October Surprise

So, after coming back from Hawai’i with Exhumed and playing a one off with Impaled at the California Death Fest pre-fest show one day later, I had less than a week to make preparations; it was time for the slack-jawed hooded menaces to once again hit the road and for some good old fashioned monster-on-monster crime. This was to be immediately followed by another short Halloween run with Exhumed. FML.

Our first gig was at the Phoenix Theater in Petaluma. I’ve played here twice with Exhumed before, once with Revocation. The other time was my very first show with Exhumed in the 1990s where I happened to give myself a nasty little scar on my chest by cutting myself, purposefully, on stage, in a moment of extreme edge-lord-ness. Don’t let your babies grow up to be edge-lords.

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Getting FUBAR In Edmonton

Our band of hooded maniacs was asked to play the first ever Infest Edmonton Metal Festival over Labor Day weekend. We would all have the day off, so why not labor over our love of music? We headed out to check out the scene in the Energy Province.

We got some free drinks and booze courtesy of Sean’s fancy ass credit card that got us into the airport lounge. That was good because we’d just spend almost $600 on luggage fees. Even though we whittled it down to just two Enki double-guitar cases for all 3 stringers, all those monster costumes and merch add up. And West Jet was in no mood to cut as a deal. I always tell my dad our guarantees so we look like big shots, but truth is, all that money gets eaten real quick with expenses for a dumb gimmick band like ours.

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Making a Comic Book

I made a comic book last year. This is the culmination of a dream I had since I was a child stapling together typing pages of scribbles. I ended up getting into music and playing in bands, but I never stopped wanting to make a comic book. After too many fucking years, I finally wrapped up band life and my old dream into one book, Kickstarted it, and successfully drew and printed this puppy.

It was extremely gratifying to go to a print shop and pick up copies of a comic book that I drew, laid out, and got printed all on my own. Physical copies are available here on my website, or if you prefer cheaper digital, I have them available for sale on comixology.com. But if you’re just interested in the process of creation…

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Blood of Docs – Building Doctor Jones

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

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.

photo by JKR photography

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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I was a Middle-Aged GWAR Slave

Our band recently had the amazing opportunity to go on tour for nearly two months as direct support for the Scumdogs of the Universe, GWAR. This came with some strings attached, however. No, we didn’t have to service Blothar’s dick-teats, that was voluntary. Instead, a couple of us would be pressed into service for our lords and masters. I was one of those: the shameless, the stepped-on, the slaves of GWAR.

A love that was forbidden…

For two months, we would play a show, furiously load our gear out in snow, rain, or heat, and then three of us would run back inside to don a more revealing pair of skivvies and monster shoes. To say it was rewarding would be one way to describe. The other would be grueling.

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5 Mistakes from the European Bas-tour-ds

I didn’t really manage to keep a good tour diary on this last European tour… call it lack of motivation, call it the ability to download and watch TONS of films from Netflix on my phone. Either way, I still feel the need to put something down before it ebbs from aging and already addled mind: at least to learn a few lessons. Yeah, we made some mistakes on this tour, but fuck it; it really was one of the most easy going tours I’ve ever done with a crew that managed 0% slacking and 100% laughter.

The unusual gang of idiots.

There’s no real need for tour stories here; we all had a good time with relatively few crazy adventures. Most of the tour stories would just be us talking about old cartoons or cult movies while imbibing lots of alcohol. So let’s try a list of errors we made and how to correct them.

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Warlock and Pain: Refurbishing a Classic

More than a decade ago, I bought a really old NJ series B.C. Rich Warlock bass from my friend Lorraine. I think she was ready to ditch pointy bass guitars for something classier as she went on to play in some excellent bands like The Gault and Worm Ouroboros. It came with a weird whitish-sparkly body, lots of dings that I added to, and multiple failed drill holes for a thumb-rest. I treated it as a beater bass I could fly with if I took the neck off. Well, that lil’ beater looks like this today.

And it also belongs to my wife now. It’s practically brand new, but with a vintage pedigree. This was a classic NJ series Rich, with its serial number planting its birth somewhere in Nagoya, Japan during the early eighties. The NJ guitars were real quality, then. I decided to give it new life. The project took me almost seven years to complete. But it was worth it to give my wife an awesome Christmas present.

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