Utter Trash--Rock City Morgue

Dead Rock Stars

An Interview with Rik Slave and Johnny Brashear of Rock City Morgue

By Bob Ignizio

Rock City Morgue (Rik Slave – vocals, Rhoades Diablo – guitar, Johnny Brashear – guitar, Sean Yseult – bass, and the recently joined Andy Baker – drums) will probably get some attention for including ex-White Zombie bass player Yseult. That’s fine as long as no one expects anything that sounds like “More Human Than Human” . The band has far more in common with artists like The Rolling Stones, The New York Dolls, and The Stooges than the band that Sean used to lay down the bottom end for. The only similarities are in the two group’s fascination with the dark side of life. “The dark side compels me. Horror and music are synonymous. From my earliest memories it was Alice Cooper, Gene Simmons, The Cramps, The Damned, The Misfits and now Rock City Morgue,” says Rik. While it’s a little early to say Rock City Morgue will be as successful and influential as that distinguished company, the material on their debut EP ‘Some Ghouls’ is a good start.

Hailing from New Orleans, Rock City Morgue has managed to carve out a niche for themselves in a town best know to outsiders for Mardi Gras and tourist attractions. Rik says, “There are lots of cheesy tourist type jazz fest style bands in New Orleans. Thousands of them. But that shit is easy to avoid if you want to. On the other hand there are a handful of really awesome bands like Scripts, Hazard County Girls, Detonations, Black Mountain, and Supagroup. If you have a pretty good band you can get a gig. There’s a few cool clubs and they seem to appreciate original underground music. Also the fans in New Orleans love to party and get fucked up and they love to rock.”

So far things are looking pretty sunny for the dark minded band. They’ve played some shows in L.A., New York, and Texas (including this year’s SXSW) to good response, and soon the rest of the world will get to hear what they’ve been missing when their debut EP ‘Some Ghouls’ has its official release in May. While the band hadn’t signed at the time of my interview, Rik said, “Major or indie, I don't care.” Johnny added, “I’m just so happy playing rock and roll and traveling with these guys. We are very close and we have so much fun doing it. I’m sure we would all like to sell some records with this band but that's not why we are doing it.” The band had to slow things down a little bit to break in new drummer Andy Baker, but with that now behind them Rik says he wants to, “tour Europe and record a fucking masterpiece record.” Or more likely, a “monsterpiece.”