What's Crackalackin

I recently purchased a new snare off of ebay.
It's a beautiful 5" x 14" 8-play maple Pork Pie with a honey-amber finish.

A little over a decade ago I used to own a 5" x 10" power piccolo snare by Pork Pie.
That was the loudest, highest, ear-drum shattering crack I had ever heard. I loved that thing.
I was really into Tim "Herb" Alexander (Laundry, Attention Deficit, Uberschall, The Blue Man Group, A Perfect Circle) back then, he was mostly known for his insanely wacky and mind-blowing drumming for the band Primus. I was never one of those guys who worshiped the Neil Pearts, the Terry Bozzios, or the Carter Beaufords of the drumming world. Those flashy, showy, bajillion piece drum set, drum stick twirling kind of guys have never been my cup of tea. I was more into the guys like Keith Moon, John Bonham, Chad Smith, and of course Tim Alexander. The thunderous-loud rock drummers who threw down the beats that made you bob your head and throw your rock fist into the air.
Tim Alexander was in Modern Drummer Magazine, back in 1991 when Primus released the album Sailing the Seas of Cheese. In the article Tim mentioned he was playing drums by a company called Pork Pie.
I loved the sounds of Tim's drums and wanted to find out more about the company with the funny name. It wasn't that easy to do back then. It wasn't like now where everyone has access to the Internet. I had to deal with the pot-smoking-neanderthals who worked at Guitar Center.
I also didn't know anybody who was playing them or, for the most part, had heard of them.
I ordered it on blind faith and I could not have been happier. It made buying the new one much easier.

The snare was hand-made and signed by Bill Detamore, creator of Pork Pie.



In 1987, Bill started making drums as a hobby. This hobby quickly evolved into a full service drum company. Each drum is signed by Bill Detamore with the date it was made. Pork Pie drums are made by hand in Canoga Park California. Bill still is a hands on owner. He still cuts every bearing edge and does all of the paint jobs on the drums.

I stripped the snare down, polished it up, put it back together, gave it some new heads, and tuned it up. The snare has a nice beefy crack. I'm very happy with it!

The Sam Keenan Collaboration

Some exciting news for Crash Effect.
We will be collaborating with Twin Cities local music legend Sam Keenan.

I've known Sam for somewhere in the ballpark of 22/23 years?
When you were a kid, do you remember when you were friends with a someone and you thought their older sibling was the coolest person in the world? For me that was Sam.
He was one of those music prodigy kids who could sing, play guitar, piano, cello, and pretty much anything he got his hands on in a skilled and precise way. He is one of those guys where you are like "you're so talented that you suck!"

I spent my adolescence following Sam like a little puppy through the Twin Cities music scene during the nineties. Sam was always cool. He'd say I was with the band (Liquid Ernie) to the door guy or bartender so I could catch them and other local bands at venues I wasn't old enough to get into at the time. Now that I think about it, in the beginning of Liquid Ernie, Sam probably wasn't old enough to get into some of the venues they'd play either. I lost contact with Sam for quite a few years after they broke up.

A little over a year ago I was introduced to this phenomenon known as myspace.com. During a family get together my sister-in-law mentioned she had a profile on there and that it was a great tool to get into contact with people you've lost contact with. She told me about a bunch of people that we both knew that were on there. So I figured meh... why not look into it. I punched in my sister-in-law's myspace URL and I saw one of her friends was this guy:

Whoa! Sam's gotta myspace page! I saw that he had a show that night at Lee's. (landmark hole-in-the-wall in Minneapolis)
I went his show and was blown away by his music and spent sometime catching up with him. We started corresponding through myspace and I've caught a few of his shows over the last year, fast-forward to now, Sam will be engineering, mixing, and performing on the upcoming Crash Effect album. He may sit in on a few of our shows while we are in the studio with him.

World War Z

This book is really a sister book to the Zombie Survival Guide, not a sequel. They are both written by Max Brooks but have completely different styles of writing. World War Z is a collection of short stories that can stand alone but work well built on each other to create a time line of the Zombie War.
There is a ten episode podcast available for free on iTunes that offers entire short stories extracted out of the book. I listened to them before I listened to the WWZ audiobook. They are very entertaining but there is some stuff in there that just goes sort of in-one-ear-out-the-other since you are listening to the stories out of sequence. As I listened to the stories again in the audiobook I found myself thinking, "ah, that makes more sense or ah, that seems to have more meaning".
I thoroughly enjoyed this book! I was thinking how if you removed the zombie element, kept everything else the same, just exchanged the undead for some kind of lethal virus that was killing everyone on the planet, this would be one of the scariest end-of-the-world books out there. This book sucked me in. It is performed incredibly well by an impressive cast of actors. Whoever cast the readers of this book is a genius. They picked the perfect actors for each of the stories. One of my favorites was none other than Luke Skywalker himself, Mark Hamill. His voice fits his character perfectly. After years of doing characters for animation Hamill is an old pro.
The other familiar voice I enjoyed was Alan Alda. His character, to me, seemed as if Hawkeye Pierce from Mash had gone on to work a government job after the war. The character is played with a been-there-done-that-seen-it-survived-it tone.

