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0:00:00
Ben Radford: Welcome to Squaring the Strange, where we apply critical thinking and evidence-based analysis to, well, everything from the simple to the strange, the mysterious to the mundane.

(MUSIC)

0:00:14
Pascual Romero: Welcome back to Scoring the Strange. This is Pascual  with me as always. This is Ben and Celestia. How are you guys doing?

BR: Doing great.

CW:  Pretty good.

0:00:34
And we have another friend, my good buddy, my good old buddy, Kyle. Kyle Konkiel from Bad Wolves. How are you doing, man? Pretty good, Pascual. How are you, buddy?

0:00:55
Kyle Konkiel: I am doing great.

PR: It’s good to hear your voice. We haven’t really, well, I guess we haven’t talked. I haven’t heard your voice since NAM a couple years ago, so it’s been a minute.

0:01:04
KK: Yeah, yeah, we haven’t, you know, we keep in contact via text message or Instagram Messenger. Yes. That’s the kind of the new thing that the kids are doing these days. We’re not even texting each other on the phone anymore. We’re texting each other via social media apps.

0:01:20
BR: So no effusive handwritten letters for archivists to find 20 years from now?

PR: No. Send a handkerchief with my cologne sprayed on it.

0:01:30
KK: I’m going to start using a feather pen and ink again. I’m going to start handwriting letters with wax stamps on the envelopes.

0:01:38
BR: Make some poor doodles.

0:01:39
CW: We’re just thrilled both of you could take time off from like worshiping Satan and committing criminal acts and sacrificing animals to discuss some heavy metal myths with us.

0:01:50
PR: Yeah.

0:01:51
KK: Yeah.

0:01:52
PR: We might as well just get right into it. This week we are talking about heavy metal myths, not just heavy metal, but just music myths in general. It’s going to be everything from doppelgangers to people allegedly eating the heads off of small mammals. So Kyle, what you got going on now? So you’re in Bad Wolves. How’s that going?

0:02:15
KK: It’s been going really, really great, man. In December of last year, I had just gotten off the road with Vimik. We did a South American and European run and then I kind of got the call from John John Berkland the drummer. He was just like hey, you know, I kind of want to see you know, where your heads at We’re gonna start moving forward. We just did this deal with 11-7 records and You know, we’re gonna have some touring coming up, you know, are you available? And I was just like yeah at that time we didn’t really have anything more than a few hundred thousand hits on the song that we released ourself, Learn to Live, the music video for that. And I was just like, you know what, I really think I should give this band a chance. I’ve known all these guys. I’ve known Tommy for 13 years. I’ve known Doc for nine years. I’ve known John Birkland in passing for probably five or six years. So I was just like, I really, really dug the music and I gotta give this a chance. Like there’s just too many good musicians in this band to not do that, you know?

0:03:21
PR: No doubt, no doubt. And then you guys released the new version of Zombie this year and that kind of blew up.

0:03:29
KK: Yeah, I was not anticipating the reaction that that song got. I thought it was a very cool idea. Tommy had kind of like put that down as an idea. I don’t know, like early in, it was either late 2016 or 2017, and they decided to do a rendition of it. And then that same phone call that I told you about with John, he sent me a bunch of new songs that they’ve been working on and that was one of them. So I was just like, oh, that’s cool. I thought it sounded great. I thought it was a very interesting take on it. A little bit different, you know, because a lot of times when people cover the song, I think people kind of focus too much on how the original sounded. Because if you were to take our version side by side, I think ours is more of a kind of a darker, more melodic feel than the original, which had a lot of heavy guitars and had that legendary bass line and more of a focus on the actual instruments than the lyrics themselves, which I think was kind of the way Tommy wanted to portray that. Because even today, that song is still pretty relevant.

0:04:47
PR: Sure, sure.

CW: I had that original Cranberries version on repeat during college and yeah, your version is a lot less thrashy, if I could use that term. I’m not a heavy metal expert, but I loved both of them. I really do enjoy the remake you guys did.

0:05:06
KK: Well, thank you. Thank you very much.

0:05:08
BR: That’s one of the things that I really like about music is that there’s so many ways you can go with it. You can take the same idea and the same source material and just stretch it and pull it and just do crazy stuff with it. That’s one reason I really love to hear remakes and different versions and stuff. Some people find it annoying because it’s like, yeah, it’s not like the original. Well, no, it’s not. That’s the whole point.

0:05:29
CW: It’s like folklore.

0:05:30
PR:  Yeah. I think people get a little hung up on the idea of a cover song these days because a lot of us grew up post-singer-songwriter era and completely forgot that there were five songs that existed from 1945 to 1965 and just a thousand bands played those same five songs. But I know we’re going to get emails about that.

0:05:56
CW: I think Dolly Parton wrote like most of those songs in the 60s too.

0:05:59
PR: Yeah, that’s true. It was like Bob Dylan and Dolly Parton.

0:06:03
KK: And then Prince just wrote all the rest.

0:06:06
PR: Yeah.

0:06:07
BR: Somebody had to fill in the gaps. But anyway, yeah, so, and Kyle, so you guys have been out on tour quite a bit this year, I noticed. You guys just finished up a first leg of Five Finger Death Punch run, correct?

0:06:23
KK: Yeah, so basically we started a month ago. I believe I left home April 19th and We started off just kind of doing the festival circuit. We started off in Arizona doing the UFest with seven dust five finger death punch Then we did the Los Rages festival in downtown like old downtown Las Vegas, which had, you know, Five Finger Death Punch, Hollywood Undead in this moment, a bunch of great bands. Actually too many for me to list right now. And then we went out for a week with my buddies in Hollywood Undead. They were nice enough to give us a direct support slot. It was like a theater, like smaller theater run, so House of Blues type places.

0:07:11
PR: Those are some old friends of both of us through our former mutual band. I didn’t mention at the top, but we were both in a band called In This Moment at different eras, and so we had that connection with Hollywood Undead for years.

0:07:27
KK: Well, actually, I went to elementary school, middle school, and high school with Dylan, also known as Funnyman. And then I went to high school with Jordan, Charlie Scene.

0:07:39
PR: All right, cool.

0:07:39
KK: So I’ve known those guys, I’ve known Dylan my whole life. So it was really awesome for them to take us out. And then we went and did Welcome to Rockville in Florida, and then we did Fort Rock, another Florida, I think it was in Fort Lauderdale. And then we went out for another week with Hollywood Undead, and then we kind of finished up that first round of festival gigs at Carolina Rebellion. So a lot of these shows were booked before we had released any major singles, but it was really awesome to see because a lot of the times we were the first or second band going on at all of these festivals. And it was really awesome to just see the response that we’ve gotten just from the past a couple months of Zombie getting a lot of radio play and all the support that we’ve gotten through that. Just thousands and thousands of kids showing up to watch us, butt early.

0:08:35
PR: Yeah, I was very surprised, because I was aware that you guys were first up to bat at a lot of this stuff, and the pictures that I was seeing on social media were certainly not of that noon crowd that I’m so used to from Warped Tour and stuff.

0:08:51
KK: Yeah, like Warped Tour or Mayhem, like when you’re the first band up at Mayhem, which I have done that as well. And there’s like maybe 350 kids. No, a lot of these places, not to take down anything from the other bands that played there, because a lot of these bands have been doing it for a really long time, but a lot of these smaller stages at these bigger festivals that we were doing, like we’ve kind of had the biggest crowds. And it’s just, it’s been really amazing to see.

0:09:22
PR: Cool, cool.

