Geoff Tate "Just Another Clown"

(Stand Up!) There's a lot of different ways to be a very entertaining drug-centric comic. You can be a dumb stoner like Cheech and/or Chong, a genius, but spacy, stoner like Mitch Hedberg, or you can go a route that has always really impressed me, where you recall detailed, honest, outrageous true life tales of drug-fueled debauchery that find humor in the dangerous depths of depravity, revealing personal lows in ways that  serve as confessionals and warnings. Artie Lange was so good at doing this on Howard Stern that sometimes the host would ignore his in-studio guests just to cajole Lange to repeat one of his favorite misadventures. On Geoff Tate's wonderful new album he introduces a fine alternative to the latter. He tells tales of experimenting with crack, challenging acid trips, and filing drug tests with wit, charm, intelligence and a fine sense of comedic rhythm, but with absolutely so shame, regret, or for the most part, consequences. His stories are genuinely funny, seem relatively honest, and are apology free. As he says on the album, having AIDS is terrible but getting AIDS is great, because what could be better than sex or drugs? If you answered "rock 'n' roll," you may be looking for the Queensryhche lead singer Geoff Tate, who is way less funny.