If you never saw a Bozo Porno Circus show then you just plain missed out. The Tone Zone Records band was a freak-out and a half, stuffed to the wall with loud noises and pretty girls getting sparks shot off their metal-covered crotches by belt sanders. Recently, lead guitarist Chris "The" Lane (AKA Crispy and for a brief hilarious time Nikki Wykkid) uncovered a treasure trove of tour diaries and photos, so in the next few days we're heading down a well of Houston-flavored debauchery from the glory days of our goth scene.

Our group reached Atlanta around four in the afternoon. The venue looked like an enormous dance club from the outside -- basically just a huge concrete box, but we had been told that it was a fetish club that featured gothic and industrial music. There's one in every major city, it seems.

The club was cavernous on the inside, most of which was a dance floor, and on one end was a very big raised stage, a nice professional job that looked appropriate for large bands or plays, not the disappointing "cobbled together by a cheap bar owner" platforms that we often encountered.

I was exhausted from hours of driving and traveling. The venue was empty except for a few of the bar staff, but our promoter had promised us a place to shower, and at that point I was very interested in washing the road funk off of myself.

It turned out that the shower facilities were a bit different than normal. The club had a shower room set up for fetish performances, something I had not encountered before. Essentially, it was a large room with stadium style seats all facing three small platforms in the middle that had showers on them.

Being in Bozo Porno Circus had pretty much broken me of any remaining reservations about being naked or changing in front of people, but it was somewhat disconcerting to take a shower in the middle of a large empty room with a bunch of seats facing me. It was a very good shower though, and did the trick.

There was a large crowd gathered by the time we played, and that was always a good thing, so the show went on without a hitch. After the show, I ventured out into the crowd to check out what Atlanta's scene had to offer.

My experiences playing Fetish Balls and the like were a mixed bag. There were usually a population of the area's gothic crowd, and then older weirdos, swingers, and various kinds of hard-to-categorize perverts. Atlanta's fetish community seemed to have an assortment of people fitting into those general groups.

Middle-aged people wearing fangs and Victorian clothing, mixed in with creepy nearly naked older hippies, and younger goths wearing lots of latex.