WORLD WAR Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War is a recounting of these apocalyptic and horrifying years that will make sure we never forget how close we came to total annihilation. Told from the perspective of numerous survivors from all over the world, from Denver to South Africa, Sydney to Yonkers, Malibu to India, WORLD WAR Z captures the sacrifices and, toward the end, the ingenuity of our race to defend and save our cities, towns, and villages from a plague that seemed virtually impossible to stop.
Brooks tells a moving story of courage and survival and gives us insight into the key military strategies that helped us take our world back. To this day, controversy and conversation still revolves around some key issues that WORLD WAR Z addresses such as:

- How the Walking Plague was initially covered up by corrupt governments
- Why the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services downplayed the Great Panic
- A zealous American President's mistake in putting his party's needs in an election year ahead of the safety of his people.

I wish there was an unabridged version of the audiobook.

The Zombie Survival Guide

I LOVE any and all things ZOMBIE!
I love the campiness, the impending apocalyptic doom, the sucker-punch scares, the mythology, the volumes upon volumes of crappy and cheaply indie made "B" films.
I love all the spin-offs of George A. Romero's films. I love the makeup and gore effects. I love the twisted visual gages and jokes. I love the badly-written story lines and the over-blown special effects budgets. I love everything from 28 Days Later to Shaun of the Dead and Bubba Ho-Tep (what's better than a geriatric Elvis in a nursing home battling an Egyptian Mummy) and everything in between. I love other people who love the Zombie stuff. There is an affinity for the undead floating amongst people that crosses gender and cultural lines. Like Trekkies only it's a little more underground and less organized. For me there is a sense of a guilty pleasure in my affection to the Zombie world. It's fun to come across other fans. You either love it or you don't get it. You can rent the cheesiest titled B-rated Zombie flick with a super over the top cover and you wonder what kind of reaction you are going to get from the person at the counter. Are they some teenager who looks at you weird as they read the title and tell you when it's due back? Or are they the kind of person who says "I've seen this five times and if you like this you should check out..." There seems to be an instant camaraderie that springs up in meeting a fellow Zombie lover. The Zombie world is huge from Zombie related television shows, to Zombie films, to Zombie comics, to Zombie books, to Zombie art, to Zombie video games, to my personal favorite the Zombie Pub Crawl (playing a show that is apart of that is a goal of mine) and then there's even Rob Zombie.

I think I'd be equally excited and scared to meet him.

So all of that is an intro to The Zombie Survival Guide by Max Brooks, son of the comedy genius Mel Brooks, a Saturday Night Live alumni writer, and fellow Zombie enthusiast. This book is great! I will say that I think you have to have some interest in the Zombie world to get this book. It is brilliantly read, strait and dead pan. No pun intended. Ironically this book could be useful if the world was faced with a real world-wide pandemic.

Below is a description of the book.
The Zombie Survival Guide is your key to survival against the hordes of undead who may be stalking you right now. Exhaustively comprehensive, this book covers everything you need to know, including how to understand Zombie physiology and behavior, the most effective defense tactics and weaponry, ways to outfit your home for a long siege, and how to survive and adapt in any territory or terrain.

Top 10 Lessons for Surviving a Zombie Attack:
1. Organize before they rise!
2. They feel no fear, why should you?
3. Use your head: cut off theirs.
4. Blades don't need reloading.
5. Ideal protection: tight clothes, short hair.
6. Get up the staircase, then destroy it.
7. Get out of the car, get onto the bike.
8. Keep moving, keep low, keep quiet, keep alert!
9. No place is safe, only safer.
10. The Zombie may be gone, but the threat lives on.

Don't be carefree and foolish with your most precious asset: life. The Zombie Survival Guide offers complete protection through trusted, proven tips for safeguarding yourself and your loved ones against the living dead. It is an audiobook that can save your life.

I'm excited to listen to and review World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War.

Kudos Magazine Sampler

Very excited about this one folks! Still not sure how they came across us but I'm ecstatically happy that they did! Kudos Magazine, the very stylish and hip lifestyle magazine has included the track "Bomb" on their first volume of their Rising Stars music compilation. I'm excited about the exposure Bomb will receive across Europe and the digital world we live in. I'm also very excited about being on a compilation with some heavy hitters in the indie music world. You're probably familiar with Walkie Talkie Man by Steriogram via the iPod commercials. This compilation is available for free when you download Issue 6 from Kudos.

Giant Robot Monkeys!

I'm not real big on political humor. Most of the time I don't get it because I don't follow politics too closely. However this one I get a laugh out of.