What’s not to love about Mac Sabbath, America’s premier fast food-themed Black Sabbath cover band? The mighty Mac Sabbath celebrates its 10th anniversary this year, returning to Chicago for a show at Reggie’s on August 28.

 

 

Since the characters of Mac Sabbath exist under a cloak of anonymity, I’m joined by band manager Mike Odd for a fun chat about the band’s origins and aesthetic.

There’s nothing quite like Mac Sabbath – See you at Reggie’s on 8/28!

Band image: Paul Koudounaris

 

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TRANSCRIPT

And this is Car Con Carne, a Q101 podcast.

I’m James VanOsdol, and as I’m recording this, I just spent last night out at Skeleton Key Brewery in Woodridge.

That is one of many locations where I’ll be hosting, in front of a live audience, episode 1000 of Car Con Carne, Skeleton Key Brewery in Woodridge, episode 1000.

It is happening on the 26th of September, seven o’clock start.

It’ll be three bands performing and interviewing.

I’ll be DJing in between episode 1000.

This is just one of the events.

More details to come on that and the other ones very soon.

Car Con Carne, presented by Easy Automation.

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Get a quote by visiting easyautomation.net or call Dan, my guy Dan, 630-730-3728.

And since I’m about to talk about Mac Sabbath, I want you to talk to the Mac daddy.

His name is Dan, 630-730-3728.

Mac Sabbath celebrates the band’s 10th anniversary at Reggie’s with the show on August 28th.

Mac Sabbath is, of course, the greatest fast food themed Black Sabbath cover band of all time.

A Black Sabbath parody band performed by warped, nightmarish versions of beloved long time characters.

And since Ronald Osborne, Slayer McCheese, Graham Alice and the Cat Burglar do their work under a shroud of anonymity.

I’m talking with band manager, Mike Odd.

Mike, let’s start with the obvious question.

Actually two questions.

What is Mac Sabbath?

Why is Mac Sabbath?

I love that there’s an obvious question.

I guess maybe there’s lots of obvious questions.

Where to start?

How do one pack all this?

What is Mac Sabbath?

Wow.

I mean, how much time do we have?

We can go all night.

Kind of like you said, it’s like a mutated fast food mascots giving you this sort of Black Sabbath version of a anti-fast food lifestyle over-the-top theatrical stage show, rock band play.

I mean, it’s not quite a play, but it’s certainly more of a play than almost any other band that I can think of.

I think performance art is a fair category to put it in.

You could say that.

I would love it.

I would love it for you to say that.

I’m not gonna say that.

Is it possible to be too high to attend one of those shows?

Is there like a danger zone?

Depends on the brain, I guess.

I honestly would say there’s always a danger of being too high.

But that might be the right place to be.

Yeah, for sure.

And Reggie’s is the perfect place for Mac Sabbath.

Mac Sabbath most recently in town, end of last year for the Cultivate Festival.

10 years.

How did we get to the decade, Mark?

That’s a huge milestone.

I’m sure you’re scratching your head too.

I can’t believe we did this.

No, I’m like, it’s kind of like Black Sabbath.

What’s gonna happen now?

When you think about 10 years of Mac Sabbath, maybe Mac Sabbath isn’t the band we thought we wanted, but maybe they’re the band we deserve as a culture.

I would sign up on that.

I think that’s perfect.

I might use that.

I think my favorite thing that anybody ever said in the press is the first time that the band came to New York and we played in Brooklyn, the Village Voice said, it’s a cross between Hieronymus Bosch and My Little Pony.

I was like, wow, this guy really gets it.

That’s demented.

So is Mac Sabbath.

You are the spokesperson, you’re the hype man basically for Mac Sabbath.

How did you get involved?

At what point did you sign a blood pack that this was going to be your life?

Well, I was running this thing in East Hollywood called the Rosemarie Billy Goat Auditorium.

They call me Mike Odd.

I’m like the oddities guy.

So O-D-D-O-T-O-R-I-O-N.

