Jim McDonald: I listened to
“The Greatest Show Unearthed” and
it’s a great album. It’s probably
the most fun, and creepiest album I’ve heard
in a while.
Curtis Rx: Awesome. That was
our plan, to make it Halloween sounding.
Jim: It sounds like you’re
in the middle of a Halloween party all the way
through.
Curtis: That’s a great
compliment, thank you.
Jim: The writer I assigned to
review your album told me he’s afraid of
zombies.
Curtis: Really? A zombie to
me has always been the perfect villain. They really
scare people in all kinds of crazy ways.
Jim: How do you describe Creature
Feature?
Curtis: Halloween. Halloween
all day long, all year long. It’s Halloween,
it’s got a lot of old horror movies, old
horror videos games… Everyone always asks
what genre are you, and I just say it’s
Halloween. There’s a fine line that could
be seen in a lot of 80’s horror movies where
it was both funny and scary. That’s what
we try to do. We try to make it tongue in cheek
but not dumb it down. We try to make music that’s
right in the middle between scary and fun. We
want it so that little kids can listen to it and
good enough that adults will listen to it.
Jim: You’re not really
horror punk, and not entirely goth. I imagine
that a Creature Feature show pulls in quite a
variety of people.
Curtis: Yeah, the live show
is what I really love. We get adults, we get kids,
we get kids kids. All three of them like the music
at the same time and I think it’s a blast
when that happens. The crowds we bring in are
great. We get kids as young as thirteen, sometimes
down to even eight years old and all the way up
to fifty-five or more. That’s fun. I get
to talk to a lot of people, and the younger crowd
doesn’t often know a lot of the horror movies
I know, but the older ones do.
Jim: That’s cool. The
only concert I’ve ever been to where I saw
several generations coming in like that was Alice
Cooper.
Curtis: Definitely.
Jim: It was really neat to see
three generations walk in together for the show.
Curtis: That’s something
we recognized right away. We delve pretty deep
into old, old horror films so people who are fans
of those somehow discover our music. It’s
weird. We write different things for different
generations and every song becomes its own genre
unto itself. Every song is its own entity. It’s
very fun to do.
Jim: I was interviewing Ben
Weasel a few months ago and he related to me how
fans want to find meaning in music that’s
often just meant to be fun. Are Creature Feature
lyrics simply fun, or is there deeper meaning
to the songs?
Curtis: Therein lies a fine
line. There is a lot of meaning put into it. There’s
a lot of under the surface stuff there. Of course,
we always try to make it on the surface so you
can have fun, but like any good writer I, grew
up with Ray Bradbury and Richard Matheson and
Rod Serling. Rod Serling was the master of on
the surface you were having fun but there was
so much more going on underneath, and he did that
amazingly with every single Twilight Zone that
he wrote. The same with Richard Matheson. There
are some hidden meanings in there, and I borrow
from a lot of different things, especially Ray
Bradbury. “The Greatest Show Unearthed”
is highly influenced by “Something Wicked
This Way Comes” and his collection of short
stories “Dark Carnival”. There’s
a lot of not growing up in the album. I think
that’s the biggest thing. A lot of artists
the older they get the more they start to take
themselves too seriously, and you can’t
do that. We try to let you know that you can still
have fun. It’s all in what you take from
the songs, but there are hidden meanings there,
but on the surface right away from the first listen
you’re supposed to have fun.
Jim: I kind of thought that
songs like “How To Serve Man” and
“Buried Alive” sound like they could
have some intended meaning other than the obvious,
but being a Misfits fan I’ve heard all the
arguments about hidden meanings in songs. Sometimes
fans pick songs apart until they’re not
fun anymore.
Curtis: Exactly. A lot of people
ask what does this mean, or what does that mean
and I just won’t answer them. I just go
it’s whatever you want it to mean. Whatever
you take from it. Obviously with “How To
Serve Man” we wanted the song to be about
cannibalism without ever mentioning cannibalism
or eating the dead. We always like to do a play
on words and try to dance around the subject without
actually talking about it.
Jim: There are a lot of interesting
lyrical twists on the album.
Curtis: Yes, that’s our
fun part. Our goal is to put one word in every
song that no one uses anymore and to find other
ways to mention stuff that’s already been
mentioned in songs. A lot of that comes from Ray
Bradbury, who is the master of descriptive passages.
Jim: Bradbury always had a surprise
in store. Matheson as well. Richard Matheson always
left you wondering at the end.
Curtis: Exactly. I’m a
huge fan. “I Am Legend” the vampire
novel he wrote is one of the best books ever written.
