Tag: Joey Killingsworth

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Heirs of the Dog: George Jonestown Massacre’s Riffs Raise Money and Awareness

Daryl Stephens, Brian Costner, and Joey Killingsworth (Photo: Debi LeDoux)

Hearing Joecephus and the George Jonestown Massacre rock a heavy groove, you might feel compelled to exclaim, “Righteous!” And for once this assessment would be spot-on. For these purveyors of Southern rock laced with metal and a dollop of punk have combined righteousness with their pounding riffs for some time now. In fact, it’s their specialty.

The core trio, led by founder Joey “Joecephus” Killingsworth with Brian Costner on bass and Daryl Stephens on drums, has excelled at the tribute album, wherein the works of a beloved artist or band are recut with a 21st century urgency and celebrity cameos, with the profits earmarked for charity. Previous star-studded outings have included Mutants of the Monster: A Tribute to Black Oak Arkansas and Five Minutes to Live: A Tribute to Johnny Cash. Now they’ve dropped what may be their best tribute yet, Heirs of the Dog: A Tribute to Nazareth (Saustex Records). This time, they focus their tribute spotlight on one album in particular, the iconic Hair of the Dog, recreated track by track and bursting with cameos that read like a Who’s Who of heavy alt-rock. Recently, Joecephus filled me in on the details.

Memphis Flyer: What does Nazareth mean to you?

Joey Killingsworth: When I was 13 or 14, my cousin played me Hair of the Dog and Alice Cooper’s greatest hits. And both of those really stuck. One night, I had had a couple of margaritas, then came home and had a beer. I heard a Nazareth song on the radio, and I immediately called [co-producer] Dik Ledoux and said, “Hey, man, I’ve got an idea. We’ll do Hair of the Dog all the way through!” So we went to his studio and knocked out all the basic tracks in one day back in 2019. Then we started getting the guests.

Once I get one guest locked in, we’ve got a record. Fast forward a couple of months, I was talking to Ruyter Suys of Nashville Pussy about it. She said, “I’m in, and Blaine [Cartwright, also of Nashville Pussy] calls ‘Hair of the Dog.’ He wants that song.” So I called up Dik and said, “We got two guests, we got an album!”

Did you ever dream you’d get Nazareth guitarist Manny Charlton on there?

No! That was a surprise. But on each charity album, we try to get one member of the original band we’re doing a tribute to. And getting Neil Fallon was a big shocker. I’ve been a Clutch fan forever, so when he got on board, that was a whole other ball game right there.

The roster is impressive. You also recruited J.D. Pinkus of Butthole Surfers and Luther Dickinson. And there’s a cameo by Eddie Spaghetti of the Supersuckers.

He had helped us before on the Black Oak Arkansas record. Then I sent our version of “Love Hurts,” which features Eddie’s vocals and Eric Lewis’ steel guitar, to Ruyter, and she was like, “I never cared for that song much, but I love that steel. And I love Eddie. Ask him about me singing a duet with him.” Eddie just said, “Fuck yeah!” It’s got a little Gram/Emmylou thing going on. Sounds like they’re a little hungover. And Eric Lewis knocked his part out of the park.

The album’s profits will go to the FSHD Society for research into facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophy, which took the life of Jonelle Spicer in 2018. Tell me about her.

She was a big Memphis music supporter, and so motivational. She would always come out to the shows. We’d been buddies with her and her partner Rudy [Forster] for a while. He was in Blackbone back in the day. So I told Rudy, “Let’s do this record in her honor. And Rudy, we gotta get you playing on here, man.” It’s all about helping Jonelle and the spirit of her.

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Music Video Monday: 1000 Lights

1000 Lights began in 2018 as a band on a mission: recreate the Stooges’ Fun House for a Halloween party at Black Lodge Video. And they assembled an all-star cast to do, starting with Flyer film editor Chris McCoy (Super Witch, Pisshorse) on bass, and Russ Thompson (The Margins, Static Bombs, Pisshorse) on drums. To this solid rhythm section they added Joey Killingsworth (Joecephus & the George Jonestown Massacre, Super Witch) on guitar, and, in a masterstroke, Jesse James Davis (Yesse Yavis, Model Zero, The Tennessee Screamers) on vocals. Davis was the perfect fit for the manic, yet devious, rock ‘n’ roll energy exuded by Iggy Pop in the classic Detroit band, being no stranger to stripping off his shirt and gyrating with abandon.