0:09:23
BR: Yeah, I remember I was, I went a couple years back, I went to the Fun Fun Fun Fest in San Antonio. And it was cool, because it had, I think, three or four stages, and it was, you could just circulate. I mean, I was, I’m not a hardcore guy, I was exhausted, like three hours into it, and like, what was it, a four day festival? Like, you’re killing me here, but it was cool, because you could see, you know, they were actually separated by genre, and so you could just sort of wander over here, wander over there, and see some new acts and stuff. I don’t go to music festivals as much as I should, but it was always lots of fun when I did.

0:09:56
KK: Yeah, it’s just so much, it’s just like, there’s so much time, like, you want to get there, you want to see the first band, you know, they go on at like 1130 or noon. And then, but you want to stay for the headliner, like they don’t go on until 10 and you’re in the sun, and there’s just so many people. But the festivals, the festivals were really good, and then we started the first leg, well, I guess it’s kind of like a separate tour, we’re kind of following Death Punch throughout the year, but so we did this, it was Five Finger Death Punch, Shinedown, and Starset, Bad Wolves. It was about a three-week long tour, and I literally just flew home from that last night. So I’m going to be off for a week here. I fly back to Casper, Wyoming next Tuesday, which we’ll be playing the Event Center with Five Finger Death Punch there. I believe that’s only us and Five Finger Death Punch. We have two more shows with them, and then we actually start our first headline tour. If any of your listeners are interested in going that they can check out our website which is badwolvesnation.com. There’s all the shows that we’ll be playing, merch, anything you want is basically there if it’s bad wolves related.

0:11:07
PR: Awesome.

(MUSIC)

0:11:38
CW: Well, thank you for taking time off of your very packed schedule these days to talk some skeptical analysis with us about musical myths. You had a long period of touring as a working musician, so you’ve probably seen a lot of weird stuff, and we’re going to draw on that if you don’t mind.

0:11:57
KK: Yeah, of course.

BR: Kyle, I want to ask you, what are some strange or funny touring or pre-show rituals or superstitions you’ve either done or seen or heard about, you know, maybe regarding going on stage or on the tour bus or I’m sure there’s lots of really weird music stuff, either heavy metal or otherwise.

0:12:14
KK: I thought it was weird. I saw this video of Metallica a few years ago and James Hedfield getting ready to go on stage and he like put on his boots and I saw him stomping around in a box of kitty litter I thought that was pretty weird.

CW: Is there is there any legitimate like reason for that does it help the boots get less slippery or something?

KK: I don’t know I just saw it and I was like that’s James Hedfield stomping around in a kitty litter box.

BR: And and who knows if it was used kitty litter it could have been you know hopefully it’s fresh but who knows there’s some sort of weird s*** ritual there.

0:12:45
PR: I don’t know, my only guess is like, I know when you get like, especially when you get fancy boots or fancy shoes, the soles are like really super hard and kind of slick. And like, maybe it’s like, that’s how he scuffs them up or something. But I’m like, you could just like, drag your feet on a sidewalk for a minute too. Like it’s not, you don’t have to get kitty litter.

0:13:12
KK: But then it’s not baking soda fresh.

0:13:14
CW: I’m immediately suspecting there has to be some purpose for that. At a roller derby venue I used to be involved with, they had a concrete floor put in and they ended up having to spray a fine mist of Coca-Cola on it to make it more grippy for the wheels.

PR: Ah, that’s interesting.

CW: I’m always like, there’s a ton of different material science angles to this.

0:13:33
KK: Yeah, I don’t know, maybe he’s just trying to keep himself from getting hit with a bad ground or something.

0:13:41
CW: Superstitions are one angle. There’s of course a huge basket of urban legends associated with rock music and rock musicians. And I just learned this week that Ozzy Osbourne really did bite the head off of a bat.

0:13:59
KK: Yeah, as far as I heard, he thought it was fake.

0:14:04
CW: That I didn’t know. I didn’t know that he thought it was fake when he bit it off. And then I found out it was not the only small flying animal that he bit the head off of. Apparently he bit the head off of a dove in a meeting with some record executive. Did you guys hear about that?

0:14:16
KK: Oh yeah, I did. Yeah, I heard about that one. I think it was like a power move. kind of like show that like he’s like, listen, you’re going to do what we want to do or I’m going to go elsewhere. I’m crazy. I just bit the head off of a dove.

0:14:33
BR: So Kyle, when you’re meeting with executives, you do or you don’t bring in doves to bite?

0:14:38
KK: I don’t. I don’t. I just, you know, I put on my best Clark Kent outfit and I just kind of smile and nod until I’m asked a question.

0:14:53
CW: I felt bad for Ozzy because that meant that when he did it with the bat he had established a pattern at that point.

0:14:59
PR: Yeah, no, the bat one was funny because he did, the dove thing was real, I think it was at CBS Records. He did it as basically an intimidation tactic, which the man was on a lot of drugs at the time so, you know, I mean, take that whichever direction he wants but but did drugs believe it or not he did he may still I don’t know yeah we actually ran out in 1990 all the drugs had to be there were no drugs for anyone else for several months that’s the reason he actually is the reason that Pablo Escobar existed. Him and Motley Crue. Yeah. But yeah, as he did in Des Moines, Iowa, I believe it was, this was in 1982, which was like just not very long after he bit the head off the dove, he stuck a bat in his mouth and took a bite. Now, the idea was, at least the story as he relayed it, was that he was supposed to bite the head off of a rubber bat or a rubber something and someone in the crowd had a bat like one does sometimes you know you just gotta have a bat and and they threw it up on the stage while he was doing you know this gimmick and he grabbed the actual bat and bit the head right off and very quickly realized it wasn’t a rubber bat but at that point I’m like you know he’s Aussie so I’m sure he probably just sold it.

0:16:29
KK: Yeah, it was funny, I was actually, I was at the Aztec Theater in San Antonio a few weeks ago. It’s a great venue, right next to the Riverwalk. But if you go, there’s this little path in between stage left and stage right. If you go back there, there’s some gaff tape, I don’t know how old it is, but there’s some gaff tape about right in the middle and it says you’re in San Antonio Ozzy pissed on the Alamo.

0:16:54
PR: Yeah, I was there about I was there about three years ago, and I missed that I don’t know of course I yeah, who knows I don’t remember half the shows that I do but…

0:17:04
CW: That was one of the legends I came across when I was looking at all the various urban legends about very about Hard rock musicians is Ozzy is apparently renowned for pissing on the Alamo.

0:17:16
KK: Yeah, yes. He’s allowed, he’s not allowed to come back to San Antonio these days.

0:17:20
PR: Yeah. Yeah. That was, uh, I think that was, I want to say the same year that he bit the head off the bat. So he was like really on a run right about that time.

BR: So, so let me ask this Kyle. So if a bad Wolves was going to get banned from Austin, what would you do?

KK: Oh, I don’t even…

BR: If you’re an Austin or just anywhere else, if you’re trying to get lots of publicity, like, oh, you guys are not coming back here ever again. How are you going to turn it up a notch, take it up to 11? What are you going to do?

0:17:52
KK: Well, I’m not sure how familiar you guys are with me, but I’ve been pretty keen on archery this past year and a half. Maybe I would shoot a flaming arrow into a can of gasoline or something.

BR: I love it.

PR: That’d be pretty good. Of course, yeah, all you have to do to get banned from Austin is just, you know, walk up on stage and be like, I don’t know, I’m not too sure about that Bon Iver guy. Bone-ever. Bone-ever. I said bone-ever. Anyway, but yeah, that’s a hipster joke for those who aren’t in the loop.

0:18:26
BR: I got it.

0:18:27
CW: All the people in Austin got it.

0:18:28
PR: Yeah. Everyone in Austin just, just clicked unsubscribe. Just killed.

0:18:34
KK: I actually just got an email. I just found out that I’m now banned from Austin. For mentioning Bon Iver. All right.

