Yes it is, even at CMJ.

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