This Poster Kills Artists: King Buzzo Screen Print

King Buzzo of the Melvins has recently released a fucking amazing solo record of acoustic tunes called This Machine Kills Artists. He’s gone on tour and I got to do a poster for the gig in Seattle. What kind of gig poster does one design for the man with the most amazing distorted tone on the planet when he goes acoustic? Naturally, you make a poster paying tribute to one of the shittiest distortion pedals ever made.

Parodied on my gig poster for King Buzzo is the DOD FX33, the “Buzz Box.” According to lore (and King Buzzo himself) it was designed to emulate the Melvins guitar tone. DOD failed and instead designed something Buzz Osbourne described himself as “… totally worthless. It sounds like a vacuum cleaner.” It was never meant to be an officially endorsed pedal, but c’mon, it’s called the “Buzz Box.” I wanted to do a poster featuring this pedal for something Melvins related, anyway. The man himself dropping all distortion for his material seemed the perfect time to do so.

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Freak Puke is the debut album from Melvins Lite, a more recent power trio incarnation of the Melvins. It features old stalwarts King Buzzo and Dale Crover joining with legendary bassist Trevor Dunn. They’re as “Lite” as a joke about 9/11; it’s every bit as heavy as any version of the Melvins. They are touring to promote Freak Puke, but this time, the tour is an event of Guinness sized magnitude. 51 shows in 51 days, every state in the union plus Washington D.C. This will be a record. I was pleased as punch to be included in the tour poster series from Secret Serpents. Yesterday, they played the second gig in Seattle, Washington. I commemorated the event with this piece of Sewage-style snarkiness.

I was a bit apprehensive at first, being handed the tour poster duties for Seattle. Being that this was such a geographically consequential tour, I wanted to do something to reflect the area they were playing. I couldn’t abide by putting the Space Needle in the art, but I couldn’t think of anything more unequivocally recognizable about the Emerald City. I set about looking for inspiration.

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