Dead Boy Productions

 

08/24/08
Rev Dan, Dan Zig, Hell Cesar & Remy Voodoo

Dead Boy Productions Interviews Calabrese

The last time we talked to you the Traveling Vampire Show has come out so what’s been going on since then? 

Jimmy: A bunch of West Coast, Texas, Midwest shows. We just shot a scene in a movie, the Graves, it’s a horror movie. We haven’t seen the rushes yet and we haven’t seen the script either, but it’s the same director that did the video for Voices of the Dead, Brian Pulido. He’s a comic writer so hopefully he knows what he is doing and we’re crossing our fingers it’s going to be a cult hit. He’s a very professional guy, very cool. When we met him for the video, we just hit it off, because we were on the same page and liked the same stuff, like the same music and every so we were like let’s be friends (laughter) 

Bobby: We immediately scheduled a play date after that, jumping into the balls on the playground. 

Jimmy: But it was all shrunken heads it was pretty wild (laughter). He is going to take that video and try to work it into the movie and take footage from the movie and rework it into the video. Hopefully in a few months that will be on YouTube. 

You said you did a lot of Midwest and West Coast shows. Have you gone across country 

Jimmy: No, the furthest we have gone is.. (looks at Bobby) 

Bobby: …is Ohio? Indiana or Ohio. 

Jimmy: The scene is the biggest is California and Texas. I think the next time we are just going to go up the coast of California. Oh we just did get signed or we signed a distribution deal with Plastic Head in the U.K., so this month they are going to be releasing our CD out there with the video for a Euro release so now we are going to have a reason to go do some touring out there. They actually tried to put us on something, the Dead Kennedy’s it was like two weeks before. Someone must have dropped off and they wanted us to come out there, but it was two weeks and the plane tickets were going to be insane and we didn’t know how to get the logistics together to get our merch out there. 

Do you guys rock full time or…? 

Jimmy: We, uh,….no comment on that. As far as you’re concerned rocking is our business. (laugter)

Actually we are working with someone else on a comic right now. We are trying to work out the legal things. We worked on a script and Brian Pulido is out of our range for working on a script, pricewise, because he gets X amount when he works on a script with Chucky and the Friday the 13th comics. (to Bobby) do you remember the name.

Bobby: I can’t remember the name, just a couple of cool kids from Tuscon, who love comics and know their stuff, hopefully the came up with a script from our script to mesh it together to be cool. A comic book explosion of fun. 

Have you guys ever played the comic conventions and stuff?

Jimmy: actually I tried to get into the San Diego ComicCon but it was sold out. It’s like you have to get a booth like the year before. 

You do, you have to get stuff before Christmas. Have you ever been to the Con? 

Jimmy: No. We are hoping we can do Dragon Con again that’s in August. It was amazing when we did that 

Bobby: It was like three hotels combined 

Jimmy: We had our booth out there 24 hours so we were in shifts constantly. There is people walking around drinking all night long 

Bobby: that was more like a sci-fi, fantasy, role-playing, goth 

Jimmy: They had all the entertainers there for the signed stuff, one level they had video games, and then they had role playing stuff. Everyone was wearing their foxtail stuff for the anime people. That was the first time I had ever seen that so I was like what the hell is going on. 

So new songs? 

Jimmy: Yeah we just played two new songs tonight we cut out two. Right now we have four songs written that we are starting to put in the set list so we can see how it plays off the audience before we hit the studio. Hopefully we can go into the studio in January of next year, that’s what we are shooting for. 

You guys pay for all the recording yourselves? You guys aren’t signed? 

Jimmy and Bobby: Yeah.

Jimmy: Spookshow Records, that’s our own thing so it’s Do It Yourself, except for the distribution in the U.K. We need help with that, but everything else we try to do 

Do you guys design all the merch too? It’s obvious you are very influenced by comics so is that where it comes from? 

Jimmy: We just find guys over the Internet and contact them 

Bobby: it’s really cool just to have, I think at least on of my favorite bands, if anything for the artwork alone is Electric Frankenstein, they have enough artwork they could have a picture book about artwork. We always have to have something cool. We obviously can’t draw ourselves so we want to have as much crazy artwork and images, imagery as possible. 

I don’t want to sound like an asshole, but one of the first thing that drew me to the band was the artwork, because it’s the style I like and so I saw it before you played and I remember thinking I hope this band doesn’t suck! 

Bobby: (laughter) At Dragon Con people have never heard of us before and they saw the shirt and people were like “I’ll get that shirt I guess, pretty cool”. They just buy the shirts they have no idea what we sound like, no idea who we are, they just thought it was a cool shirt 

Jimmy: It would be cool to make our brand. You don’t necessarily have to be into the music to get the artwork and the shirts. It’s almost like Lucky 13. Now that we have so money shirts I guess that’s what we are doing (laughter). I think right now we have like three or four screenprinters, a couple in Calfornia, some in Arizona. 

Bobby: I think we have like three or four shirts in the pipelines just waiting to be printed. 

How did the Hot Topic exclusive come about 

Jimmy: they asked us. They have buyers that go out looking for new stuff. We were kind of disappointed because they had them at some stores in Arizona and California, but not really East Coast 

Bobby: It was weird because we would get a message from a kid in Wisconsin who said he got the shirt at Hot Topic, but then here in California they couldn’t find them. 

So new album next year then. 

Jimmy: Yeah we are getting tired of playing the same songs over and over again. It’s really fun and really exciting to start writing new songs. That is all we want to focus on when we practice, but shows get in the way 

Again on the topic of artwork. Are there any shirts or posters or anything based on fan artwork? 

Jimmy: We have one called the Vampire Skull. This one guy just handed us a rolled us piece of paper and it had the Vampire Skull thing. He just handed it to us and said hey do what you want with it. That’s how I learned how to scan stuff. Most of the time people will give us artwork. We’ve got a bunch of artwork at our shrine in the practice room that people give us. So of it is kind of so-so, but we appreciate it and it’s kind of cool hanging up on the wall, we get inspired looking at it when we are playing. 

Bobby: It seems like the coolest stuff we get is for our secret fan club. The best thing when people send, you know because we ask for their soul, being silly and all, but then they send in a piece of paper with a fingerprint of their own blood. 

Just like MIlhouse 

Bobby: Sometimes people write it out like a contract and sometimes its sealed with those old school burnt stamps 

Jimmy: we are going to have to put that on the blog one day all the things people send it 

Bobby: We will get some torn pieces of paper or written on a napkin ‘one soul’