Author Archives: Jonathan Williams

Green Day’s “¡Dos!” is the second step in a punk rock trilogy

Not quite two months ago, Green Day began what could be its most ambitious musical project to date with the release of ¡Uno!, the first in a trilogy of back-to-basics albums (read my review here). The second installment, aptly titled ¡Dos!, continues down the chronological path towards January’s ¡Tré! with another set of bouncy, sugary-sweet punk rock blasts that sound like a band gladly reliving its youth rather than becoming jaded and uninspired as it grows older.

The solo acoustic stylings of lead-off track “See You Tonight” might indicate this album is going to explore Green Day’s folkier side (which the band has previously done well on 2000’s Warning and Nimrod‘s “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)”). But ¡Dos! quickly reveals itself to be just as energetic as anything the band has previously released. “Wild One” sounds like a mature sequel to “She,” with its calm refrains about a seemingly doomed obsession with a potentially crazy girl. “Makeout Party” is a fast-paced, rollicking rock ‘n’ roll good time while “Stray Heart” has an almost rockabilly feel.

“Ashley” picks things back up with another exciting ode to the virtues of bad girls and “Lady Cobra” takes a few garage rock cues from the White Stripes‘ “Fell in Love with a Girl.” “Nightlife” is the biggest surprise on ¡Dos!, with it’s electro beats and lurid lyricism from Mystic Knights of the Cobra‘s Lady Cobra juxtaposed with bits of dark twang. And “Amy” (a tribute to Amy Winehouse) bookends ¡Dos! with another Elvis Costello-like acoustic pop solo from Billie Joe Armstrong.

www.greenday.com

Georgia Wrestling Now welcomes Professor Morte, Cyrus the Destroyer and A.J. Steele

“Manborg” pays homage to low-budget ’80s sci-fi

Georgia Wrestling Now welcomes the Alabama Wolfman, the Kentucky Wolfman and Drew Game

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Halloween’s over, but this week’s edition of Georgia Wrestling Now is as monstrously wacky as ever. Team All You Can Eat’s Matt Hankins and Wrestling with Pop Culture talk to the Alabama Wolfman, who hasn’t been seen since being defeated by Dragula at Monstrosity Championship Wrestling’s matches at the Wrestling with Pop Culture Anniversary Party last March. He has something hairy in store for Dragula at MCW’s Nov. 16 event at Club Famous in the form of his angry cousin, the Kentucky Wolfman. And if MCW’s Wolfmen don’t provide enough absurdity for one show, we also talk to Drew Game about this weekend’s matches at WrestleHemia, a rock ‘n’ roll wrestling sideshow at JJ’s Bohemia. It all begins at 7 p.m. EST and you can call in with questions and comments at 347-324-5735.

Amidst the rock 'n' roll sideshow atmosphere, Drew Game's arrogance does not go over well with the WrestleHemia audience.

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“The Black Earth” parodies zombies, wrestlers and beer drinkers

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Zombies are mindless idiots that roam aimlessly looking for their next meal. Sometimes, the people fighting them are just as dumb and narrowly focused as the zombies themselves. In the case of The Black Earth, the heroes are a couple of bumbling rednecks more concerned with getting another six pack than stopping the zombie outbreak in their small Southern town. Based on the comical antics of Kurt Angle and “Stone Cold” Steve Austin in the WWE of the early 2000s, Hank (Jefferson Traywick) and Johnny (Jon Dannelley) use their pest control skills to ward off the undead pests that are taking over the town of Black Earth. Along the way, they encounter more bumbling idiots and a hot babe or two, and take plenty of beer breaks. Before the film’s world premiere tomorrow night at the Plaza Theatre (tickets available here), writer/director James T. Warbington talks to Wrestling with Pop Culture about the film’s wrestling influences, the bands on the soundtrack and which wrestling personalities are likely to be appearing at the premiere.

Where did the name The Black Earth originate?