0:18:38
PR: Well, that’s all right. You played South by Southwest once. You played it a thousand times.

0:18:50
CW: Well, some of the things that have been ascribed to specifically extreme hardcore metal musicians and punk rockers have been very have been not something that the musician has sought after or or tried to invent about themselves. But I was reading about how the Columbine shooting was was blamed on Marilyn Manson’s influence and that some journalists claimed that the shooters were wearing Marilyn Manson type makeup and all the harm that that did him. He actually apparently he had venues canceling on him and everything like that either in your own musical experience or people that you’ve known. Have you ever had false rumors end up harming a musician’s reputation or their business?

0:19:36
KK: Not offhand, but I know somebody actually one one of my one of my good buddies Dan Cleary. He works for Jane’s Addiction he had worked for Manson for a long time and that’s something that that Manson’s career actually never really fully recouped from and even a couple years ago, they went to go play Moscow and you know just the stigma kind of still attached to his name from that, which was almost, what was that, almost 20 years ago?

0:20:05
PR: It was just actually, literally 20 years ago. Wow.

0:20:08
KK: You know, there was a bomb threat at that show in Moscow, and it was a fly date. They were just flying to Russia to play that one show. So they flew there, set up the whole stage, the rig, you know, the production, the gear, and the police were just like, nope, can’t play.

0:20:29
PR: Wow, that is rough. Yeah, I actually, I do recall that if you look at his career to, you know, and he was kind of really at his peak just about the time that Columbine happened. I think Mechanical Animals, the kind of the biggest record he had done to date at that point was the current album.

0:20:49
KK: But I mean, I don’t know, just like all that stuff I mean you know we can think guys like you know Rob Halford and Dee Snider when all that’s and even Ozzy Osbourne back in the day you know back in the 80s when Nancy Reagan was trying to Nancy Reagan and then tipper gore for gore yeah Nancy Reagan and tipper gore I think was mainly tipper gore I’m trying to edit, you know, kind of fudge a little bit on the First Amendment there. And I’m just glad that there was top-tier musicians stepping in and being like, no, we should be able to say what we want to say and not have to worry about consequences for songs, writing about either personal experiences or things that they think that they need to be talked about. I mean, we kind of had something similar with one of one of one of the bad wolf songs, where Tommy actually had to put a statement out on YouTube about it. Because people were getting really upset of the content of the song but didn’t know like what perspective it it held. The song’s called Officer Down. If you guys haven’t heard it yet, you should definitely definitely take a listen to it and let me know what you think. But it’s kind of the perspective from police violence and being the police officer type situation. So we kind of got a little bit of heat from that not too much, but yeah enough to where we kind of had to put out a statement because a lot of people were assuming that we’re anti-police officer Anti, you know because you know we do have two African American African-American men in the band and the song kind of takes place coming from being an African-American growing up in the 90s But then also being a police officer where your partner gets shot and killed by a gang member, so it’s kind of both perspectives You know kind of early 90s type type thing when there was a lot of you know police I mean, there’s still a lot of police violence, but when there was a lot of gang-related violence as well.

0:22:51
BR: I’m always fascinated when bands have to, well they don’t have to, but they sort of socially have to apologize for some lyric or some…

0:23:01
KK: Oh, there was no apology.

0:23:03
BR: Well no, but it reminds me of, for example, when Anthrax, when there was the big Anthrax scare. You’re like, we disavow the use of anthrax as opposed to who in the world would, like, really? It’s so bizarre to me that somebody would be like, hey guys, we need to say we’re against anthrax. Like, really? This is the meeting we’re having here?

0:23:32
PR: How bad its gotten for the band Isis in the last few years.

0:23:38
KK: Oh Yeah, I think Isis has been disband for a disband for a while. But yeah, I remember that I remember that was that was John Bush era anthrax and I remember they all wore these white Jumpsuits on stage for a long time. This is we’re not changing our name. Yeah. Wow, that’s amazing to me.

0:23:57
PR: I mean it just that we would even need to address that at all because it’s like on one hand there’s this band and on the other hand there’s the thing that the band’s named after that has existed longer than them to be fair, but like no one could have predicted people mailing it in the era of of terrorism a good 25 years after the band even existed in the first place, you know? And, and to me that’s kind of like, it just, you know, it’s the way it is, but it’s unfortunate that bands even have to acknowledge that. It’s like, why do they, like, who cares?

0:24:36
CW: It’s kind of assuming that the general public is not as self-aware as your average Google search.

0:24:43
PR: Right.

0:24:44
KK: Yeah.

CW: I mean, it’s going to wreck your Google results for a while.

0:24:46
PR: You just have to accept that. Yeah, that’s true. Yeah, you can’t, I don’t know where Isis the band is on Google now, but I’m sure they’re maybe not in the top ten anymore.

0:24:54
CW: Now Kyle, did you did you have a favorite? Urban legend about a rock star that that you have ever looked into or that has fascinated you that you might like to talk about?

0:25:03
KK: Well the one I don’t know the one the one that I keep going back to I mean that there’s kind of a there’s kind Of the few where you know don’t really have much leverage, kind of like Elvis is still alive or Tupac’s still alive or something like that. But just the Paul McCartney doppelganger one, I thought, was pretty interesting because there’s subreddits, there’s full pages, websites dedicated to like, oh, Paul McCartney died in like 1969 and they had to replace him. And if you look at a picture from Paul McCartney from 1968 and 1971, you could tell he is drastically looking different. The shape of his face is different. Like he had a mild cleft on his chin, but now he doesn’t.

0:25:54
PR: It’s called a beard, guys. It’s a beard.

0:25:58
CW: The late night show host Craig Ferguson had a long running gag that Paul McCartney had been replaced by Angela Lansbury.

0:26:04
PR: That’s a pretty good one.

0:26:05
BR: Ouch.

0:26:06
CW: If you look at them facially next to each other, it’s pretty hilarious. But that’s a whole fascinating little sub-genre of urban legend about rock stars because Paul McCartney is not the only one. I read up and there’s some sort of conspiracy theory about Bob Dylan that he wanted to get out of the music business and had a motorcycle accident and used that motorcycle accident in like the 70s or whatever to have himself replaced. And people have listened to his music before that era and after that era and were like, yeah, he was way more Bob Dylan before the motorcycle accident. This other guy that they’ve replaced him with is not nearly as much Bob Dylan.

0:26:50
KK: Well, have these people ever heard of cocaine? Because I know that that, I mean, as you know, Rick James said it best, it’s one hell of a drug.

PR: Yeah.

KK: I don’t know. It’s just, I find that to be kind of like, like, why? Like, you know, like, why? Because you know, all these artists, you know, who have recently died over the past few years, David Bowie, Chris Cornell, Chester Bennington, I mean, I’m sure all these people are now selling more records than they have in a long time, now that they’ve passed. I don’t get why would you just want to just keep the facade going. It doesn’t make any sense. There was one in South America I heard about, Avril Lavigne as well. That’s where it originated, was in South America. I went into a deep dive one night when I heard about the Paul McCartney one, and then I happened to have stumbled upon that one as well.

0:27:49
PR: Yeah, and that one’s pretty funny because the interesting thing about modern day conspiracies like that is that you have a lot more material to source when you’re trying to build your conspiracy. There’s just thousands of photos on the internet and thousands of different people just throwing their ideas at it and so, you know, this one was born in the era of the internet and And it you know, it’s just it’s so weird to me that one of the big things for me Is that Occam’s razor usually does a pretty good job of cutting up these rumors pretty fast in the sense that all you have to ask is why would they do that and you know the go on this like long you know well he wanted to get out of music it’s like yeah he could have quit he literally could just stop like that yeah that’s what people do when they don’t want to do music anymore they stop they just stop doing it. You’d be amazed.

