Tuesday
• O C T. XII. • Radio Werewolf — “The Night” (demo version)
From their unreleased 1986 demo tape.
Radio Werewolf frontman Nikolas Schreck truly was to gothic music what Boyd Rice was to noise & industrial music. Much like Rice, Schreck delighted in the role of the shocking Satanic provocateur, appearing on talk shows in support of Charles Manson, shamelessly reveling in Nazi imagery, and giving long deadpanned interviews to total nutjobs like televangelist Bob Larson and racist asshole Tom Metzger. They even appeared alongside Wolfman Jack in the horror comedy Mortuary Academy, playing themselves as a band killed in a car accident, but re-animated by a former Disney engineer for one final concert at a Bar Mitzvah.
The original incarnation of Radio Werewolf disbanded in 1988, when drummer "Evil Wilhelm" left the group (along with bassist James "Filth" Collord) after becoming fed up with so many people taking the band's fascist schtick at face value, leading to numerous real neo-Nazis attending gigs and causing trouble. Schreck reformed the band a year later, along side his wife Zeena (daughter of Church of Satan founder Anton LaVey), abandoning the fun campy death rock of their old tracks like "1960 Cadillac Hearse" in favor of weird ritual music they described as "A long range experiment in the use of sound and symbol as magical influence on the human psyche.", releasing four albums and a couple of 12"s before finally calling it quits in 1992.
As for former keyboardist Paul Antonelli? Well, he ended up as the Daytime Emmy Award winning musical director for the soap operas General Hospital, Santa Barbara, All My Children, Sunset Beach, Passions and As The World Turns.
No, I'm not kidding.
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Yes! So glad to see them represented here. Such a great addition to the death rock scene! And yes, Schreck is a character. I used to stay up nights watching interviews with him. It's so funny that so many people bought into the act hook, line and sinker and just didn't see it for what it was.
ReplyDeleteYeah, it's kinda unfortunate that some people think that unless a band is constantly giving you a knowing wink or or doing a bunch of "Don't worry, we don't actually believe this stuff" PR in interviews, then they must be taken at face value. Heaven knows I've had some misunderstandings with friends over some of the more "provocative" power electronics I've got on my ipod...
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