There’s actually a town called Black Earth, Wisconsin. They were OK with us filming there, so we just named the movie The Black Earth. The short film was an official selection at the Driftless Film Festival in Madison, the Iris Film Festival out of Pennsylvania, the Horror Emporium Insane Asylum out of Illinois and the Minneapolis Underground Film Festival. It was also listed as on of the top 50 shorts of 2011 on the Internet Movie Database. It piqued a lot of people’s interest, which helped us raise the money for the feature. The budget was about $2,000, which is really small. I drove to Alabama, the other director flew in from Pittsburgh and another guy flew in from San Jose, California to film it.

The short was filmed in Wisconsin, but the full-length was filmed in Alabama. Why was that?

The short film was just the first scene, where they’re all in the house together. There are few different actors in the feature film because the others were either really bad or just couldn’t make it to Alabama. But it’s the same two main characters. Quinn [Levandoski], who plays Jake, flew down from Wisconsin and will be at the premiere.

There are a lot of bands featured in this movie. How did you get so many bands to let you use their music?

I was in the Tone Deaf Pig-Dogs. I started the band in ’88 and they reunited about five years ago. I was like, “Dude, give me some music.” They were like, “Here you go.” I also played with Round Ear Spock for a while, then played with Andy Samford for a while, so they were glad to be on the soundtrack. I contacted The Real McKenzies and they said, “We’ve got a new album coming out, so don’t use any of the old stuff. We’ll send you a copy of our new album and you pick what you want.” Mojo Nixon actually contacted me and said, “Use what you want. But if you get famous, you gotta buy me a beer.”

How did you come up with the idea to make a zombie movie with characters based on wrestlers?

Remember when Austin would sing “Kumbaya” to Vince and all that? That was some of the funniest stuff I can remember so I said, “I wish I had two characters like that who just drink beer.” I’m a goofy punk rocker, so it made sense for that to be in the story. I like zombie comedies, especially if you don’t have a good budget. If you’ve got no budget, you’ve got to make fun of yourself. We were talking about writing these two crazy redneck brothers and I told co-writer C.L. Robbins, “They should be a lot like Kurt Angle and Steve Austin. They’ve got to think that they’re shit don’t stink, like when Austin kept playing guitar and couldn’t sing and was out of tune, but he thought it was great.” That’s what these two guys have got to be. The one brother never really fights, he just drinks. But no matter what, they think they’re invincible and awesome. Of course, they’re actually just lame rednecks who get drunk, So that’s where that idea came from.

They used to say that wrestling imitated life, but I’m starting to think that life imitates wrestling. Even when somebody’s making an entrance in the movie, we’d talk about theme music. So we had Sherri [Eakin] comes out with her big rocking ’80s song where you see her legs and she’s all sexy and she pours beer all over herself. That was all based around wrestling. Whenever something’s cool, Chris [Robbins] says, “That’s Diesel.” On the set that’s all you’d hear and there are all these outtakes of us going, “Dude, that was so fucking Diesel.” We’re talking about Kevin Nash, of course, because we’re cheesy wrestling goofy-asses.

The world premiere is tomorrow night at the Plaza Theatre in Atlanta. Where else will this movie be screening?

We’re going to play it in Atlanta, then it goes to Pittsburgh, San Jose, Chicago and Madison. We’ll have DVDs at all these screenings, and the DVD will be for sale online by December. It will also be available Amazon Instant Video and we’re trying to get it on Netflix or Redbox.

What can we expect from tomorrow’s premiere, aside from the movie screening?

The cast of "The Black Earth" from left to right: Jenny Nicole Helms, Jefferson Traywick, Sherri Eakin, Jon Dannelly and Quinn Levandoski

Chris is going to introduce it, then I’ll come out and we’re going to do a question and answer session afterwards. A majority of the cast will be there. So we’ll have Quinn coming down from Wisconsin. We’ll have Hank and Johnny (one’s coming from California, the other’s coming from Birmingham). Jenny Nicole Helms, who plays Sara, the bitchy girl, will be there. A lot of the crew will be there and the other director, Alex Traywick, will be there, along with co-directors C.L. Robbins and Corey Campbell. We all used to work on movies together and as years passed we all became friends and started hating the directors. So we created Family Curse Productions, which is a group of directors, editors and writers that has absolutely nothing to do with the people who we worked for before. We all love wrestling and horror movies, so it works out well.

