Who Wants Some Head

2024/05/17 Doktor Ross SewageLeave a comment

Sebastian from Exhumed was getting pretty tired of the same old spark guitar gag he was doing for the Exhumed set over the last few years. For our Decayed Decades tour, Matt suggested we bring back an old gag, the guillotine. Sebastian would solo, then Dr. Philthy would come out and behead him. Exhumed had done the guillotine bit with Bud, the old guitar player, years ago, but that severed head looked REALLY bad. I offered to make something a little bit better for Sebastian.

I had very little time to get this together between tours, so it was definitely done under a crunch. And there were a few missteps on the way to making this…

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Fixing Latex Clothing

2023/01/282023/01/28 Doktor Ross SewageLeave a comment

Kind of an odd post for this blog, but music often includes theater and theater includes costumes. On the last Exhumed tour in 2022, I was fortunate enough to have my lovely girlfriend accompany us for three shows. At the last minute, our guitarist Baz remembered a photo shoot I had done with her featuring my teal “sexy nurse” GB-4 bass and my girlfriend in a sexy latex nurse costume she had from before we met. It just HAPPENED to be the exact same colors. I call it kismet. Anyway, he suggested we invite her on stage with us to perform with us and our own inimitable Dr. Philthy! It was a grand idea and she assented.

Latex clothing is a tricky beast. It needs to be tight but this can also make it difficult to put on. It doesn’t slide on like normal cotton, it’s got tack to it when applied to skin. While getting ready before our show in Philadelphia at Johnny Brenda’s, we moved a little too fast and undid some of the seams on the collar of the dress. The seams are glued, not sewn (obviously) and we were lucky we didn’t actually rip the latex. Also of some luck, our direct support had red duct tape that matched the collar’s piping so I was able to make a quick fix for the night and the show went on. This dress wasn’t cheap, though, so we needed to do a REAL fix. So, I learned how to fix latex clothing.

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DIY Spew Tanks

2018/03/13 Doktor Ross SewageLeave a comment

So you want to spew like the pros. Or, at the very least, the idiots in our band. Before our last tour with GWAR, we rejiggered our entire system of blood delivery. Based on a system devised by Sean, I made a revised version of a self contained blood tank that could send pressurized spew to the wanting masses.

Sean first got the idea to use plastic pipes for self-contained blood spewing some years back. It involved sealing and pressurizing plastic tubes with common Schraeder bike pump valves. Everything was customized for each individual costume, though, and require fragile gravity feeds. Years later, I came up with this diagram after thinking about how a spray bottle worked:

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Blood of Docs – Building Doctor Jones

2018/01/152018/01/15 Doktor Ross Sewage2 Comments

In my last post about building a costume, I detailed fleshing out a character from our mythos. For our last tour, however, we also added a character for the beginning of the set to introduce the narrative. Like any beginning of a set for a blood-spewing band, we needed a character to kill and come out spewing to capture our audience in the whirlwind of gore to come. Introducing, and then sending to his final resting place, Doctor Jones.

Photos by Johnny Perilla from nextmosh.com

Since we were out with GWAR, a decapitation was out of the question. That’s practically a trademark of theirs. But I wanted something splashy, so I settled on ripping someone’s face off. This was only my second two-part mask mold, but it went infinitely easier than the first.

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Blood of Dogs – Building Sgt. Rott

2018/01/02 Doktor Ross SewageLeave a comment

A new part of the mythos for our band since our last record has been the addition of dog soldiers to back up the big bad guy. Well, they’re on the record and on the record cover, but it took us the better part of a year to make ’em. Sean built one and I did the other. You wanna know how Sean built his? Tell him to write a blog. You wanna meet Sgt. Rott? Here he is.

Sgt. Rott was played by our buddy Muddy when he joined the second half of our long-assed tour with GWAR in 2017. Sean’s dog solder, Lt. Collie, was there the whole time. Because that’s how a hierarchy works.

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Ghoulection 2016

2016/08/152016/08/15 Doktor Ross SewageLeave a comment

We finished up our tour with Carcass and Crowbar on the East Coast, so we and Night Demon had a string of shows in order to get back to California. Originally we had wanted to go to Cleveland (sorry guys) but we ended up in Webster, NY, at some old Mason hall or church or whatever… I don’t know. It was near Rochester, and even the few folks from Rochester were like, “Webster?” But whatever, the people who did show up were the right people and had a rocking good time.

We had to drive all night, again, but were set to hit Chicago and one of the best venues in the United States, Reggie’s Rock Club. The staff lead by Edgar is fucking on point, the food at the attached bar is great, they have laundry, a back room, but most importantly, they have insane Chicagoans who know how to rock the fuck out. Easily it bested any of the previous nights on tour… the ENTIRE tour.

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The Fast and the Furious Star Wars

2015/12/17 Doktor Ross SewageLeave a comment

Being very, very excited at the new Star Trek trailer and its use of 1990’s rap hits to really hit upon the cerebral nature of a show set in the 23rd Century, I decided to see what it would be like if director Justin Lin took on another famous franchise. Here’s my interpretation of Justin Lin’s Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

DIY Movie Screen

2015/07/28 Doktor Ross SewageLeave a comment

My wife is a once-a-month DJ at the Monday Metal nights at the Golden Bull in Oakland, CA. Recently having acquired a quality video projector, I thought we could gimmick her night up a bit by showing movies along with the metal. Horror movies, of course. Who needs sound when you can just watch Herbert West reanimate corpses?

We're a classy couple, to say the least. — We’re a classy couple, to say the least.

The only issue was where to project the movie? They have a screen at the Golden Bull, but it faces sideways. I wanted the screen to be visible down the long room from the door to entice people (as if the tunes shouldn’t be enough). I had to build my own screen to sit on stage next to the most super hot DJ ever.

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