And yet, though 1000 Lights channeled Fun House beautifully, their own personalities came more to fore as they pursued original material. Shedding their tribute-band origins, they emerged as something closer to The Damned with echoes of Tin Machine: Both more frenetic and more atmospheric than the Stooges, depending on their mood, but always bringing the reliable riffs.

The capstone of this was their show at the Crosstown Theater in 2019. As McCoy explains, “Last year, 1000 Lights was asked to be a part of Crosstown Arts’ silent film live scoring series. We chose to do Häxan, the 1922 film by director Benjamin Christensen that is both a documentary about the witch hunts of the Middle Ages and a precursor of the modern horror film. We incorporated our existing songs into the score, and wrote a lot of new material to go along with the film. Justin Thompson and Dawn Hopkins recorded the show, and we took the tapes to Dik LeDoux for mixing and mastering. We took the best parts from the 104 minutes of the live score and created an album which we’re releasing on Bandcamp this week. We couldn’t be more pleased with the results. It doesn’t sound like a live album at all, despite the fact that it was recorded in front of a large audience.”

Today, the world gets its first taste of Häxan, the album on Bandcamp, with this, the first video spawned by the project. Davis steers clear of any obvious Iggy-isms, creating his own Southern take on the more panicked sounds of punk. He is hurtling toward the Bluff City from a devilish distance, perhaps about to slam the city from above like a meteor? The frantic apprehension is captured beautifully by McCoy’s wife, director Laura Jean Hocking. “We shot at Black Lodge,” McCoy notes, “using projection art she created and the big screens they have in their theater. Then she incorporated images from Häxan into the final video.”

Says Hocking, “I wanted to portray Jesse as if he was a denizen of Andy Warhol’s Factory. Jesse has a dynamic, androgynously sexy stage presence and I used it to convey the punk urgency of the song. The layered images and projection give it a fever dream meets Exploding Plastic Inevitable sense, like Jesse is fighting the Devil with rock & roll.”

Music Video Monday: 1000 Lights

1000 Lights celebrate the release of Häxan with a live-streamed concert at Black Lodge, Halloween night, October 31, 9 p.m.

If you would like to see your music video featured on Music Video Monday, email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com

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Joecephus & the George Jonestown Massacre Keep on Trucking

CREDIT: John Pickle

Joey Killingsworth’s band, Joecephus and the George Jonestown Massacre, has built up a good bit of name recognition over the 13 years they’ve played and recorded music. The only problem is, this Memphis band has very little place recognition. “We tried to play Minglewood a long time ago,” he recalls, “and the dude’s like ‘I’m sorry, we’ve gotta have a local band for this spot.’ I’ve been playing around here since 1993! And in Memphis band listings, most times, they don’t even spell the name right. But outta town, the name’s spelled right. It’s cool to say you’re from Memphis, but this is a fickle town.”

It’s ironic, because the family name is about as Memphis as you can get. Killingsworth’s father, Bobby Joe, was born in McNairy County and grew up playing rockabilly and country there, until he aimed for the big time and moved to Memphis in 1962. Not long after that, he joined rockabilly/country singer Eddie Bond’s band in a musical partnership that would last for decades. When Bond began hosting a variety show on WHBQ in 1966, his friend Bobby Joe was right there with him, taking on the nickname “Bo Jack” and a new comedic character to boot. The show was on the air for 10 years, and then another five when it was revived in the 1990s.

But Killingsworth the Younger had no taste for country music during most of those years, and invitations from his father to join the Bond band went unheeded. Later, the son grew to appreciate the genres of his father, and even drummed for Bond in the last years of his career. By that time, he was kicking himself for missing out. “Eddie Bond would tell me, ‘You could have met Ernest Tubb! He was on our show.'”