BR: That’s the big thing on Elvis is that I’ve I’ve wasted some time debating a couple Elvis conspiracy theorists and let me tell you that’s that’s a whole rabbit hole right there. But yeah, I’m like, well, it’s like, yeah, so why? Oh, yeah, he got tired of being Elvis.

0:28:55
PR: Yeah, OK.

0:28:57
BR: He got tired of all the money and all that. It was just, OK. He got tired of it. So he’s like, hey, I’m going to fake my death. And that was the easiest way to go about this.

0:29:06
KK: Yeah. You have all the money in the world, and you can do what you want. But there’s all these people like, don’t you ever say an unkind word about Elvis Aaron Presley.

0:29:15
PR: You know they did misspell his name on his tombstone… or did they?

BR: Well let me ask you this when you were kid growing up? What what ideas about musicians did you have that you realized turned out to be myths when you got in that role? I mean other words, aside from wild rumors of Aussie and bad heads and Marilyn Manson removing some ribs to pleasure himself, what are some of the more mundane ideas that you had about rock stars that you had before you actually became one?

0:29:50
KK: Well, here’s the thing. Actually, my former guitarist, Chris Hullworth, he was the one who kind of put this thought into my head. And at the time, growing up, the first record I ever bought was a Dookie by Green Day. I was really into the kind of skate punk offspring, stuff like that, the popular music of that time. At the time, I didn’t really think of musicians as being like, oh, these guys are rich and famous. I was just like, oh, they just look like they’re having tons of fun. But as I got older, in the era of Jay-Z, Master P, Juvenile, stuff like that, it built this perception in my young teenage mind that, oh, if you do music, you’re just going to be rich. You sign this record deal and then all of a sudden there’s a money tree that grows in your backyard. But I mean, at music industry changed with Napster and stuff like that. But I think even when I did my first tour within this moment, like Chris would always say, it’s all about perception and reality. People perceive you as something more than you really are. That’s what being a musician is like you’re you know you have money you have status you have all this stuff which is at that time for me like and still to this day now is not true. You know like some kid like asked me at the merch booth one time like I was 23 years old and uh He was like so what kind of car you drive. I was like in 1994 Ford Ranger XLT. Yeah, you remember that truck Pascual.

0:31:35
PR: Yeah, I do.

0:31:38
KK: He’s like, oh, I thought you could drive like a Mercedes or BMW. I’m like, yeah, with what money? You know?

0:31:47
PR: Yeah. That was an interesting one for me because my music career, I mean, it’s been a very interesting one for me because I grew up playing music with my dad’s band and I actually made money doing that even as young as 10, 12 years old, but when I got to LA, my first band in LA was in 2000, and this was when so-called new metal was really popular. So I was like, well, I’m a death metal guy, I could totally do this new metal thing, whatever. And so I jumped into these bands right out of the gates, and there were a lot of these bands in the valley in LA that were kind of gaining a lot of popularity and labels were just throwing money at us. The first thing I ever did, and this was actually my, I was in my second band at this point, they gave us a development deal and they paid me to basically just go to the studio for six weeks. And it was like the craziest, it felt like, I was like, this is what it’s going to be like. I mean, I wasn’t making a ton of money, but I was like not working and just getting paid to record. And then pretty much that year, like things fell apart with that project because our manager, I’m not gonna mention his name, he managed No Doubt at the time, which so it was kind of an upper level kind of deal and our singer was female and he felt that she could be just pulled off of the project and then they would just hire a band and not worry about the publishing quandary of five people writing songs. That ended up, I was like, wow, that was so great, but then it all ended abruptly, and then the very next project I did was this post-Napster metal stuff, and everyone’s just like, oh yeah, we don’t have advances anymore, we don’t do development deals, we don’t do stipends, we don’t give money to people. We don’t promote you, we just… They’re just like, we’ll pay for you to record your record and we’ll pay for the promotion of the record.

BR: And you’re welcome.

PR: And you can make your living on tour. It was quite a shock, like Kyle said, you know, it’s like people think that you’re doing so great and it’s like, no, actually, like, there have been times that we would do, like, a bus tour and almost our entire guarantee would go to just paying for the bus just to keep up appearances. Some of these festival tours even require you to have a bus. It was like you’re getting paid $1,200 a day to play and you’re paying $1,000 a day for the bus. Then you’ve got five people to split the rest of the money, which really isn’t being split between you guys because it’s going to your agent or your manager.

CW: It’s amazing how People’s perceptions are not lined up with reality when it comes to the economics of of artists of all types artists and authors and and Musicians. I remember the one of the first concerts I went to live was this ska band called the Pie Tasters. I was super excited I had like two of their CDs and I started chatting up this guy at the at the merch table and I’m like so you guys like travel with the band and everything and like sell the merchandise and he looks at me he goes I’m Steve I’m the lead singer. I was a little embarrassed.

BR: Oh that’s Steve oh yeah yeah.

KK: Well I mean I had to do that with within this moment as well. When we did the Mayhem Fest in 2010, I would go and play bass for a half hour and then I’d get up early in the morning and set up our merch booth and sell merch all day.

0:35:25
PR: Yeah, yeah, that’s the truth of it. Nowadays, kids are so used to it, being a member of the band, this is a funny thing. So I spent the latter part of my career tour managing rather than playing and I’d be at the merch booth or I’d be with the band and people would take, they would just assume I was a member of the band because I was at the merch booth. And it’s like a totally different story these days. I’ve taken a lot of pictures and signed a lot of autographs with people not realizing I was not in the band.

0:35:56
CW: To be fair, Pascual, you totally look like you’re in the band.

0:36:00
PR: Especially last week. I got a I got mistaken first for Stephen Carpenter from the Deftones I think that’s that’s becoming a slightly more common thing as my my weight has not been under control but that’s a whole other story.

0:36:15
KK: But actually going back to the whole the whole perception thing. I think it’s funny because even still to this day You know, I’ll have a couple friends I haven’t talked to in a long time kind of like hit me up and they’re like, so zombie, huh? You’re doing pretty well. And I’m like, well, I was like, you know, anything about the song, we donate all any, any money we make from that song, we donate to Dolores’s three children. And with that being our, our currently our biggest hit, you know, our management gets paid, our label gets paid, and everyone else gets paid for that song, except for the band, because we decided to donate our portion of the proceeds.

0:36:50
CW: I read about that. I thought that was a really remarkably kind move that you guys did for Dolores’ three children.

0:36:57
KK: Well, we were kind of getting a lot of slack for when we released the song. Like I said earlier, I’m not sure if it was on or off the air, that song was written, our version of the song that we covered was recorded in late 2016, late 2017. So we were gonna release the song regardless, but we felt like at that time, as Dolores’ passing had happened, it would just be better to, if we were gonna release the song, do it in a way that is beneficial towards the people that hurt the most, which is obviously her family.

0:37:35
PR: Yeah, because she was actually slated to record that song with you guys, correct?

0:37:40
KK: Yeah, so just a little story here. We had recorded that song, we had signed with 117 Music in late 2017, and they just kind of wanted to hear all of our stuff. They’re like, you gave us an album’s worth of material, but I want to hear everything that you guys got. So we sent all the music over to Alan Kovac, who’s a CEO of 117, and he was like, hey, I saw and listened to this zombie song, noticed it’s a cover. I actually used to manage the Cranberries back in the 90s. I think we should go ahead and send this to Dolores, because I think this would be a really good song for you guys to release as a single. So he sent it over to her to kind of get her blessing, and she loved it so much that she had asked if she could sing on it. And what are we going to say? No? I mean, there’s there’s there’s so many, you know, legendary just that you have from that song alone. There’s so many legendary, you know, vocal lines and and stuff like that. And then the day that she was slated to record her parts on the song, she had been found deceased in her hotel room in London.

