Tag Archives: all hallow’s evil

The All Hallow’s Evil All Hallows’ Eve Spooktacular

A man with horns plays a very nice multiscale guitar in front of some $4 "creepy cloth" he bought from Wal-Mart
The budget for this thing was like $200. You know how much this would have cost 10 years ago? At least $30,000.

This starts with a “back in my day…”, but it’s not about how things were better back in my day, so adjust your expectations accordingly.

Back in my day, before personalized entertainment was delivered straight to your pocket 24/7, there were two choices for amusement: watch tv or try to beat the third level in Battletoads. Going outside was also technically an option, but nothing good has ever happened outside, so why bother?

When one’s thumb could no longer withstand the unforgiving plastic of the NES d-pad, one was left to ride the waves of whatever programs were cheap enough to fill the hours between the shows people actually wanted to watch. You know how there are now so many good-to-great tv shows that it just reinforces that the hours left for you on this mortal coil are a rounding error in the actual history of the universe? Wasn’t like that back in my day. There were 3 shows worth watching and in between those 3 shows was a wasteland of things that people would watch just to see something move on that damn screen.

Back in my day, the content well was dry. New movies were not a click away, we had to walk/drive to a damn store and rent an actual tape. So I often just watched whatever was on tv. And thanks to that, I’ve developed a nostalgia for insignificant things that happened before I was born. So in that spirit, I made a Halloween special designed to pay tribute to the hours I wasted watching 70s television in the late 80s/early 90s.

The prime mover on this was the Paul Lynde Halloween Special, which was on Amazon Prime sometime over the summer. It’s from 1976 and is almost painful to watch, but it has KISS lip syncing some tracks from Destroyer and so I’ve seen it more times than I should admit to.

I actually saw KISS earlier this summer and though they do slightly less lip syncing than they did on the Paul Lynde special, it was enough that the idea of doing a one man performance with a backing track seemed less ridiculous to me than it probably should have. All Hallow’s Evil has always used a backing track for drums, but back in the day there were 2-3 of us on stage, so at least all the guitars were live. I always felt that was important, but from what I’m seeing out there, it’s not as important as it used to be.

All Hallow’s Evil didn’t play live a lot, but when we did, we recorded it. On at least two occasions, we were also pretty good! Unfortunately, all of our live performances were from a time before digital video was a big thing, so they’re all trapped on Hi-8 video cassettes and saving them from oblivion requires both knowing where they are and having the means to play them back into a computer. I’d love to see them again if only to find out if we were indeed as good as I thought we were, but in the meantime, I wanted to find out if I’m still as good as I thought I was.

There was some question about that, because when I was 22, youthful exuberance could power me past my limitations–I can’t breathe, dammit!–but I’m 36 and tired now, so the light very well could have died. However, I’m happy to report that I am still one of the great unsung performers of my generation.

It’s on Amazon Prime Video now, so hopefully people accidentally stumble upon it as they search for Peanuts or something like that. You can also enjoy it on YouTube, where it is only two clicks away from some truly heinous shit.*

*One thing that was better back in my day: you could watch random programs without fear that some math problem would eventually start serving you up some Nazi propaganda. 

Dehydration and This Podcast Will Kill You

A heart with a taser, lungs with a switchblade, and a brain with brass knuckles.
The lungs were originally supposed to be swinging intestines like a chain, but for some reason it looked obscene. The background is by Rasa Art Studios (https://instagram.com/rasaartstudios?igshid=1my73yk21hrmt)

I am an indoor cat. The indoors is where all of my favorite stuff is and where one of my least favorite things—the sun—isn’t.

I don’t hate everything outdoors though, as I’ve grown quite a fondness for roller coasters, thrill rides, and anything that can offer me a brief respite from constantly reviewing all the mistakes of my life. So when I was coerced into taking a family vacation earlier this summer, I spent a lot of time on the roller coasters of Busch Gardens, slowly rising above my lot in life before plunging back down to Earth.

In fact, I spent a little too much time on the roller coasters and not enough time at the drink stand, because I managed to work myself up a decent dehydration. I recovered well from it, but in the process I broke my almost month-long streak of solid, no-wipe-needed poops, leaving me with a feeling I can only categorize as “heartbreak.”

So while the rest of the family was floating down the lazy river, I was back in the hotel room playing on the computer and wiping my ass (not at the same time; I’m still paying off that computer). It wasn’t all bad though, because being inside surrounded by screens is all I really wanted anyway.

Sometime between bathroom breaks, one of my screens lit up with a message from This Podcast Will Kill You asking if I’d like to be on their Cystic Fibrosis episode. I, having more words than I know what to do with, immediately said “yes.” Two weeks later, I hopped on Skype and had a wonderful conversation with Erin Welsh and Erin Allmann Updyke, the best parts of which you can hear right here, introducing and closing their excellent episode on Cystic Fibrosis. 

No disrespect to An Introduction to Cystic Fibrosis for Patients and Families, which is/was my go-to CF resource for years, but I wish this episode was available when I was younger. Erin and Erin are able to communicate complicated ideas in ways that only the best amongst us can and this episode taught me everything I know about the actual discovery of CF.

They were also nice enough to offer me the opportunity to play some music on their show. The smart thing to do would have been to ask them to play a song off of the latest All Hallow’s Evil album No Gods, Only Monsters, which is currently available at https://allhallowsevil.bandcamp.com/album/no-gods-only-monsters or wherever digital music is sold. However, none of the songs on that felt thematically appropriate to the conversation we had so I wrote brand new song for the episode, “Complete Somatic Rebellion.” It’s currently available at https://allhallowsevil.bandcamp.com/track/complete-somatic-rebellion and will probably show up on streaming services in a month or so.