Song of the Day: H.I.M., "Right Here In My Arms"
On my very first day as an editorial assistant at Spin, I didn’t do a whole lot of work. Does anybody do much of anything on their first day? You meet some people, you settle into your space, you get a spiel from IT about your computer, and otherwise you’re just setting up your e-mail signature and waiting for people to ask you to do stuff (which they don’t feel comfortable doing yet because they have known you for all of 22 minutes).
But at the very end of the day, one of my editors sent me to the launch event for Radio Bam, which was Bam Margera’s new show on Sirius satellite radio (this was before the merger; it’s kind of wild to think about a reality wherein there were two competing satellite radio companies). Margera, who had made his bones as part of the Jackass crew and was in the midst of a celebrated spin-off called Viva La Bam, mostly yammered about nonsense and introduced a handful of songs by metal bands he earnestly liked. I watched the show and chatted with him for a few minutes afterward. Initially I was just supposed to grab some quotes for a chunk of Backstage Pass, our monthly gossip and party spread. But something fell through at the last minute and I ended up having to convert my conversation with Margera into a full Q&A. It was the very first byline I had as a staff member at a magazine. I went back and read it again for the first time in forever, and it’s awful.
Bam had a live band performing on his first show, and it was one of his favorites: Finnish goth theater-metalheads H.I.M. (which stands for “His Infernal Majesty,” but they are only ever called “Him”). They performed a few songs extremely loudly, and while my favorite song they ever did is a cover of Neil Diamond’s “Solitary Man” that has been strangely deleted from the zeigeist, the highlight of the Bam show was H.I.M.’s run through the rip-snorting “Right Here In My Arms.” H.I.M. are one of those groups where the greatest hits is actually their best album: a total singles band. That’s a feature, not a bug.