Jim: “I Am Legend”
had one of the best endings ever.
Curtis: Exactly. It had one
of the best endings and it had one of the best
spins on vampires.
Jim: Tell me about the samples
in your music. Do you use samples from old horror
flicks or do you create your own samples?
Curtis: A little bit of both.
Right away you find out there are some free movies
out there you can use samples from and not have
to go after fees for. We realized early on that
contacting the companies and getting the rights
to samples from the movies we wanted to was going
to get very expensive after a while. We decided
to make up our own samples based on them. We have
our own studio so we recorded the samples and
aged them and used different techniques to make
them sound is if they’re coming from old
tape. We stretched out the tape and things like
that. A lot of times you think you’re hearing
a vintage sample, but it’s actually us recreating
it. Some of the real ones you get to hear are
like “House on Haunted Hill”, “Last
Man on Earth” and of course “Night
of the Living Dead.”
Jim: I was listening to the
album in the car today and I couldn’t tell
which samples were real and which weren’t.
I watch a lot of old horror, and I just couldn’t
guess whether some samples were real or not.
Curtis: Awesome. That’s
a great compliment. We had fun. It goes back to
when you’re young and experimenting. That’s
what we wanted to do. I grew up wanting to be
a voice over artist for cartoons, so this was
my chance to say OK, let’s recreate it.
The one thing we enjoyed the most was working
on “Corpse In My Bed”. The Ed Sullivan
type intro. We watched a lot of old Ed Sullivan
tapes and tried to get it pretty close.
Jim: You can definitely tell
what you were going for. Listening to that intro
is a ball of fun.
Curtis: Awesome. The one thing
we did try to do and didn’t quite get is
Vincent Price. You can’t recreate Vincent
Price.
Jim: No. No one can recreate
Vincent Price.
Curtis: Exactly.
Jim: I was reading in your bio
that one of you collects cemetery artifacts?
Curtis: Yeah, that’s actually
me. I don’t know, I just like to collect
strange things. How it first started was a long
time ago a friend contacted me who lived in France.
They were actually moving a cemetery. Anyone who
didn’t write back and claim their family
plot they were just getting rid of stuff. Like
the 17, 18 and 19th century iron crosses and stuff
like that, they were just going to dump them.
I decided to get some stuff imported and brought
over, so I saved as much as I could. It scares
some people, but I see it as a piece of art. To
throw out something like that is kind of a tragedy.
That started the whole thing and I’ve become
a collector of strange things like that. I find
different places where things have been dumped
or moved. I’ve actually gone out to old
cemetery locations to dig and brought up old headstones
and stuff.
Jim: That’s almost like
saving a historical artifact.
Curtis: Exactly. Maybe that
comes from watching Indiana Jones too many times.
Every time I find something like that it’s
really cool. I use old pictures and different
things like that to find where the stuff was dumped
in the 60s and 70s and we’ve actually found
some really cool stuff like that.
Jim: What’s your favorite
piece in your collection?
Curtis: Probably those crosses
from France. There are some there that are amazing
stuff with angels carrying broadswords, it’s
supposed to be a protector. These are all hand
done, hand made in the early 1800s so those are
probably my favorites.
Jim: I see you’ve been
doing some live shows, how is “The Greatest
Show Unearthed” being received by audiences?
Curtis: We just got off a two
and a half month tour. We have December off and
then we’re back on tour forever basically.
I love it. Early on we built our own studio, we
did everything ourselves and just made music for
us because it’s the stuff we want to hear.
It’s actually been received really, really
well. It’s being received a lot better than
we thought it would in the beginning, to the point
where we’ve been in all fifty states this
month. In the last two and a half months we’ve
crossed the United States four different times
on tour, and it’s going to start again in
January for another three months. Then we’ll
take some time off to work on a new album.
Jim: What’s a Creature
Feature stage show like? There’s only two
of you, and you’re both tied to instruments.
Curtis: Yeah, when we record
the songs there can be as many as forty tracks
going on at the same time, so our whole idea was
that it’s great to write this, but are we
going to be able to pull it off live. We do by
using samples, and we have a whole bunch of keyboards
hooked up. We do have a drummer with us now, his
name is Kevin Majorino. He does all the percussion
for us live. Early on we realized that we wanted
to pull it off as a musicianship type of thing.