0:38:50
PR: That is wild. And I’m sure that, unfortunately, because of that timing, I mean, the way you guys reacted to it was perfect, and I think you guys did the right thing by moving the proceeds on over to her kids. But I can imagine that it can be really tough to go forward with a business plan that includes releasing a song with someone who was supposed to be on it but passed away, because I can imagine you kind of get every number of opinions about that where you get people criticizing you of trying to capitalize on it.

BR: There’s no right answer.

PR: There’s always going to be something that goes out there. You guys are kind of like, what are you going to do? I think you guys did the right thing. As far as I can see now, the public seems to have a pretty full understanding of the situation and and you know everyone’s being really positive about it which which I’m glad to see but I could see how that was a very difficult situation for you guys.

0:39:47
KK: Yeah it was definitely a very difficult first couple weeks you know as the song released just because we were waiting for that backlash and we were having a lot of news outlets contact our management to do interviews and I think the only one that we actually took so we got hit up by CSNBC CNN TMZ I Think the only Actual press release that we did with anyone was actually with Rolling Stone. We felt like that would be the proper way to go about it, instead of having you know some sort of tabloid or sort of left or right type news outlets. We wanted to just tell the story the way that it was, not that TMZ or any of those other companies would have spun it differently, but just it being a musical endeavor, I think I thought the best move that we could have done was release it via Rolling Stone, the music magazine since 1960.

PR: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. That was a good move.

KK: So we refused to do any interviews with any other news outlets besides that one, and we just wanted it to be done. Because, again, waiting for the backlash. Because it could have gone either way. It what it’s done for the band itself, but it also could have easily trashed our career.

0:41:24
PR: Yeah, absolutely.

0:41:26
CW: Well, it definitely is a wonderful tribute rather than an opportunistic move. You guys handled it perfectly.

0:41:32
KK: Well, thank you, and that’s exactly kind of how we wanted to represent ourselves, because, I mean, there was, like, ourselves because we did think long and hard about if we were to release the song, how would we do it? Because we didn’t want to capitalize on that. That’s not something that we’re just like, oh, we better jump and do it now, boys. I got that text message very early in the morning. I was getting up to go to work, and I saw a text from Tommy at probably five in the morning, and he was just like, hey, I just want to let you guys know that I got a call from Alan Kovac really, really, you know, really early this morning and Dolores had passed. And I was just like, oh, what?

0:42:14
PR: Yeah.

0:42:14
KK: Like he was very, you know, there was a few really short, let’s say a small circle of people that, you know, I had let listen and I was like really excited. You know, people who I consider my best friends probably like two two people I let listen the song my girlfriend was one of them and I was just like yeah Dolores is gonna sing on this. This is gonna be so awesome Like maybe one day we’ll get to play a show with her. Like how cool would that be?

0:42:39
You know, yeah, and then I like that’s what I was thinking I was just like, oh man, like we are like my first instinct was like, okay I don’t I don’t know if we are if we should release this or not, and then you know going back and forth with our management and the label, it was decided that we should move forward on it as a tribute more than any sort of capitalist type proceeding.

0:43:02
Well, rock stars passing before their time is an unfortunate statistical reality in the music business for myriad reasons. One of the things I know Pascual wanted to look at was something called the 27 Club.

0:43:16
KK: Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix.

0:43:18
PR: Yep. Amy Winehouse, Kurt Cobain, Jim Morrison. There’s a number of them. It’s been a pretty famous, I don’t know what we call it, kind of a myth, I guess. It’s been around for a number of years. I mean, I remember it as far back as probably even before Kurt Cobain, but I do remember when Kurt Cobain died, I think that was when I was first kind of made aware of it. They’re like, you know, he died at the same age as all these other guys. And then, of course, that piqued my interest. And now when Kurt Cobain died, we did not have a readily available Internet like we do nowadays. So everything kind of had to be skimmed through magazines and stuff, so it seemed like a very real thing. It was like, wow, a lot of people just die at the age of 27 for some weird reason. And I thought I’d look into it a little bit, you know, now that I actually do have the technology to do so.

0:44:14
CW: A little easier to crunch numbers now.

0:44:17
PR: Yeah, it is.

0:44:18
CW: You don’t have to be a baseball statistician.

0:44:20
PR: Yeah, exactly. So the 27 Club is obviously, you know, people dying at the age of 27 and there are a number of famous people Heath Ledger was also one of them not a rock star but a very famous guy.

0:44:33
CW: I didn’t know he was in there.

0:44:34
PR: Yeah, yeah. Now there really isn’t I mean drumroll please but there’s not really any data that suggests that it’s an outlying age for for celebrities to die for the most part celebrities die about the same about the same age as the rest of us. Currently, Americans at large die at almost the age of 76 now, which is to say that’s the average based on people dying young and people dying old. I wouldn’t call 76 a hard out or anything. the age of 27 is not especially noteworthy on a statistical basis. There is a little bit of a spike in the 20s. So between 24 and 30, there’s kind of this zigzaggy spike of number of deaths that that seem to be a little higher. Now when you think about those the ages kind of of mid-20s to 30s, you also have to think that there’s probably a lot of correlations. Now this is me hypothesizing, I don’t have the data in front of me, but if you look at people who do drugs and people who become famous when they’re young, they kind of peak around those times, that’s when they get the most of their money, that’s when they start spending the most of their money on drugs and alcohol and partying and doing a lot of things. Most of these deaths are by substance or some other misadventure that has to do with risky behavior.

0:46:10
CW: So they’re old enough to afford the really good drugs and know where to get them and they’re young enough to still want to do them.

0:46:17
PR: And this number is not skewed from the general population either. It’s just that people around their 20s, they’re young and they’re free to do stupid things and so they die. But an interesting thing is actually that the age of 38 has a little bit of a spike to it. There were a number of people, Sam Kinison, Johnny Thunder, a little bit of the older crowd, Brent Midland of the Dead, Harry Chapin, they were all 38 and there is a spike. So there was a musician’s untimely death, a guy charted, this guy Andre.

BR: Was that done by Andre Plenty of Time on his hands?

PR: Yeah, Andre Plenty of Time, a guy named Andre. Just take my word for it, this guy Andre did his work. Now he actually used a website that was a religious website that talks about the evils of rock music. But it did have, it had a list of people dying untimely deaths. And so he used that list to calculate where all the deaths were happening between the ages of 17 and 55. And the biggest spikes, now there was a, 27 does have an uptick, but so does 38. And so that one’s pretty interesting. But far and away, most celebrities die old, like other people so it’s just not statistically relevant. 27 is an interesting number a lot of maybe especially famous people. Prince wasn’t 27, Michael Jackson wasn’t 27, Buddy Holly wasn’t 27. I mean there’s so it’s…

KK: Richie Valens was even younger too.

PR: Yeah I think he was 18, 17 or 18. He was really young.

0:48:02
CW: Yeah. I just looked up John Belushi and Chris Farley. They both died at the age of 33 and that was one of those like weird tandem, oh, crazy somewhat overweight drug-using guys from Saturday Night Live. You know.

0:48:15
BR: Who would have thought?

0:48:16
CW: Yeah.

0:48:17
PR: These very specific, high-strung, drug-addicted, overweight, funny guys.

0:48:22
KK: Well, I just think, you know, when, like you said, around that time, the last one, the last great one, I think, that I can think about off the top of my head being Amy Winehouse from the 27 Club, it was just like, again, that information wasn’t really out there. There wasn’t a way, like you said, unless you really wanted to put the time and the effort into it, to try to make that connection. I just think that, I don’t know, just a lot of famous people just so happen to die at that age and it was like kind of like like it’s like almost like oh it’s spooky but you gotta make sure you live past 27 dude.

