Creature Feature (1995 Disasteroid version)

History:

John Vogel (aka Grey) played me this song in my parents’ apartment in Indianapolis in 1994. John subbed in on guitar for the aforementioned band Three Nails and was then with us for a show or two while I was casting about for members in both Indianapolis and Evansville, Indiana.

(John reminded me also that Alex Bond was on drums and Dave on guitar during this little stint. Alex also played drums for our 1998 Cornerstone Festival set and will be drumming with us for our reunion gigs this summer. John will join us on bass for “Creature Feature” at the Indianapolis July 4th gig. So that early lineup will ride again for a moment! Life is wild.)

John and I met when Three Nails played The Coffee House in Evansville, where I also met our guitarist Chris Dickens and bassist Mike Schauss and my future partner Andrea and where Blaster would play its seminal stint of shows. John became good friends with both Andrea and I.

Shortly after this we found ourselves carpooling to our job at a seatbelt assembly plant north of Indianapolis for a while. (By carpooling I mean that my car broke down—the latest in a long series of broken down cars—and John gave me rides.) The walls of the factory were covered with GIANT Bible verses. No joke. John and I were nonplussed that they were all “positive”. No mention even of the cross or crucifixion, never mind challenging words about hypocrisy or loving enemies or caring for the poor, etc. With our colored hair and band shirts and so on, our employers were visibly skeptical when we told them we were Christians. Maybe if we’d had big (positive) Bible verses tattooed on us… but I bet that would’ve only made it worse haha!

John was quite a Goth at the time, in love with The Cure, Bauhaus, etc., but he loved punk just as much. We actually recorded a little cassette demo of acoustic alternative songs that ended up being a wedding day gift to Andrea from both of us. (There was a a gentle little song I’d written called “Monster Island” that I might share sometime if I can find the tape.) Though I wrote most of the lyrics to this song, John might well be the first to put “sci-fi” directly onto Blaster’s lyrical map with the chorus chant that he came up with. I was mostly writing horror or horror adjacent lyrics at the time. Of course, “Creature Feature” is full of monsters, emblematic of our whole approach of combining the genres. This is why I prefer to call us a “sci-fi/horror punk” band (if I label us at all). I’d honestly never even heard the term “horror punk” until after the band broke up and was always a little resistant to it thereafter. I never conceived of our style or approach that narrowly. Sounds a little precious, I’m sure. But it’s honest.

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Music:

I wish we’d written some more tunes like this, with that kind of chugging, almost faux metal riff, complete with the breakout “rock” guitar lick. (Is there an alternate timeline that contains a Blaster Guitar Hero or Rock Band game?) This one is pretty humble and just gets the job done, but I’d like to have seen us develop this approach. The intro’s subtle guitar feedback over drums and bass breaks into the aforementioned lick and then plunges into the plodding, chunky (and kind of surfy) riffage: simple goofy gold to my ears. It fits sonically with tracks like “King of the Beach” and “Wolverine”—the rhythm and vocals especially perhaps. It’s a nice little vocal variety over the tough music: the semi-rapping into the singy “creeeature feeeature” (along with those subtle little spoken bits, “creature!”, “feature!” haha!) and then into the monster “ruffs”. (These anticipate the werwolf growls of “American Werewolf” I suppose.) The slightly sped up and melodic chorus is a neat changeup and the noise harmonics in between its staccato bursts of “sci-fi!” hint at the eerie bridge to come. Repeat (with the addition of another of Dave’s hilarious pubescent-falsetto bits on the first “sci-fi!” haha!) and then we descend into that spooky interlude.

Dave’s washing cymbals and sporadic hits and fills, Mike’s pedal-delayed bass, and Chris’s feedback blend perfectly here. It was so great to have a band that could and would break out into creative atmospheric segments like this while I got to ham it up with some honestly kind of freaky monster moans and groans and growls and howls—and, of course, the faux lounge singing. Many of these vocal bits are again downstream rough approximations of the likes of Mike Knott, Allan Aguirre, and Mike Patton (all three did loungey bits and screams or growls or howls). That’s just what was in my head for a number of years previous. You get hints of all out monstery vocals in portions of Misfits and Cramps, but no one seems to really go for it. Much closer would be some of the more guttural moments of The Birthday Party and early Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, but I wouldn’t really start listening to that until the following year I think. I don’t know who’s providing that little sort of space-motor effect with their mouth—I suspect Dave again—but it’s a great addition, that touch of campy sci-fi in the more full-on campy horror I’m inhabiting in this part. And the random portion of a “Jam Master Dan” rap I wrote at age 12 and still remembered? It was completely spontaneous and we all cracked up after. It cuts off because I had no idea where we were in the song and was just filling out the space. Throw it in the pot! Why not?

Ah, and the “Calling Mothra” group vocal (with Dave’s shaky high harmony adding flavor as usual). For me, one of our signature moments. I always loved hearing the whole crowd sing it out in this same hushed tone live. Magic. Dave’s tasty little cymbal accent leads out of that long interlude back into the final chunky verse, which just really brings it home after all that atmospheric space. I’m fairly impressed we could make a pretty textured piece out of John’s solid and catchy arrangement.

