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Mike RIGGS (ROB ZOMBIE guitar player)
"Sleaze Freak" track listing: 01. Bombshell From Hell 02. Hate X 13 03. Sleaze Freak 04. Devilscum 05. Death Stomp 06. I Am Monster 07. Love Pig 08. Macabro Expectaculo 09. Corpse Grinders 10. The Devil Made Me Do It 2 11. Scum-O-Rama 12. 13 Freaks 13. Just Like Me
You gotta check out RIGGS's new band named Scum of the Earth. MIKE TEMPESTA of POWERMAN 5000 is also in the band and they had John Dolmayan (System of a Down) and John Tempesta (WZ / RZ) in the studio as guest musicians.
Their label Eclipse Records (known for Mushroomhead, Bobaflex, others...)
released 1 song and it's awesome- called Murder Song
you can stream it by clicking on this link...
http://www.eclipserecords.com/scum/ScumOfTheEarth_MurderSong.m3u
The First CD is in stores this fall and their video directed by Rob Pryor
(Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Shadowwalker)
will be hitting MTV and Fuse around then too so be sure to check them out!
http://www.ScumOfTheEarth.com
One can imagine Rob Zombie searching for band members at
Hollyweird nightclubs, like the Leper Room or the Ghoul a Go-Go,
but his new guitarist hails from, of all places, rural Arkansas.
I live on a compound, Riggs explains.
We've got 55 acres, and theres 20 of us living out there.
Judging from the huge pentagram tattooed on his chest,
he's obviously not residing with a group of
fundamentalist Christian extremists.
According to Riggs, his gig with Zombie is his first real band. I wasnt doing anything, he says. Then one day Rob called me up and told me about this album he was doing. He asked me if I wanted to play guitar with him, and I said Id do it. I worked on the album for about four months, then we went out on tour. Its been real cool. I get to dress up like a monster and run around on stage for an hour and a half.
Unlike most guitarists, Riggs gets musical inspiration by playing around with his computer instead of his guitar. I really like sitting in front of a computer with my guitar and programming stuff, he says. I dont even know if I could sit down and write a song without a computer. A riff is a riff. Big deal. All riffs are just Black Sabbath riffs, anyway. Most songs on the record didnt start out on guitar. Scott Humphrey and Rob did all this programming on Pro Tools, then I would come up with guitar parts that fit into that. Thats why some of the guitars sound like synths. The oscillating sound you hear on Superbeast was done with the guitar going through a Polyfusion rack processor into Pro Tools, and Scott used the Sci-Fi plug-in on it.
Riggs recorded Hellbilly Deluxe using a Fernandes Vertigo Elite Sustainer guitar (usually tuned down to C), a Diesel head and a Marshall cabinet. Onstage he gets his creepy crunch from a combination of Marshall Valvestate and Mesa Triple Rectifier heads through Mesa/Boogie cabinets. For the tour, he approached Fernandes about making him some custom guitars that would fit right in with Zombies macabre stage design. I wanted something that was really weird, he says. Originally I wanted to have maggots and old meat in the guitar. Then I was talking with my little cousins at home, and they went, It would be cool if you put blood in it! I thought that was a great idea. One is clear Plexiglas, and the other one is made out of green Plexiglas and glows in the dark. It also has a strobe light inside of it so the blood lights up.
In addition to looking extremely gruesome, the blood-filled guitars provide Riggs with between-song refreshment. I drink the blood out of my guitar, he explains, but its made me sick a few times. We keep the blood in these big buckets and jugs, and sometimes it gets old and rancid from sitting around too long. I guess I filled my guitar up with old blood, and when I drank it, it tasted like rotten, slimy frog eggs. It slid down my throat, and I threw up all over the security guards, monitors and lightswhatever was in front of me. But it was pretty cool. I didnt miss a lick.
Copyright © 2000, Harris Publications, Inc. All rights reserved
In 1990, Riggs lived for a few years in both Georgetown and Austin, TX. and started a really lame band with a friend of mine named Steve Howe, with Riggs on vocals and rythm, Steve on bass.
They somehow managed to get this super fuckin' kick ass drummer named Chris to play with them. He was 16 at the time and played like Dave Lombardo from Slayer. They were desperate for a lead guitarist, an d eventually asked my best friend at the time, Gary Craft.
He agreed only on the condition that they throw out all the songs they had written and play his stuff instead. When they heard Gary's stuff, they happily agreed. They only kept one song by Riggs (we called him Mike) that he was very attached to, Artist of Misery.
Gary really liked that one and helped him tighten it up into a pretty great song. Mike wrote it about either his step-dad or his uncle (I forget which) who was a total bastard, and really fucked up his life. It was a very important song to him, personally. With Gary on board, they kicked out four origionals in just a few weeks. Gary's dad (also a lead guitarist, also named Gary!) had a friend who had just built his own recording studio in his house, and was able to get them in to record their demo.
I supplied the cover art and fliers.
Mike came up with the name Demiltry (he just made it up one day).
They played a few parties, and only a few clubs in Austin before
they broke up, but the shows they played blew everybody away.
I only met Mike a few times.
He was super-skinny,
shy, didn't say much, probably because everyone made fun of
his thick Arkansas accent.
(You don't hear it at all when he sings) .
I've been living in Asia the past seven years,
and only recently found out from Gary that Mike got hooked up with Rob Z.
-- Scott : scott(a)scottdubar.com ,
http://www.scottdubar.com/
(Contact him for purchasing it, tell him about Zombieland ;-) )
First I was supposing that that demo was a fake, Because riggs said in an interview that he wasn't in any band before zombie's one. And I listened to it, and I trusted it is not a fake.
About the guitar tracks, I am pretty sure that any of you can find similarities with Metallica , White Zombie's La Sexorsisto, (well actually i feeled that it sounded closer to Metallica than Zombie). The vocal parts are not too bad for a garage metal band and the syncoped drums get along well with the rest of the band.
Also the graphics are great (very dali-ish), you may hire that guy for some services. -- RzR
Demiltry track list: