Mac Sabbath plays Lancaster: 'Drive-thru metal' mixes Black Sabbath with fast food lyrics
If you go
What: Mac Sabbath
When: 7 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 9
Where: The Chameleon Club, 223 N. Water St., Lancaster.
How much: $10-$12
Get tickets: www.chameleonclub.net
In the ever-growing number of metal subgenres, where it's not uncommon for a band to associate with Viking mythology, another variety has emerged:
That's, of course, referring to "drive-thru metal."
Meet Mac Sabbath , a band that combines music of Black Sabbath with lyrics about the evils of fast food. Take the band's latest song, "Zipping Up The Uniform," which is about the "plight" of a fast food worker. (It's a riff on "Symptom of the Universe.")
"Wake me up at 8 a.m. alarm ringing in my ears/Electric frying energy to pick up all these steers/All we have to show for it is pockets full of fries/Zipping up the uniform working for your lies."
All of its four members — Ronald Osborne, Slayer Mac Cheeze, Grimalice and the Cat Burglar — are anonymous, rumored to have time traveled from the 1970s. Mike Odd, who serves as the "manager" and spokesman for the band, talked about the project ahead of Mac Sabbath's upcoming show at the Chameleon Club in Lancaster on Wednesday:
Q. Where is the band from and when did it form?
A. I got this strange phone call — anonymous phone call — to go meet this character in this burger place in [the] San Fernando Valley of California. And, you know, and that's where this really scary clown approached me and just laid all this on me. It's all kind of — he keeps it all very mysterious and interesting. So Los Angeles is where it seems to have all come together, but this is a guy who's told me that he's time traveled here from the 1970s. And there's a whole time, space continuum sort of thing going on. So when you talk about time and place, it's a little vague.
Q. How did they get this idea to do their own take on Black Sabbath?
A. Well, Ronald is definitely on a mission. There's like this clear message of that like 1970s last time that, you know, for him that he felt free and not a prisoner of the tyrannical government and food system that's going on right now. It's very anti-Monsanto, and has very Orwellian ideas about what's going on, and what we're being fed and why ... People say that Black Sabbath invented heavy metal, and both of us are in agreement that's not the truth. Because it's more like they invented heavy metal, and they invented punk, and they invented goth — and just like everything cool and spooky and fast and hard and mean, kind of alt. I don't think anybody would've guessed that the music of Black Sabbath and the lyrics about tyrannical fast food would be such a perfect pairing.
Q. What's been the response to the band so far?
A. The response is amazing. I mean, it's been a while since we've done — a really long while since they've done a show where they're not passing the clown around on the top of the audience. I mean, clown surfing is this new thing that he's coined. I mean, if that's any indication.
Q. How are most people finding out about Mac Sabbath?
A. That's the funny thing, because Ronald is so anti-technology. I mean, I don't know if it's legit or not because of this time travel thing, but he doesn't even seem to understand it. But it does seem to be [an] Internet, buzz band.
Q. How many songs does the band have now?
A. I think it's like 10 or 12 songs, something like that. About enough to cut an 8-track tape, which I think is what we're looking at. He wants 8-track tapes — I'm working on that. You know, of course we have to do the most complicated thing that makes the least sense.
Q. Is there anything important that I didn't bring up?
A The thing that I think is really neat about this band is it's [a] big, scary, theatrical, intensive, wicked heavy metal show. But at the same point, it's still seems to remain kid-friendly. And I think that's a really cool part about it.