0:48:55
CW: Well the fascinating like folklore aspect of this is there is always somebody who has the time even before the internet and one of the little side paths I went down on this was the the connection of a of a white Bic lighter did you guys hear anything about a Bic lighter connection?

0:49:13
KK: I well I’ve always just I’ve always just been told that white Bic lighters are just unlucky.

0:49:19
CW: So you’ve heard that. I did some reading and it was rumored that three or four of the members of the 27 Club died with a white Bic lighter in their shirt pocket. And that’s wrong. That’s just flat out wrong. Janet Joplin died like in her sleep and somebody else died in a bathtub and they didn’t have lighters on them when they were a sleeper in the bathtub and then the Bic lighter didn’t even come out with a white Bick lighter until after Jimi Hendrix was dead so he didn’t have one but the the whole unluckiness arose from some stories in high times and some other that said that the white Bic lighters, specifically, when people who were smoking marijuana would use them to tap the pot down into the bowl or whatever, it would get resin and residue on the bottom of the lighter. And if you were using a black lighter, you couldn’t really tell, but if you were using a white one, the police could notice that residue and bust you.

PR: Oh, sure. That makes sense.

CW: So that was just an interesting little and yeah I went down a lot of little rabbit holes researching you know the truth the truth to various rumors about Bic Lighters and the 27 Club and once again it’s a it’s a drug connected to rock and roll star hypothesis there.

BR: I think there should be a celebrity standard of Abe Vigoda. If you can live to be 94, that is the standard by which you judge whether an actor is about to die.

KK: Didn’t he just recently die too?

PR: Yeah, just a few years ago. I’ll tell you, there was this website called Is Abe Vigoda Dead Yet?

CW: I remember that!

PR: I used to have it set as my homepage for like two years and then one morning I went on the internet and it’s all, he is dead. I was like, ah, I don’t know if this paid off.

0:51:27
CW: Did he fake his death?

CW: Yeah, no, he did. He’s going to live forever, just like Betty.

KK: Yeah, he got tired of acting and being a standard old cranky guy in all the movies.

PR: He faked his death.

0:51:39
KK: That wasn’t for him anymore.

0:51:41
BR: Yeah, he’s gonna go do NASCAR or something.

PR: Yeah, he’s off writing folk music in the mountains somewhere. The immortal Abe Vigoda.

KK: Hashtag immortal Abe Vigoda.

PR: But yeah, there are some other kind of funny superstitions. It’s not even really a superstition, but one that a lot of people don’t know about. It’s like a tour bus etiquette thing which is you don’t do, you don’t take a dump on the bus on the, now not just on the bus, I mean you wouldn’t do that, but in the in the lavatory on a tour bus. And a lot of people have had different explanations for it and Kyle, but you actually know the practical reason why.

0:52:26
KK: Well, right now we’re on a bus, a 1994 Prevo, that is nicknamed the nugget, the golden nugget, because it’s gold. On the nug, and I have seen it, it’s really, it’s like three quarter to an inch thick tubing just like what you’d make a beer bong out of back in the day. So I mean, if anything solid goes down there, be it toilet paper or poo, it’s gonna clog it up and it’s gonna be an expensive fix. But there are buses that have this thing called a poo grinder. I don’t know if that’s actually a technical term. It’s actually a sick death metal band name but I have heard I don’t know if this is true or not but I heard that Devon Townsend only gets buses with with with poo grinders on them because he likes to poo on the bus.

0:53:31
CW: He’s bucking the trend!

KK: And then and then another thing is it’s kind of like it’s kind of like because whatever goes in there, once the tank starts getting a little bit more full, you’re gonna smell it throughout the whole bus. So it’s definitely kind of like if you do have one, you still kind of don’t.

0:53:51
PR: No, that’s the thing. So I’ve never learned the hard way, thankfully. I had the good fortune of being taught this rule before I ever had the chance to mistakenly do it. But I have been on a bus with the proper plumbing for it. In fact, a modern alternative to the normal tour bus is what’s called a bandwagon, which is sort of a converted, I think they’re like 18.

0:54:17
KK: Yeah, the converted RVs.

0:54:18
PR: Yeah, and they actually have a fairly functional bathroom. In fact, they have showers, which is out of control. But the toilets are usable on it, but then the thing that, just the number one, like again, you think you can use it, but you still can’t because there are five to 12, I mean, I’ve seen 16 people on a bus at once, and they, when you use the bathroom in a closet that’s in a room with that many people packed on top of each other, regardless of what happens it’s going to be a miserable experience, so you just don’t do it anyway.

0:55:02
KK: Yeah, and if you do have to, I’m sure, you know, I’m not sure, if you do have to, like if there’s no restrooms around, no one can stop, you got to do the old hot bag.

CW: I’m learning more than I ever thought I would about life.

KK: You take like two or three trash bags from the bathroom that is in the trash can liner of the bathroom, smaller bags, and you just kind of line the toilet with it. And do your business and then throw it out the window at 90 miles an hour.

0:55:32
BR: I never realized it was so glamorous. Such a glamorous life.

0:55:36
CW: The rules are that you don’t say the name of the Danish play In a theater, and you don’t take a dump in a heavy metal tour bus.

KK: In any tour bus!

0:55:47
CW: I Don’t know well, this is remotely connected. This is scatologically connected I did find a little urban legend about Frank Zappa and whether or not he really did take a dump on stage one day and He apparently some rumors started that he did that as part of one of his shows and I just loved his rebuttal quote he said for the record folks I never took it on stage and the closest I ever came to eating it anywhere was at a holiday Inn buffet in Fayetteville North Carolina in 1973.

PR: I do remember that yeah. Frank is the best in fact one of the figures in the Tipper Gore hearings and one of the defenders of free speech and music.

0:56:34
KK: Well, you know, we could talk about that or you can just go back to 1991 and talk about G.G. Allen. That’s a whole different thing.

0:56:43
PR: He literally did do that very regularly. There is camera footage of it and yeah no it’s don’t look it up just do your favorite do yourself a favor and just let that live with your just let it live in your imagination.

BR: Is that where the whole thing about huffing Jen come started or…

PR: Possibly, possibly I don’t know I mean he always said his music was but he took it kind of a whole other way.

0:57:07
CW: I did attend a concert one time here in Vegas by a fellow named Extreme Elvis, who was famous for having a micro penis and urinating on stage sometimes. And we, we did get to see that. He did urinate on stage. We, we made, we knew that that was a possibility. So we went way back in the crowd.

0:57:30
BR: It’s like Gallagher, man. Yeah.

PR: You just got to stay out of the splash zone.

0:57:35
CW: Yep. I did not fight to get into the mosh pit on that one.

0:57:41
PR: It’s like a GWAR concert on a different level.

0:57:47
CW: Now you guys are both metal musicians, so I would be, we would be remiss as skeptical podcasters if we didn’t talk about the whole notion that heavy metal contributes to anger and violence and The delinquency of our youth the seduction of the innocent and all that oh, yeah That was one of the factors in the satanic panic that was one of the factors in the the fight against the tipper gore and Nancy Reagan fight against lyrics and extreme music of any kind I was just wondering what you guys have to say about any aspect of that and what you’ve heard for or against or indifferent?

0:58:30
KK: I know, as someone who’s spent a lot of time in the mental community, probably going on 15 years now, I really think that those people would have done that regardless and I think maybe the media or whomever would have used something else to blame because those people were obviously weren’t mentally right in the head or you know…

CW: When you say those people you’re talking about some criminal who’s been convicted of something or committed something just like you liked heavy metal too?

KK: Yeah you know the Columbine shooters or anyone who blamed anything on Grand Theft Auto still to this day.

0:59:13
PR: Yeah, sure, sure.

