Tag: integrity

Hell or High Roller: Psycho Las Vegas 2021

Rob Shepyer August 26, 2021

There was a time when for me, going to Psycho Las Vegas meant budgeting only enough money to eat McDonalds for three days while I slept on a friend’s couch in some lawless Vegas neighborhood so far off the strip, Ubers wouldn’t dare travel to such unsavory corners. Now, in the post-pandemic world, I report on Psycho with new purpose. This year, I was staying in a Delano scenic suite high above the city and budgeted enough money to properly chase the American dream. Raoul Duke’s American dream in Hunter Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was a metaphor for the limits of human consciousness. With freedom as the central American covenant, what greater expression of patriotism is there than breaking free of reality’s chains by dosing yourself past every threshold? Now though, as I take that same trip as Duke in 2021, my search for the American Dream is a futile attempt to connect with a time long gone. You might assume I mean the world before the pandemic but I also mean that beautiful era in music history where rock and metal bands could draw crowds as far as the eye can see. How do we recover

The Road to Psycho Las Vegas 2021 Part 2

Rob Shepyer August 13, 2021

This is how we hold the line. With the country’s social climate at a fever-pitch and the festival we love less than a week away, we are making the choice not to retreat into the shadows and live our lives in fear. If we all just stayed home and didn’t fight to live the way we believe we deserve to, there is no way we’d ever return to how things were. The world will never totally be the same, but we’re not letting concerts go the same way movie theaters did. Fuck that. Psycho lives forever. related content: The Road to Psycho Las Vegas With every international act having to postpone their performances to 2022, the festival has become a domestic affair. We are doing nothing short of chasing the American Dream just like Raul Duke in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, fueled by metal instead of hardcore psychedelics, what is left of the dream is more perverted and strange than anything the good doctor could’ve imagined. The festival itself is the drug, Vegas is the drug, this fucking pandemic is the drug, let it tweak your senses just a bit and make you lose inhibition just enough to make

A High and Beautiful Wave: Psycho Las Vegas 2019

Rob Shepyer August 31, 2019

“So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.” ~ Dr. Hunter S. Thompson With the country’s current political climate putting its populous in divided disarray, one has to wonder if the American dream has remained intact and not fallen by the wayside as so many once credible ideas and institutions have. Dr. Hunter S. Thompson performed a drug fueled pilgrimage down the mainline vein of the country, the dusty connective highways between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, in search for the heart of the American dream and like a lethal dose of adrenochrome, he came bursting on the scene. What the good doctor found was both life and death, decency and depravity, all wrapped into one gaudy American nightmare churned out by the 24 hour fantasy machine of Vegas. Today, if Thompson was alive, he would think Psycho Las Vegas was the climax of the dream he was looking for, a wellspring of underground music taking over the Mandalay Bay Casino & Resort, a

Catch One Hell of a Night With Integrity and Pageninetynine Presented by Psycho Entertainment

Rob Shepyer April 29, 2019

This night at Catch One was easily one of the most extreme, craziest nights of music that will occur in 2019. The entire night, every room at Catch One was booked to perfection with diverse bands going on in time slots that allowed you to catch every flavor of heavy music if you had the right credentials, which was the case for me. Jesus fucking Christ, I got to see Integrity and Pageninetynine in the same damn night. It was one for the history books. I had been waiting to see Integrity live for years, bitching and moaning on their social media pages for them to play Los Angeles. Leave it to Psycho Entertainment not only to make my dreams come true but exceed my expectations with a lineup that featured amazing bands that would each draw me to a show if it was just them playing. They weren’t the only promoters that made this night happen though, this shit was so insane that Midnite Collective and Church of the 8th Day had their hands in the pot too. related content: Midnite Communion V: Los Globos Doom Spa With Bongzilla And Bongripper My night began with Graf Orlock, the perfect