“Are you ready?” I look up and see Charles Kaster’s face inches from mine while he’s on the stage ready to start the set. Charles is the lead singer/guitarist for Hans Condor. We showed up early for Guitar Wolf and as always, checking out the bands’ merch. Hans Condor had a couple albums for sale. I picked up one of them and looked at it. The song “Motorhead” was listed! I was wearing a Motorhead jersey by pure coincidence! I asked Charles if they were going to play it tonight and he and their drummer kind of shrugged and said “possibly. We’ll see if we can do it.”
And after asking if I “was ready”, they blasted through their version of “Motorhead”, which rocked pretty hard! I didn’t think they’d play it the very first song! After that, it was a good 40 minutes plus of their own songs, high energy punk rock ‘n roll, with a few special licks from Black Sabbath (“War Pigs”) and Slayer (“Raining Blood”) thrown in for a few bars. I was wearing my Slayer hat too, so this was incredibly cool to me.
I’ve seen thousands of performances and there’s been a few times where I’ve seen bands hand their guitars to people in the audience to hold for a bit. But it’s either while they get back onstage after playing in the audience (Fleshtones) or while they’re taking off their jackets (the Dickies), or just as a closing part of their set for a good visual (Supersuckers). But I’ve never seen someone pass their guitar having it turned on for anyone who was in the audience to just play. And I’m not talking just hitting random notes. So they go into a long jam type of rockin’ song and yeah, the guitar gets passed to someone in the 2nd or 3rd row. He puts it on and starts playing some chords. Then after about a minute, passes the guitar to someone else in the audience who ALSO started wailing away!
Never seen anything like that before. I think they were friends of the band, but still something pretty cool to see. Anyway, Hans Condor are recommended and it’s always great to see a band come into town hungry, happy, and just excited to blow the roof off the place. Mission accomplished.
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