We didn’t really have a traveling show,
like props or that kind of stuff so this tour
was about three guys trying to play forty different
instruments, which was interesting to do. It was
fun. The next tour we’re going to bring
some film elements into it. We’ve created
a couple of videos and we’re going to project
them behind us while we play. If you like the
music we make you’ll like the films. Our
ultimate goal with Creature Feature is to make
music and films so that hopefully late next year
we’ll start production on our first Creature
Feature full length horror film.
Jim: Really?
Curtis: Yeah, that’s one
of the goals we’ve had for a long time.
The script is done and we’re going to go
into some preproduction stuff. As early as next
year we may be ready to release some information
on that. We’re going to do a whole new score
for it ourselves. That’s our ultimate goal.
Every time we release an album we’d like
to release a movie with it so people could see
the visual aspects of it.
Jim: Do either of you have any
background in making films?
Curtis: Yeah, I do. I’ve
lived in and around LA my entire life and I started
out doing special effects for horror movies in
the school of Dick Smith and Tom Savini. I learned
all their stuff, bought all their books. I did
a lot of stuff for low budget horror films and
did a lot of short horror films. I never got the
opportunity to do a full length movie.
Jim: Can you tell me much about
the script for your movie?
Curtis: Not much other than
it will be a haunted house movie. It is going
to be a throwback to the 80’s. It’s
going to be a horror comedy. Some of my favorite
movies are like “Evil Dead 2”, “Dead
Alive” and “Creepshow” and of
course a lot of that is based on comics. To me
that’s the perfect way to make a horror
movie. It’s got to be funny. It’s
got to make people laugh so they won’t expect
the next scare. I’m a huge fan of old school
special effects techniques, so it will be all
prosthetics and monsters. It’s going to
be a throwback to the way movies used to be made.
Jim: That sounds good. “Evil
Dead 2” is one of my favorite movies. Between
the green bleeding walls and the Three Stooges
style humor you never know when to expect the
next scare.
Curtis: Exactly. That was one
of the few movies I’ve seen where every
scene was something completely new and you’ve
never seen anything quite like it before. Plus
he cuts off his hand and replaces it with a chainsaw.
Had anyone ever seen that before? So our movie
will be a lot like that. I’m a huge fan
of “Evil Dead 2”. I actually have
props from “Evil Dead 2” and “Army
of Darkness”. A lot of original stuff. So
I’m a real, real big fan of horror, especially
anything with Bruce Campbell and Sam Raimi.
Jim: It’s always fun when
you put the two of them together.
Curtis: They’re geniuses.
There are always rumors of a fourth “Evil
Dead” coming out.
Jim: I was really hopeful when
I’d heard the rumors of a “Freddy
vs Jason vs Ash” movie, but I guess that
didn’t work out.
Curtis: That would have been
great. I could see Bruce Campbell the whole time
throwing out one liners. That’s on the list
of all the great movies that could have happened.
Jim: That’s a long list,
isn’t it.
Curtis: It is a long list, and
now we just have the remakes.
Jim: What do you think of the
current state of horror movies?
Curtis: I’m not a fan
of any of the current horror. First of all, they
just remake stuff. The funniest thing I hear is
oh, they’re going to remake a Vincent Price
movie. Just in that one phrase you know everything
that’s wrong with the movie. You can’t
remake a Vincent Price movie because there’s
no Vincent Price in it. That one phrase shows
me what people think is modern horror. So I’m
not a big fan of modern horror. There’s
some really good indie stuff coming out, but they’ve
got to stop just remaking stuff. Grab some people
who went through film school who have original
ideas.
Jim: A lot of current horror
movies seem to rely more on gore than a good scare.
Curtis: Exactly. It goes back
to the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre. A lot
of people saw that and they think they saw more
than what really happened. You never actually
see much in that film. I even thought I saw stuff
in that film and when you go back and re-watch
it you find that it was much tamer than your mind
invented. Everyone is relying on gore now but
if you could do like what “Evil Dead”
did and have a really gorey scene that you can
laugh at, to me that’s the way to manipulate
an audience.
Jim: If you had to build Creature
Feature from cadavers, who would you dig up?
Curtis: Definitely Vincent Price,
Rod Serling, they’re the main ones. I’d
love to have Freddy Mercury from Queen do some
singing, so we’d bring him back. Wow. There’s
a huge list, but those are the main ones. There’s
a lot of people who are still alive I’d
use like Bruce Campbell and Jeffery Coombs.
Jim: If you were making a monster
you can only use pieces of each victim, right?
Curtis: That would be a long
list. I’m a huge fan of Burgess Meredith.
Maybe we’d take a piece of John Wayne too.
There’s some John Wayne in our music.
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