Family Values Missing In This Tour

------------------------------- Music review

Family Values '99 Tour: Limp Bizkit, Primus, Redman and Method Man and Filter at the Tacoma Dome, last night. -------------------------------

TACOMA - Think of the Family Values '99 Tour as Lilith Fair's brother-in-law. The scrub who spends his days scratching himself in front of the TV and downing six-packs of beer. The one she hates.

In stark contradiction to the women's feel-good tour at the beginning of the summer, Family Values is one big tub of testosterone.

Like last year's tour featuring Korn, Limp Bizkit and Ice Cube, this year's concert was dedicated to rock (Filter, Primus), rap (Redman and Method Man) and rap rock (Limp Bizkit) with predictable results. That's `entertainment'?

The concert last night was mostly obnoxious and mindless, but not without moments of entertainment - "entertaining" in the way the "Jerry Springer Show" is.

Several Springer themes came up during the five-hour concert (too long, even for the hormonal teenage girls and guys stuffed into the Tacoma Dome). Redman and Method Man invited all the women in the audience to bare their breasts. Several did, and a topless woman ended up getting fondled on stage. Bands encouraged the audience to give a collective bird. In clips of the summer tour played over video screens, band members performed antics such as sucking a spaghetti noodle into their noses and coughing the end out their mouth.

Primus opened with hard rock. Redman and Method Man took the mostly white crowd in the opposite direction with an athletic rap show. Filter played third. The band's signature screeching, the sound a human might make while being eviscerated, alternated with Morrissey-ish crooning.

Excepting Redman and Method Man, the pre-Bizkit bands played like an agonizing 4 1/2-hour opening act. And despite their insipid music, Limp Bizkit delivered a show worth the wait. Bizarre touches

Well-known for their cheeky sets - two years ago they built a 30-foot toilet on stage, last year, a spaceship - the band came through with an industrial chemical factory with giant boiling Erlenmeyer flasks and big winding gears. It was Dexter's Laboratory meets steel factory.

Lead singer Fred Durst came in uniform: red baseball cap on backwards, black T-shirt, baggy khakis and old school Adidas sneakers. It's obvious why the band's strategy of touring nonstop has succeeded. For all their whiny misogynistic rap, Limp Bizkit knows how to put on a show.

For one song, Durst filled the stage with nubile young girls from the audience. In another, he pulled up a random audience member - Durst's Skinny-Me - a thin teenager with a matching red baseball cap, who rapped/sang/bounced around the stage along with him. Then Durst waded out into a podium in the middle of the audience.

The band's program included its breakthrough cover of "Faith" and House of Pain's "Jump Around," as well as several songs from its first album "Three Dollar Bill, Y'all" and this year's "Significant Other."

During its final number, streamers and confetti rained down like Kenneth Branagh's "Hamlet." "Treat tonight like the last night on the planet," Durst said.