Lyrics:

The scene on the screen
is a horrific sight
It's scary and I'm wary
of the hypnotic fright

Creature Feature
Creature Feature

I feel like a monster
in a low budget sci-fi flick
I'm trying to devour 
some scantily clad Japanese chick

Sci-fi! (x4)

She's a spooky kabuki
with a vampiress bite
My eyes are beady, hers are 3-D
on this eerie late night

Creature Feature
Creature Feature

I feel like Godzilla
in a B-movie thriller
breathing fire from my mouth
knocking all the fake city buildings down

Sci-fi! (x4)

Calling Mothra... (x 4)

Lizzie Borden, Flash Gordon
Dr. Who's clone
Space Invaders
came and ate her
now I'm alone!

Creature Feature
Creature Feature

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In one sense, this one’s quite light. John came up with the “sci-fi!” shout and, I believe, the words that I placed as the final verse. (I think John came up with the song title too.) It was a simple celebration of science fiction and monster movies (including an axe-murderer I wasn’t even aware of at the time). Even so, I implicitly brought in all the concerns with battling the “flesh” (sinful desires) that we’ve already seen on this album. Why should one be “wary” of the alleged “hypnotic” quality of a horror movie or creature feature? I’m once again “lost in space”, “my imagination’s wandering explicitly”. If this theme is spiritually dubious, it nevertheless has the advantage of immediately placing the lyrics into more narrative territory. One can almost picture a solitary person before a glowing screen in an otherwise unlit room.

Then the chorus’s sudden strange affective (“I feel like”) reversal: the viewer is in the movie. Not only that, the once frightened viewer is now the monster of the movie. The words start off so simple. No flare, no description, just a “monster” in a “low budget sci-fi flick”. Generic as can be. Then, specificity of an odd sort: I, the (giant) monster, am trying to eat a human. I’m no longer human at all, but the devourer of humans. Nor is the setting now the U.S.A. (or any other English-speaking locale), but Japan, a place that loomed large in my childhood imagination (and still does to this day): the home of Godzilla, samurai films, Robotech (and other anime), and a different set of superheroes (e.g. Kamen Rider). God how I loved this stuff! And do.

Why turn a celebration of this love into an admonition of the dangers of consuming certain kinds of media? Well, see previous posts. These are potentially more “hounds of hell” barking on my trail again, distracting me from Jesus, hounding me into indulging my “flesh” (to repeat: sinful desires). And we have a tell-tale sign of that: the human that I’m attempting to devour is not only female but “scantily clad”.¹

I’m saving the whole lust/sexual fantasy/masturbation theme for the discussion of another song on this album. But it’s all over Blaster lyrics, right through to The Monster Who Ate Jesus. On the next album (SSFFTV) I’ll have to discuss the liner notes in which I warned fellow Christians not to misunderstand our lyrical content as a carte blanche endorsement of horror (or any other) media, with strong scriptural urgings toward keeping oneself “pure” from the world. In this case, however, I think the horror tropes are thinly veiled allegories for the topic not of violent or occult themes, but sexually graphic content. The second verse confirms this, though it does so by reversing things yet again. I’m still inside the movie, but now I’m the victim of the monster. The Japanese woman I was menacing is now a threat to me. The devourer becomes the devoured (or bitten at least). Yet my “beady” eyes suggest I’m still in an objectifying mode.

I pretty clearly had no idea what “kabuki” meant (a classical form of Japanese theater) but nowadays the combination of that with “vampiress” puts me in mind of cinematic works like Kwaidan (1964) and Yokai: 100 Monsters (1968), two incredible films in very different (yet overlapping) registers.

Kwaidan (1964)

Yokai: 100 Monsters (1968)

It’s kind of amusing to see that I just went wherever associative lyric writing took me. So for the second chorus I bounce back to being a kaiju, the most famous of all (again tied to the generic “B-movie thriller”). I wasn’t consciously trying to be meta with the “fake city buildings” but listeners clocked it straightaway and tended to think it was hilarious (as did I). This sense of humor pervades the whole song and both masks and mitigates its “spiritual” undercurrent.²

The rest of the song is a fairly random roll call of sorts. “Calling Mothra” continues the chorus theme for a moment, though here referencing kaiju as savior rather than destroyer (calling upon a counterbalancing force). This wasn’t a planned counterpoint. I just wanted to evoke those tiny women singing for Mothra’s arrival.

The final verse returns to the opening verse’s more general evocation of science fiction monster movies (again, with the axe-murderer thrown in for spice). However, that final line connects thematically with the female motifs. The girl is devoured at last, not by monster-me, but by other invaders, and the figure before the TV set is as alone as he started. It’s honestly a little sad and creepy to me—“eerie”, as it says. A strange little tour through my religio-monstrous (or monstro-religious) imagination at the time. Which I guess can be said of all these songs.

1. I don’t recall any of the East Asian cinema I watched, from kung fu to kaiju, involving particularly “scantily clad” women. I was probably intuitively blending western and eastern horror conventions. (Also, I was not in the habit of saying “chick” for women. It just rhymed with “flick”.)

2. Probably more could be read into this awareness of the “fake” in these monster productions vis a vis the “wary” spirituality of the album.