Nineties rockers Filter are coming to Lawrenceburg, Indiana next month and it won’t cost you a dime to see them.
The band is scheduled to play a free show on Sept. 28 at Hollywood on the Roof at Hollywood Casino. Standing-room general admission is free, but there are also VIP options. The show starts at 9 p.m.
Filter was formed in Cleveland, Ohio in the early ’90s by guitarist Brian Liesegang and singer Richard Patrick after he left his gig as touring guitarist with Nine Inch Nails, who he played with during the Pretty Hate Machine era. The band’s sound — which was fueled by a roaring Industrial angst akin to NIN — found an audience right off the bat. Filter’s 1995 album debut, Short Bus, featured the breakthrough single “Hey Man Nice Shot.” The bubbling, full-throttle rager was omnipotent in the mid-’90s and remains one of the defining songs of the era (as in, if they ever make a Forest Gump movie that takes place in the ’90s, “Hey Man” will play over the scene where OJ is found not guilty).
“Hey Man” also holds the honor of having the most morbid origin story of any Top 40 hit from 1995. Though it came in the wake of Kurt Cobain’s death-by-shotgun, the song was actually inspired by a different suicide. Patrick said the song was loosely based on the demise of R. Budd Dwyer; in 1987, the Pennsylvania state treasurer shot himself during a public press conference as local news cameras were rolling. Footage of the suicide went “’90s viral” — it was widely circulated on VHS cassette. (Watch the great documentary Honest Man: the Life of R. Budd Dwyer if you want to learn more about the politician’s tragic end.)
Filter’s sophomore album, 1999’s Title of Record, produced a very different sounding hit — the dreamily poppy “Take a Picture.” Filter’s current tour is in honor of the recent 20th anniversary expanded reissue of Title.
While Filter has never achieved the commercial success of their ’90s heyday, Patrick has kept the band alive with a revolving lineup, much to the delight of the band’s hardcore fanbase. Filter’s most recent album was 2016’s Crazy Eyes. Patrick had reportedly been working again with Liesegang, who left Filter in 1997, but plans for the new album fell through after the collapse of PledgeMusic, the crowd-funding site Patrick had used for some of the band’s more recent releases.
This article appears in Aug 28 – Sep 4, 2019.