John Pickle

and Brian Costner

It was also country that gave Killingsworth his first break in the music business. Reluctant to trade on his father’s or Eddie Bond’s name, he created Joecephus and the George Jonestown Massacre as an umbrella group for the diverse music he preferred. Though he grew up on bands ranging from Black Flag to Bauhaus to Nazareth, his newfound love of country led to some radio play in the 2000s.

“I got a bad job review, so I wrote a song about my boss,” says Killingsworth. “That one little song, ‘Quittin Time,’ still gets maybe a couple thousand plays a week. I recorded it by just plugging a guitar and pedals right into the board, and I cringe whenever I hear it, but it outsells everything we’ve ever done. I just went off on my boss and everybody just started requesting it. Rock 103, the morning show, played it for about seven weeks in a row when it came out.”

Momentum grew for the Massacre, and most of the growth was out of town. “I’d search the internet and email any bigger bands playing within an eight-hour radius, to get on board opening for them. You can book one show with David Allan Coe or somebody like that, and then there’s automatically 700 or more people you’re playing for. Then you book your little shows around it.”

The band quickly built on two seemingly contradictory strengths: outlaw country and thrashing riff rock. This eclecticism has served them well. “With the Massacre thing, we’ve been able to play with everybody from Coe to George Lynch (of Dokken), Bad Brains, Johnny Winters, Jim Dickinson. A weird mix of people. We’ve got like 80 songs. We can make it fit into a set.”

The group has parlayed these diverse pairings into some equally diverse collaborations, especially on tribute albums that Killingsworth has masterminded. Perhaps the most popular has been a double LP tribute to Black Oak Arkansas, which blends contributions from the Massacre and original members of Black Oak (including Jim Dandy) with offerings from the likes of Jello Biafra (Dead Kennedys) and Greg Ginn (Black Flag). Killingsworth says it’s not surprising that such pioneers of punk appreciate the Arkansas rockers.

But nowadays, Killingsworth is most excited about the latest release by the Massacre, Death Rattle Shake. This new outing finds them in full riff rock mode, with crunching guitars underpinning Killingsworth’s deadpan vocals. It’s a sound that’s won fans throughout the region, and it’s keeping Joecephus mighty busy — even if, as he notes, “my dad still plays more than I do.”

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Music Video Monday: Mung

Don’t call today’s Music Video Monday a comeback! 

Actually, you can call it a comeback. Long before Dethklok ruled the basic cable mindspace, there was another band known as the Four Horsemen of the Metal Apocalypse. Mung was a tongue-in-cheek group of metalheads consisting of Joey “Joecephus” Killingsworth, Josey Van HellSing (Wade Long), Zim (John Pickle), Varmint (Mike Matthews), and Suzy Savage (Rhiannon Smith). Under the direction of Memphis underground video pioneer John PIckle, the band shot a pilot intended to sell to network TV. “We did a VH1 Behind The Music sort of thing about Mung,” Pickle recalls.

The pilot effort was not successful, and much of the raw footage was lost for years, until Pickle accidentally uncovered it and edited this video together out of some of the recovered material. “I saw this old footage and thought, there’s no sense in letting all this stuff go to waste.”

The director says the video for The Spell Song—Mung’s theme song—was shot in his living room. “We put a bunch of garbage bags up over the walls and windows and just went at it,” he says. 

This Wednesday night, Mung will return after an eight year hiatus to open for Mac Sabbath, the McDonald’s themed Black Sabbath cover band, for one can’t miss night of metal and comedy at the Hi-Tone. “We picked up right where we left off eight years ago,” Pickle says. 

Music Video Monday: Mung

If you would like to see your video featured on Music Video Monday, email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com

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Music Video Monday: Super Witch

This Music Video Monday promotes itself. 