Then we’re having an after party somewhere. Marc Laurinaitis will be there and his brother, Animal from the Road Warriors, should be there. My wife grew up with the Laurinaitis family, so they like to come out and support me. They actually bought their own tickets, so I saw their names on the ticket list. Johnny‘s not going to be there, which may or may not be a good thing. I don’t know.

Molly Harvey takes up Residents-y with Jeffrey Bützer’s Tender Prey

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Molly Harvey is no stranger to costumes and identity ambiguity. As a long-time collaborator with The Residents, an avant-garde act known for performing with giant eyeball heads and other theatrics, she has spent most of her career providing theatrics for music (or is it the other way around?). After working with the Bicycle Eaters’ Jeffrey Bützer, a multi-instrumentalist who has been known to stage musical tributes to David Lynch, A Charlie Brown Christmas, Tom Waits and others, last year on the Black Mass pre-Halloween show, Harvey has found different ways to portray other people. Tonight, Bützer and Harvey return to 529 with the likes of T.T. Mahony, Johnny McGowan, Matt Steadman and others as Tender Prey, a tribute to Nick Cave that includes songs ranging from The Birthday Party to Grinderman. The show is free and also includes performances by Cave Women (playing covers of Nick Cave, PJ Harvey and the like), Ben Trickey performing a Tom Waits set, Andy DeLoach doing Leonard Cohen and puppet shows from Ninja Puppet Productions. As the unmasked Harvey prepares to sing a few Cave songs, she talks to Wrestling with Pop Culture about her theatrical background and future musical ideas.

Advertising for this show prominently credits you as being from The Residents. Since the identities of the members of that band have always been obscured, is it OK for you to be revealing yourself in this manner?

No, they’re going to kill me now. I was actually always named on the records and stuff, so I was always the one non-anonymous member. I was more of a collaborator. I wear costumes when we perform, so my identity is always obscured. When I was touring with them, there wasn’t any Facebook or anything. So I could play, then walk around the venue afterwards and nobody’d know who I was. But now it’d different because people can just look on Facebook and see me.

Do you still perform with The Residents?

I perform with them when they come to town. They’re on the West Coast, so it’s kind of hard for me to leave and tour with them. So I do little things with them when they come through.

How did you get involved with The Residents?

Just by weird happenstance. I moved to San Francisco when I was 21 and just happened to meet them. I worked in a cafe that they came into and, of course, I didn’t know it was them. But I developed a friendship with the singer and little by little we revealed things about each other and I realized he was involved with the band. I had studied theater in college and had just graduated. I think one day I was like, “Hey, can you use me to do anything?”

You’ve also worked with Gwar, an equally theatrical band, though not quite in the same vein as The Residents. How’d you get involved with Gwar and what did you do for that band?

I was living in Richmond in 1989 and I think almost all of Gwar is Virginia Commonwealth University art school dropouts. They’ve been doing Gwar for 28 years, which is crazy. They did a 35 millimeter film in the early ’90s called Skulhedface that Jello Biafra was the star of. So I did a scene in that. I never performed live with them, I just did the thing in the movie.

Richmond had an amazing music scene, and still does. Because of the art school, I think Richmond just attracts certain people. Now, with certain cult bands having come out of Richmond, a lot of people actually move there to start bands.

How did you start collaborating with Jeffrey Bützer?

I met Jeffrey through [guitarist] Matt Steadman. Jeffrey was a Residents fan and I knew Matt because we worked together. I was looking for something to do and Jeffrey is kind of a mover and a shaker and always has stuff going on. I guess Matt told Jeffrey about me and Jeffrey was familiar with what I do. So we talked and we still have a lot of ideas of stuff to do, but he’s a busy guy who’s in a million bands and is always making projects. We really want to do something original together, but so far we’ve just done these shows that are covers of people we like. They’re fun and people like to go see them. Last year we did Black Mass at 529. That was a lot of PJ Harvey, Leonard Cohen and stuff like that. He has faves.

What will your role be in the Nick Cave tribute tonight?

I’ll be splitting the songs. Michael Bradley is also singing some songs and he’s got the perfect Nick Cave voice. Then I’m singing six or seven songs, then Carrie Hodge from What Happened to Your Fire, Tiger? is going to sing backup on a couple and lead on one.

Bützer and I have had a few conversations about The Residents and he seems to be really excited about working with someone who has also worked with such a mysteriously avant-garde band. Was there any hesitation in letting him advertise you as a member of The Residents since the rest of the band does a great job of hiding its identities?

It’s nice to have people like Jeffrey because I never really tell people that. If I get up on stage with him at one of their shows, he’ll be like, “It’s Molly Harvey from The Residents!” Sometimes I’m like, “I don’t know if you should say that.” It’s always been a weird thing because my name was out there, but my face wasn’t. But at the same time, I’m not a prominent part of The Residents and they’re always changing and working with different people all the time. On a practical level, if I want to do more stuff, that’s a thing on my resume that differentiates me from everyone else. I’m never comfortable leading into a conversation with that, but having someone like Jeffrey doing it is kind of nice because he does make things happen and he is excited about it. Even though it is a little bit of a gray area, if it can lead toward me working with cool people that I may have never otherwise known, I’m all for it.

You mentioned that you’d like to do more original music with Bützer. Have you given much thought to what kind of project you’d like to work on with him?

My background is in theater. Even though I sang as a kid, I really approach singing as an actor or performer. I’m definitely not a trained musician, but I do write and in the past two or three years random people in my life have been like, “Have you ever thought about writing songs?” Working with The Residents, I certainly wasn’t writing their material, and doing theater I was interpreting other people’s words. But I’ve been asked enough that I finally gave it a try. I have a couple of characters I’ve come up with. Everything for me is very character driven, so it would be more of a narrative about a certain character. But there are some little things brewing.

Wrestling with Pop Culture presents: the return of Monstrosity Championship Wrestling

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Before you put Halloween behind you and start preparing for those Thanksgiving family feasts, Wrestling with Pop Culture is proud to announce the return of Monstrosity Championship Wrestling! And now that the votes have been tallied, we have even more reason to celebrate as Wrestling with Pop Culture won the Reader’s Choice award for Best Local Blog in Creative Loafing‘s Best of Atlanta 2012.

Poster by West "Knife" Evans.

This time MCW finds a new home at Club Famous, inside Famous Pub in Toco Hills. Old rivalries continue as the intolerant Alabama Wolfman (who hasn’t competed since his encounter with the flamboyantly fanged vampire Dragula last March) brings his angry cousin the Kentucky Wolfman to get ravenous revenge. You’ll also see an age-old rivalry play out in the ring as long-time adversaries Rock, Paper and Scissors battle for supremacy.

Monstrosity fans will also be treated to returning favorites like “Calm Like a Bomb” Pandora, the Washington Bullets and “The Zombie King” Papa Marko, while talents such as “The Monster Killer” Asesino, “Bona Fide” Fred Yehi, “The Demigod” Mason and the tag team known as Worst Case Scenario (Ethan Case and Eli Evans) make their MCW debuts. Reckognize Apparel will also have a limited edition Yehi T-shirt available exclusively at this event. Professor Morte and the rest of the Silver Scream SpookShow crew will preside over these fiendish festivities as the Casket Creatures provide macabre musical offerings. Win a bag of edible body parts from Pine Street Market, a Dead Elvis flask from Diamond*Star*Halo, artwork from Neon Armour and other raffle prizes! These and many more surprises await you on Nov. 16, starting at 8 p.m. The cover is only $10 and Cayrum Honeys will provide fiendish freebies and devlish drink specials such as a creepy concoction known as To Hell You Ride!