Diarrhea Planet have arguably the worst and best band name at SXSW 2014, but one things for sure, if you see them this year you won’t forget their live show.
We kicked off our 2014 SXSW experience with Diarrhea Planet at Hotel Vegas on the East side of Austin and they set the bar high for bands the rest of the week. I’ve seen them before, and watched videos, and sang along with “Ghost with a Boner” in my office, but I’ve never seen anything like I saw last night. And it all started with this contest they invented for SXSW called, “here’s a free custom D Planet t-shirt to the first 10 people who stage dive, our lawyer hates of for this.” It worked, and for the next 45 minutes moshing and stage diving ensued.
When you’re on the fifth row of a Diarrhea Planet show you have to make a decision when the stage diving starts. Are you in or are you out? For me, I decided, what the hell, I’m going in. So for the next 45 minutes I was bouncing around with screaming fans, catching stage diver after stage diver after stage diver launching themselves from all angles off a subwoofer at the front of the stage. Not only that, every single person with a beer threw it through the air. The front rows turned into one big happy Lone Star bath.
I couldn’t have been more hyped on this show or their performance, so I tried to bring myself back down to earth. These kind of mind-blowing crazy shows must happen all the time at SXSW. Maybe even happening at the same time. But when I woke up this morning and looked back through other people’s Instagrams I’m fairly certain this was a unique experience. Some of them read “Best show ever”, “Haven’t had this much fun since high school.” So here’s the thing, Diarrhea Planet are supposedly going to play 10 more times. So, on Tuesday morning at 9:50 AM I have a feeling by Sunday everyone will be talking about Diarrhea Planet. If they aren’t already. Esquire just went on the road with them a couple of weeks ago.
As we started the night with Diarrhea Planet, as we were walking to our car 5 hours later we passed two of the guitarists on the streets, and I told them they almost got me killed. I’m not used to the pit, but I got kicked in the face, one dude wrapped his legs around my head, and was the overall Dad of the pit. Those guys must be doing something right to have me moshing.
