Star & Dagger is a hard rocking project created by former White Zombie bassist Sean Yseult and former Cycle Sluts from Hell guitarist Dava She Wolf. That’s really all I needed to know to want to hear more. After I got my copy of the recently-released Tomorrowland Blues, I was equally impressed by the soulful vocal talents of Marcy Von Hesseling, who sounds like a cross between Johnette Napolitano and Ann Wilson after several shots of whiskey. Turns out Von Hesseling is a busy woman, running the famous New Orleans wig and makeup shop Fifi Mahony’s, creating costumes for the band’s latest video for “In My Blood” and singing for a band quickly developing a hardcore following in the rock ‘n’ roll underground. As Star & Dagger prepares for a performance at this weekend’s Housecore Horror Film Festival (and a generally chaotic week or two for New Orleans), Von Hesseling talks to Wrestling with Pop Culture about horror films, hard rock and more.

You recently performed in and did costumes for a video for your song “In My Blood”. How did that turn out?

We love making videos! It’s so much fun. We always have our friend Art Haynie direct for us. He’s really good. He did our video for “Your Mama Was a Grifter”. Dava is such a huge [Stanley] Kubrick fan and we really wanted to take a lot of pages from The Shining and recreate a lot of scenes. Sean and Dava played the little girls in the blue dresses, we have the kid on the Big Wheel coming up to them, then you see a flash and you see them rocking out with their guitars and head banging. We built a maze for the maze scene and we have a frozen scene where people are frozen at the end. We did a CGI elevator scene with the blood coming out of it. We got covered in blood, which was awesome because the song is called “In My Blood”. We busted ass to get it ready for Housecore Horror Festival where we’re playing Oct. 26. We’re going to show [the video] at the film festival. It was so much fun, then we partied when it was over. Sean had a big feast for everybody at her house with tons of food and her swimming pool.

How did you get involved with the Housecore Horror Film Festival?

 

Phil Anselmo puts  it on every year and he’s a local New Orleans dude. He’s a friend and a fan, so we’re going to play Saturday, which is a great day to play because the Melvins play that day. It’s going to be lovely. It’s really built around the film festival, but there are so many horror fans out there that it’s going to be an insane weekend. We’re really happy to be there and we wanted to have the video done for submission just for fun. The Shining is one of our favorite movies and I really wanted to do the Wendy Torrance scenes. Finding Wendy Torrance clothing is impossible because nobody wants to dress like that. She’s got a corduroy overall dress, a flannel shirt, a turtleneck and a blue vest. Of course we had to have every little detail right. Dava was like, “We have to have the Calumet bottle and the exact typewriter.” So it was a lot of work, but definitely work that I think is going to be really cool.

In addition to helping with the costumes for the video, you also work at a wig and makeup shop called Fifi Mahony’s. What do you do there?

It’s my shop and Halloween is a crazy time of year for me. We have really wacky wigs and awesome makeup and crazy people that come in and shop with us.

It sounds like Halloween is a big time of year for you for many reasons. What do you have planned for Halloween this year? 

I like when Halloween night is on a weeknight because we get so many tourists that come for the weekend, then leave Halloween for the locals. That’s kind of amazing because then you don’t have to fight for a seat at the bar. We played the Voodoo Festival last year, which was fun. This year we decided to do the Housecore Horror Fest. So now we’ll have the weekend when all the tourists come, then we’ll have Halloween, then I think we have Voodoo Fest after Halloween. So it’s a long month!

Given who is in your band and the things that interest you, it seems like wrestling might also be something Star & Dagger has been involved with in some way.

I’m surprised we haven’t gotten any kind of calls for that. Our last video was a total takeoff on Russ Meyer films and we had an epic wrestling scene in the desert where we wrestled this girl to the ground. It was fabulous. Then we put her in a trunk. I guess it looked so real that we had these guys who were dirt biking up on these hills while we were in the valley. We were out in the middle of nowhere and when we get the girl in the trunk I shoved a wig on her head and smeared lipstick on her (very Fifi Mahony’s) and these guys come zooming down out of the hills because they really thought we were hurting her. They asked her if she was OK. I don’t know what they thought we were doing, but it was hilarious. We were convincing enough with our fake wrestling moves!

We know a good bit about where your bandmates came from, but how did you get involved with Star & Dagger?

I lived in San Francisco for a long time and was in a hard rock band out there called Hate Holiday for about ten years. We played every weekend, played every New Year’s Eve, but there was so much music going on in the ’90s in San Francisco it was awesome. I remember seeing Sean and Dava play. I didn’t know them, they weren’t friends of mine, but I was a fan of White Zombie. Sean moved to New Orleans in 1996, I moved here in ’97 and we just met one night out at a bar. She knew I sang and that I had done rock ‘n’ roll before. Her husband’s in a band called Supagroup and I did some backup stuff with them. When Sean started this band with Dava, they were in New York at a party and met Lenny Kaye. Lenny Kaye was like, “You guys should do a band together.” They were like, “Yeah, why don’t we do a band together? Let’s see if we can play together.” They played together really fast and wrote five songs really quickly. Neither of them really wanted to sing, so they called me over. You’ve got to really want to be in a band because it’s a shitload of work. It’s like joining a gang. You can’t just be like, “Oh, yeah. Let’s just fuck around and do it every once in a while.” It’s all or nothing. So when I heard the music I said, “I like this. I love you guys.” I’m great friends with them. We travel a lot together and we get along really well, so it just fit. We have a great time together. We’re writing a lot of new stuff. We wrote that album pretty fast and recorded it really quickly and just got out there and started playing. And it doesn’t hurt to have Sean in your band. She’s a really great performer, she’s a professional and she knows a lot of people. A lot of people love her because she is professional and easy to work with and fun to be around. That helps us get things like Housecore; Phil and she are great friends. People like our music, too, and that helps. But honestly, she gives us a platform that we probably wouldn’t have otherwise. We really just want to make music and have fun and there are so few women who do rock ‘n’ roll anymore that it sets us apart. That wasn’t really our impetus because none of us are super chick-like. But it just works and it’s easy to be with each other. So that’s how it started.

As the singer, do you write most of the lyrics?

I write some of them, but Dava writes most of the lyrics. She’s definitely got a more bleak world view than I do, which I love. She’s a born-and-bred New Yorker from the Bronx and she’s a misanthrope. But she’s also really witty and smart and she writes songs that are moody and cool. I like her lyrics a lot. I write lyrics every once in a while, but honestly, mine are a little pedantic compared to hers. Hers are almost like poems. Sometimes it just comes out of you and you write a song and the lyrics just work. But the way we do it is those guys write the riffs then I hear it after they record their parts. I come up with harmony and all of the melody, and I really just sing gibberish just to get a melody line down. Then I send it back to Dava and she’ll write lyrics. It’s kind of a weird way to do it. I don’t know anyone else who does it that way. But it works for us because none of us live in the same town very often – Dava’s in New York, Sean and I are in New Orleans, but Sean kind of goes back and forth to New York a lot. Writing with computers has been really liberating. I didn’t know if I’d like it or not, but I actually really do like it because you can just sit around in your house and have the freedom to sound like an idiot and work on stuff. I love to perform live. It’s so much fun to get onstage, have the camaraderie backstage with the other bands and make people perk their ears up. For some people it’s writing and getting in the studio, but I think playing live is super fun.