Two summers ago, El Dorado Del Ray, Joey Killingsworth, and John Pickle asked me to play heavy metal with them in a band called Super Witch. I hadn’t had a band to play with in a while, and while I had played jangle pop, indie, punk, noise, and all kinds of guitar rock since I first took up the bass when I was 15 years old, I had never actually played heavy metal before. So I said yes, and I’ve been glad I did. I’ve learned a lot from these guys, made some new friends, and become a better bass player for it. We’ve been slowly recording an album with Dik LeDoux’s Au Poots studio and Rocket Science Audio’s Kyle Johnson, and now it’s finally ready for public consumption. Along the way, we also made some music videos. 

John Pickle is not just a great drummer, but he’s also a Memphis filmmaking pioneer. For years in the 1990s, he created the legendary public access TV show Pickle TV, which brought gonzo insanity to unsuspecting cable subscribers all over the land. He’s made two Super Witch music videos. The latest is “The Need”, in which he used some footage of us recording the song in the studio to demonstrate what a great editor he is. 

Music Video Monday: Super Witch (2)

The first Super Witch music video was “Army Of Werewolves”, where Pickle took the opportunity to create a video based on a simple concept he had been tossing around for a long time. All four members of the band shot our segments separately for this one, but one thing I can tell you is that if you detune your bass so the strings flop around enough to capture on camera, you’ll probably break your nut. Thanks to John Lobow for fixing it for me afterwards. 

Music Video Monday: Super Witch

And finally, here’s a Super Witch video I directed. Last year, we played an awesome show at Black Lodge Video that was captured on film by Christopher Woodsy Smith. Around the same time, the Maiden protests in Kiev, Ukraine were going on, and I noticed that some videos I was seeing from the street riots had a very similar color pallette as the Black Lodge footage. So my wife and editor Laura Jean Hocking and I cut together scenes from the two sources into this video for “House Of Warlocks”. I’m very proud of it, and I hope you like it, too. 

Music Video Monday: Super Witch (3)

You can download our album Super Witch Has Risen over at Bandcamp on a pay-what-you-can basis. 

Thank you for indulging my conflict of interest. If you would like to see your music video in this space next week, please email me at cmccoy@memphisflyer.com. 

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Bo Jack Inducted into International Rockabilly Hall of Fame.

CREDIT: Chris Davis

Joey Killingsworth, who plays guitar and sings in contemporary Memphis bands like Super Witch, Grendel Crane, and the George Jonestown Massacre, understands the importance of legacy. Last Thursday, his dad, Bo Jack Killingsworth, a guitar slinger and keyboard pounder who played alongside early Memphis rock artists like Eddie Bond and Charlie Feathers, was inducted into the International Rockabilly Hall of Fame in Jackson, TN, and Joey played at his side.

“Everybody started chanting, “Bo Jack, Bo Jack,” he says, recalling the night.

Saturday evening the younger Killingsworth was busy honoring another group of Memphis area players with a completely different sound. He and a clutch of area musicians gathered at the Mighty Aw Poots studio in Cordova to record “Jim Dandy to the Rescue,” the last track for a Black Oak Arkansas (BOA) tribute project that has attracted contributors like Shooter Jennings, Black Flag’s Greg Ginn, Eddie Spaghetti of the Supersuckers, and Jimbo Mathus. West Coast Punk legend Jello Biafra of the Dead Kennedys will provide lead vocals for “Jim Dandy.”

Chris Davis

Joey Killingsworth (right)

Killingsworth gets excited when he talks about BOA and its legendary frontman Jim Dandy, the washboard-scratching wildman who shared stages with bands like the Rolling Stones, the Who, King Crimson, and Alice Cooper, and whose onstage antics inspired Van Halen’s David Lee Roth. “They toured with Black Sabbath,” Killingsworth says, as he sets up to record. “Kiss opened for them!”

Killingsworth is just one of several area musicians who has played in current iterations of BOA who are joining forces for the Bastard Sons of Black Oak Arkansas Guitar Festival 2014, Friday, August 15th, at the Stage Stop. The festival showcases the bands Electrick Nobody, Joecephus and the George Jonestown Massacre, Oliveria and Lost Cauze, each of which includes at least one member who has played with BOA in recent years.