0:59:15
KK: I really don’t think that that’s attributed to it. I think, in my opinion, the way that Heavy Metal was written is to be kind of aggressive, but to also talk about subjects you either like or feel very strongly about. And I think it’s a way to maybe get a little bit of aggression out, but not to be like a conductor of violence.

0:59:41
PR: Yeah, I agree.

CW: I remember Pascual you saying that the the tough guy trope in heavy metal is really often just a skin that big nerds wear.

0:59:51
PR: Yeah, I mean, I think that you know, I’ve said it a lot and that you know the majority of people in the metal scene, especially the musicians are are just like lifelong, nerdy, geeky people who get really, you know, who just, you know, like anyone who’s kind of in nerd culture, they get very passionate about the thing they get interested in. And they kind of turn it into a lifestyle, you know. So when you embrace metal, it’s like, you know, you dress the part, you kind of walk and talk the part, and when you’re a musician, you perform the part but at the end of the day I mean I you know I’ve I’ve I’ve come from I mean all levels of metal to the most extreme like when I was in the band Pathology I mean we were you know what are what’s called slam metal which is like a very heavy chuggy version of death metal and our lyrics were very violent just extremely not violent in the sense of of like active acts of violence but just like very graphic descriptions of medical procedures and things like that and we you know and I mean myself and any number of people I toured with were the biggest, you know gaming nerds and like I mean George Fisher who’s the singer of the band cannibal corpse who’s who’s renowned for their violent violent lyrics He’s he spends most of his time playing World of Warcraft when he’s not, you know on tour. He’s like the most gentle, mild-mannered guy. And this is very common across the metal scene at large. If you’re not a big nerd, you’re kind of softy about something else. It’s rare that you come across a real serious, thick-necked, angry person fronting a band. Even Kyle’s singer, Tommy, who I’ve also known for a number of years, he has this on-stage persona of being very strong and aggressive, and he puts forth this really highly alpha presence, and he commands the crowd. At the same time, you get behind the scenes, and all he does is just goof off. He’s just joking all the time and making fun of being out of shape and stuff and you know it’s like he’s yeah and that’s I across the board in my experience in the metal world is like these are all this is what we’re all basically like we’re just a bunch of like fun-loving geeks who just are happy to be playing music.

KK: Yeah and and and I and I really think that like anyone who blames so any sort of counterculture on you know their behavior like I really think it doesn’t matter what it is. It could be heavy metal, it could be video games, it could be movies, it could be whatever. They’re just trying to, maybe not justify their actions, but make it seem like there was like, oh, this wouldn’t have happened if I didn’t ever listen to Turbo Lover by Judas Priest.

1:02:42
CW: The strong desire to justify a judgment of some kind of aspect of culture goes both ways. I found, I was reading, I did a bit of a shallow dive here, poking around the internet, and I found two little articles that both quoted a study that I would like to parse down if you guys are game to discuss it.

PR: Yeah, sure.

1:03:10
CW: One was from a list on falcon.com, benefits and myths of listening to heavy metal. And then another one was, and then that same study was quoted by Robert Goddard writing on ourpastimes.com back in September of last year, and I’ll just quote him here. A study by Shailene L. Coss, COSS of the psychology department at Loyola University found that participants who listen to heavy metal music with violent lyrics and music were less likely to feel depression afterward than those who listened to non-violent songs. They also found that heavy metal music listeners had higher self-esteem than other participants because of the rush one feels from violent music.” And the other article said that heavy metal is, quote, an anti-depressant, which of course raises red flags. It’s like all those memes you see by David Avocado Wolf, you know, this is the only antidepressant and it’s like a picture of the woods.

1:04:05
PR: Never mind that people tend to kill themselves in the woods quite frequently.

KK: I mean, yeah, this is just go to the suicide woods in Japan.

1:04:12
CW: They might be listening to heavy metal while they do it you never know.

KK: I would doubt it I wouldn’t maybe maybe they’re like I don’t know like Yanni.

1:04:19
PR: Yeah, I believe it’s pronounced Yanny. I would not kill myself to have you know.

KK: I was actually talking about the actual guy.

PR: I know, I know. The pride of Greece.

1:04:42
CW: I don’t know, there’s not much music that would make me kill myself. Maybe John Tesh.

1:04:46
PR: I’ve got a few, but I don’t want to lose listeners. John Tesch was on Entertainment Tonight, that’s how I know him. He was a host of Entertainment Tonight and he put out adult contemporary smooth something easy listening. It’s like Yacht Rock with no guitars.

1:05:12
KK: Yacht Rock with no guitars, that’s my next band. Yacht Rock with no synth. Yeah, just a piano, drums like and an alto sax. That’s it. And like some, some sick like synth drums.

1:05:43
CW: Well, if to get back to the study, guys, I’m sorry to be real. But, but like, like a lot of good skeptics, you read, oh, there’s a study study is invalid. So she comes out and says it’s invalid and reading over the study, it struck me not so much as a legitimate study. It wasn’t published anywhere. The way that I found this study was it was it was listed on the undergraduate research clearinghouse, which implies that this young lady who did the study was an undergraduate Which you know legitimate research can be done by an undergraduate, but also not published anywhere She used a 30 item questionnaire so she had participants answer questions on a quest a questionnaire about how aggressive they felt and half the group she put into a room and they listened to heavy metal specifically the song Jerk Off by Tool, while they filled out the questionnaire. The other group had no music at all. And how many people do you think she had in this group that came to these strong conclusions that have been listed as proof by some writers?

1:06:39
PR: Oh, tens of thousands at a minimum, right?

BR: Maybe at least 800, a thousand.

1:06:45
KK: I’m gonna say four.

1:06:47
CW: And Kyle is closest. It was 32, but believe it or not, in that group of 32, only four of them were male.

1:06:48
PR: Oh, wow.

CW: I mean, if you’re studying for aggression and your group is 28 females and four males, I mean, for crying out loud, that’s a better group to study effects of PMS than male aggression.

PR: That’s a curios… I mean, because I get like, you know, you want to be randomized or whatever. And statistically, you could get that number randomly. But if you are studying aggression, like I don’t think selecting for gender would be considered something that would preclude, you know, the aggression study.

BR: If you know anything, a research design, why would you even why would you even go ahead with it? I mean, if you like, you like no matter what your conclusion is, it’s not going to be valid.

1:07:41
CW: Well, it gets better the after the participants filled out the questionnaires and they were measured the difference was one one group scored 48.0 the other groups that scored 45.9 and the researcher noted that the difference was not statistically significant. Therefore, the hypothesis presented in the introduction section of this report was rejected.” And then she went further saying that the major shortcoming of the study was the quality of the questions contained in the aggression questionnaire itself, saying that that shortcoming caused the experiment to be invalid. So we’ve got three things.

BR: She picks out this one little piece of turd and says, this is what’s wrong with this study.

1:08:26
CW: Well, no, she she came clean and said that for many reasons. Number one, there were not that many participants. She was only able to gather 32 people from the psychology department of Loyola University in New Orleans. So she only got 32 people. Number one, tiny little, tiny little sample size. And she also said that the participants, the way that the study was conducted, they could easily figure out what was being measured. There were no distractions, no nothing. They weren’t told they were measuring something, but they were actually being measured on something else. So it was very easy for people to fudge things because they could figure out what was being measured. And then third, the questions on the questionnaire were way too hyperbolic. Like one of them was like, how violent would you feel if your boss framed you for stealing money and fired you on the spot?

BR: How many of their organs did you rip out and eat?

1:09:26
CW: The average person, regardless of what music they’re listening to, might feel a little bit violent in that situation.

