Buckethead, The Drunk, The Banshees & The Rappers – Buckethead Flashbacks

Good evening everybody, in today's Buckethead flashback we're revisiting one of the most off the wall, unique and at times hard to watch shows that the guitar hero was ever involved in. So, let's begin. Woo!!

(June 30th 2000, The Knitting Factory, Brooklyn New York – Praxis, Rammelzee, Nosaj, Antipop Consortium, Sussan Deyhim & Liu Sola)
On June 30th 2000 at the Knitting Factory in Brooklyn New York, then-Guns N Roses guitarist Buckethead, drummer Brain, DJ Disk and bassist Bill Laswell performed as Praxis.

The highly improvised set was just under 2 hours long, the band would lock onto a beat, and then a revolving door of musicians took to the stage for around 10 minutes each to do their thing.

Two of the songs performed that night would later be included as live bonus tracks on the 2008 Praxis album 'Profanation' titled 'Subgrid' and 'Wedge'.

The show started with vocals from hip hop artist Rammelzee, who Buckethead fans might recognize from the Praxis music video 'Animal Behavior'. He'd also return to the stage later in the night in a rare appearance without his mask.

There was also two sections featuring rappers. The first being Nosaj (Jason Furlow) performing a song called 'Man from Mars' which was later included on the album 'The Freak Brothers'. And a duo called the anti-pop consortium.

From there, Iranian vocalist Sussan Deyhim performed what I would describe as the war cries of a banshee.

After 50 minutes, the band completed the first half of their set, returning after a brief interlude in the midst of a power cut. They were then joined by Chinese Banshee bot Liu Sola for more war cries.

The aforementioned musicians would rotate one more time and even if the show wasn't to your liking at that point, its safe to say that after that, it went completely down the shitter.

DJ Disk left his turntables and picked up the microphone, and what followed was a load of embarrassing drunken garbage. Which included profane rants about Limp Bizkit's Fred Durst, insulting and threatening the audience numerous times, screaming down the microphone, telling a weird story about a parakeet and just being an all around dick.
Thankfully the band were smart enough to leave the stage for most of his meltdown, returning later to finish out the show.

Although it was a billed as a Praxis show, calling it 'Bill Laswell & friends' would have been far more suitable. It's certainly not a show I would recommend to casual fans, although the band, especially Brain on drums, did a great job of keeping the show flowing.
Was it a good show? Nope. Was it unique? Absolutely.