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Outlaw Spirit

For Joey Killingsworth, “Quittin’ Time” was just the beginning. The Memphian wrote the song and got radio airplay before forming his namesake band, Joecephus and the George Jonestown Massacre.

“I was doing some stuff with John Pickle for his movie The Importance of Being Russell, and I came up with a wacky song called ‘Quittin’ Time,’ which got played on Rock 103, so I thought I ought to put a band together,” Killingsworth explains of the X-rated update of Johnny Paycheck‘s “Take This Job and Shove It.”

(Country music runs in the family. Joey’s father, Bobby Killingsworth, has played guitar with Eddie Bond for more than four decades.)

“Originally, I had two separate groups in mind,” admits Killingsworth, who launched the stripped-down Joecephus and the White Lightnin’ Band around the same time. “Then Hank III became my inspiration: He combines country music and heavier stuff, so I decided I could combine country and hardcore. I love Black Flag and Waylon [Jennings]-era country, so I tried to blend it. We did some acoustic shows, then our first electric show was with Shooter Jennings, Waylon’s son.”

In a recent snapshot, Killingsworth poses shirtless in the middle of Sun Studio, showing off the tattoos that further testify to his affinity for both country and punk rock. A heavily inked symbol for the experimental noise group Einsturzende Neubauten sits high on one shoulder blade, dwarfed by a brilliant caricature of Jim Marshall‘s iconic Johnny Cash portrait.

The song “Jerk U Off My Mind” has garnered more than 7,000 plays on Joecephus and the George Jonestown Massacre’s MySpace page (MySpace.com/JoeyKillingsworth). That song and tunes such as the speed-metal-inspired cow-punk anthem “Going Back to Memphis” and the country boogie “Honky Tonk Night Time” have brought Joecephus and the George Jonestown Massacre national exposure. In April, the group contributed a cover of “Death Comes Ripping” to a Misfits tribute CD. And next month, they’ll hit the road to open shows for Reckless Kelly and Unknown Hinson.

“[As of] this month, we’ll have been at it two years,” Killingsworth, a veteran of ’90s-era indie band Grendel Crane, notes of Joecephus and the George Jonestown Massacre. “When we started, we’d have gigs every weekend or every other weekend, and we’d make $20 apiece. Somehow we started networking, and we’ve been opening for everybody from Southern Culture on the Skids in New Orleans to David Allan Coe in Knoxville.

“I had to turn down a gig playing with The Bottle Rockets last weekend, because the band couldn’t do it,” Killingsworth says, explaining that he’s resorted to running a classified ad with the hopes of finding a permanent rhythm section.

“Right now, it’s me on guitar, Richard Wagor on bass, and either Don Mayall or Brett Broadway on drums, but I’m trying to find a core group, a permanent lineup that can get on the road and tour,” he says.

Last month, Killingsworth was tapped to perform with the late Waylon Jennings’ band at the prestigious Spirit of the Outlaws monthly concert series, held at Douglas Corner in Nashville. He also found time to put the finishing touches on his band’s second full-length CD, Smothered and Covered.

Joecephus and the George Jonestown Massacre will celebrate the release of Smothered and Covered with local reggae group Soul Enforcers at The Buccaneer this Saturday night.

“We’d go into the studio whenever we had a song ready,” Killingsworth says of the album’s marathon-long recording sessions. “We’d have some drinks, knock it out, and really have fun with it.”

It sounds like ol’ Hank might’ve done it that way too, but even so, Killingsworth is cautious about the group’s potential with stereotypical country-music fans.

“With whatever [the mainstream country-music industry] hypes as the new outlaw thing, they might wear big hats, but they’re not really doing anything different,” he says. “Luckily, there’s an undercurrent with these Spirit of the Outlaws shows and with people like Hank III and Dale Watson, who are just too rowdy for the establishment.”

Joecephus and the George Jonestown Massacre play the Buccaneer on Saturday, July 21st. Showtime is 10 p.m. $5 cover.