1:09:32
PR: Yeah, I find it kind of strange because you have to, I mean, you have to establish like to what end you’re doing the study. If you need to figure out… Because music is subjective, and if I sit down and listen to Meat Hook Sodomy by Cannibal Corpse, it might not affect me any worse than listening to Feels So Good by Chuck Mangione to someone who likes Chuck Mangione. It may seem really abrasive and aggressive to someone else, to me it’s really not. I understand why it sounds abrasive, it’s very cacophonic and loud, but what I’m listening to are rhythms and melodies and I’m doing the same thing that anyone else who’s really trying to pick apart music does. I think that the reaction to heavy metal can be probably compared to the reaction to the first time people were listening to avant-garde jazz back in the day. People didn’t understand it and it kind of freaked them out and it was weird and it was music by a subculture that they didn’t understand and they might do drugs and who knows.

1:10:42
CW: I remember hearing that Beethoven and Mozart caused riots. Their music was so new that people couldn’t handle themselves.

1:10:48
PR: Yeah. So there you go. So yeah, that’s, I don’t even know how you begin to study something like that. And, you know, because yeah, if you put me at a desk and like played, for instance, Sublime to me for four hours straight, I’d probably want to stab someone, you know, because I don’t like that music. I just don’t. And that’s if someone doesn’t like heavy metal, they’ll probably get mad about listening to it also. I don’t know what the study is proving by subjecting people to it, regardless of what they’re into, you know. So I’d be curious to see an actual study done.

1:11:23
CW: Well, true to court, I mean, there’s a bunch of stuff out there. There is something that came out much more recently in 2015 in the Frontiers in Human Neuroscience by Leah Sharman over at the University of Queensland, Her study only had 39 participants in it.

KK: Did they pick a better song besides Tool? Because technically that’s more like prog rock.

1:11:42
PR: Yeah, I was going to say that.

1:11:47
KK: Like they should have at least picked like Hammer Smash Face by Cannibal Corpse or Once Upon a Cross by D-side.

1:11:55
PR: Yeah.

1:11:56
CW: Well, like I said, it was an undergraduate and she probably just picked out what she had in her own collection, I’m guessing. And not to bag on the kid too much for this study, she wrote up all the reasons why you couldn’t really tell anything from the study, and I really started suspecting that this study was done as an exercise in experiment design and how to critique a study. I would suspect that. I don’t know, I was not there.

1:12:22
KK: Yeah, no.

CW: But just going down the rabbit hole, there’s a million studies that look at it a million different ways, and there’s so many nuances to consider. Do you just take a huge meta-sample of people who are juvenile delinquents and ask them what their favorite music is? Do you take a group of honor roll students and ask them what their favorite music is, and then judge the music based on that? Do you have somebody like like this one did fill out a questionnaire or do some sort of activity that measures their rate of aggression and play heavy metal music against their will at them or ask them to pick their favorite music and listen to it in headphones. You know, there’s a million ways to do it. Yeah, and I’d be I’d be curious to see what future researchers show But there’s definitely some some real biases that sort of shine through there’s people who are clearly doing research aimed at showing heavy metal is a bad thing for society. And then there’s people doing research that are aimed at like heavy metal is good for people. And so you got to just cut through the human biases which is a real problem in psychology.

1:13:31
PR: Yeah I kind of wish people would just be like willing to say heavy metal is is music. And that’s what it is. People like it or they don’t or you know just like everything else and I think you know you you might actually be able to do a fairly decent observational study or at least a research study just based on you know take a crowd of a festival crowd of 10,000 people at a metal show and see how many violent incidents happen during and after it and control for alcohol. And then, I mean, if there’s a spike, there’s a spike. If there’s not, there’s not. Personally, and I’m sure Kyle can kind of back me up on this, I’ve been to and done a lot of festivals over the years and by and large, people do occasionally get accidentally hurt or drunk people occasionally get in a brawl or two, but your average concert goer is no more violent. They’re usually just happy to be there. And, you know, at the end of the day, they’re too tired to be violent.

1:14:35
CW: Well, you’d have to contrast it almost with like a sports venue or something, you know, compare it to soccer hooligans or some other thing where people are actively moving around and excited about something. Cause I mean, I’ve been in mosh pits where, yeah, people got bloody noses and stuff, but you know, it was an accidental elbow or, and then somebody almost fell down, but they’re caught by the crowd, cuz they’re looking out for each other. It’s it’s a it’s a real cool camaraderie scene a lot of the times.

1:14:59
KK: Well, yeah, I mean you know that that’s that’s just kind of one thing you know Jamie Josta from hate breed is Kind of been an advocate of same with my singer Tommy Vax is you know yeah? We want you to move around we want you to jump in a circle and you know whatever but you know someone someone falls down pick them up you know like I really I really think it’s funny you know not to kind of give away anything from from a part of our show but you know when when Tommy says that he’s like yo – he’s like a metal concert it’s like Olive Garden when you’re here you’re family.

1:15:30
CW: Oh that’s nice.

(MUSIC)

1:15:31
PR: We’d like to thank our sponsor-level patrons, Amy Freshour-Kelly and Dr. Angela Mattke. If you’re curious what a patron is, head on over to patreon.com forward slash squaring the strange and see all the perks of becoming one. Patronage starts at just a buck an episode. For those who pledge $5 and up per episode, we send out an awesome skeptic crate every month. What’s a skeptic crate? Well, it’s a fun little grab bag or padded envelope of items and collectibles we’ve selected that relate to episodes, skepticism, science, or an interesting item from our personal collections. We will be including a fun bad wolves item given to us by Kyle in the August SkeptiCrate. Be sure to join by the end of June to qualify for the August Crate.

1:16:20
PR: So that about does it for this week. Thanks again Kyle for joining us. I had a blast. It was great to catch up with you so to speak.

KK: Yeah for sure man. I mean it was it was real fun. I enjoyed talking with you guys and like I said if any of your listeners are interested in come seeing us we’re gonna be out all year long. So if they want to go to badbullsnation.com check out our tour dates, check out our merch, come say hi and yeah thank you guys for having me it’s beena blast.

1:16:51
BR: But if you go on their tour bus, you know what not to do.

1:16:53
KK: Yeah, exactly.

1:16:54
BR: Don’t poo.

1:16:54
KK: Don’t poo. Actually, you know what? Just don’t come on a tour bus.

1:16:57
PR: Yeah. Yeah.

1:17:01
PR: But yeah, I’ll be seeing you, I believe, on July 29th here in Albuquerque. So any of our local listeners, definitely check us out. And for those of you listening to us on WIDELP in Madison, Wisconsin. They’ll be at the Annex on June 4th. So definitely check that out. Tell Kyle you’re a friend of mine and he’ll probably be happy to shake your hand and maybe take a picture with you. And ask him about how we look alike also. That’s a funny one. I’m like future Kyle coming back to Kyle. I’m five, six years older than you coming back and be like, stop eating so many potato chips!

KK: I won’t listen.

PR: But but anyway thanks again for coming on had a blast and everyone be sure to check out Bad Wolves, badwolvesnation.com as he mentioned for the tour dates near you. And next week, we’re going to be talking about pseudo-experiments. So this is experiments that, well, as the name implies, are not legit, but seem legit.

CW: Boy, those are all over Facebook, too.

PR: Yeah, they’re all over Facebook and also all over TV, which drives me nuts.

1:18:22
CW: That reminds me, I have to check the McDonald’s hamburger patty I have drying out on the windowsill.

1:18:29
KK: Well don’t invite me over because I’ll eat it.

1:18:33
PR: Kyle please stop I’m telling you it gets so bad.

1:18:37
KK: But hamburgers are so good.

1:18:41
PR: So until next time we’ll see ya.

1:18:43
BR: Bye bye.

1:18:44
CW: Take care.

1:18:45
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1:19:20
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