And when you really cross over and decide to put yourself into the world of weird, it follows you around long after you take yourself out of it, whether you want to or not.

Named one of the best personal finance podcasts, the Stacking Benjamin Show with Joe and his friends makes financial literacy fun.

We see money of inefficiency OG around us all the time.

We’ve got a few skeletons sitting out in the open, and maybe we need to broom them into the closet.

If you know what I mean.

Nope.

Take that out.

What is that?

Whatever you’re going for didn’t land right.

Who’s got a shovel and some lime?

Maybe you need to do that with your financial picture.

I don’t know.

Find out more by searching the Stacking Benjamin’s podcast, wherever you listen.

It is a very like, you know, once you cross into that dimension, you know, I mean, I don’t know if everybody knows what a oddities museum is or, you know, familiar with like kind of like a freak show type museum.

But you know, there are all these displays and things.

And so I would get these, I would sell these things and find these things.

And then I started getting calls and then I’m still getting calls.

You know, I got this thing has been shut down since 2007.

But you know, but I’m still kind of do things like online and online version of it and stuff.

And so I was still always get these calls.

And it was like, oh, you got to come down to Chatsworth, California, and it’s going to change your life, you know, because it’s like, usually it’s like, oh, I go to like home, a coin mine and go to some guy’s shed and look at his two headed otter skeleton or something.

So stuff like that, by the way, that’s kind of the American dream is getting those invitations.

Let’s be clear.

It’s some American’s dream.

So it was like, I was like, okay, you got to meet me at this burger place.

And, you know, there’s this burger franchise and it’s all this secrecy.

And there was this kind of weird meeting inside that went awry.

And then it was like, well, you got to come back in the middle of the night.

And there’s this secret fight club meeting thing, you know, and there’s all these people there from the, the higher management didn’t know that it was going on.

And like, and you’re like in this basement and there’s all these employees that are like, like a cult.

I feel like you’re pulling me into a fever dream right now.

Tell me about it.

That’s where I was at, right?

And so, you know, I’m like, you know, smashed up against like, you know, bags of like hamburger buns and there’s like freeze dried condiments and stuff.

And then all of a sudden there’s like this, they have this curtain that drops and there’s these mutated fast food mascots like slaying these Black Sabbath riffs and this clown screaming about GMOs and Monsanto and like, and then they were like, you are going to be the manager.

And I’m like, what is happening?

Apparently, they had read some stuff because I had my own, like horror rock band in Los Angeles called the Rosemary’s Billy Goat.

And apparently, they had read some stuff that I said in the press about Black Sabbath and being, you know, such a pinnacle thing beyond inventing heavy metal, but being responsible for punk rock and Gothic music and everything that weirdos hold near.

And it all pivots from Sabbath, for sure.

And then I guess I said something about food or something.

So it was like, it’s the prophecy that you’re the, and I’m like this, okay, this is like a load of malarkey.

And these guys are just trying, are know that I have a theatrical band in town and figure that I would know the right places to book them, because get them above ground and out of this secrecy thing.

And so I’m like, yeah, I’ll book them a couple of shows and it’ll be like, haha, and that’ll be it.

And then all of a sudden I like post this video from them playing at this, I got them this zombie walk thing and I post this video and it just goes crazy like I think the first Fox News was the first one that took it and grabbed it and wrote some stuff about it.

And then from there was like MTV and like all these all these people grabbed it and posted it and then Black Sabbath posted it.

And I was just like, what is happening?

And then before the band even got out of California, we went to England, toured England and played the Download Festival with Motley Crue and Kiss and Judas Priest and Slipknot.

And it was like, was the only band to play Download Festival that you couldn’t download.

Right.

This is a clearly analog band.

And I’ve got to say one of the many things I appreciate about Mac Sabbath in a world where everyone knows everyone else’s business, where everything is Google-able.

You can find out whatever you want on the web.

I appreciate it.

As a kid who grew up having to like scour magazines to learn more about bands, I appreciate not knowing a whole lot.

Named one of the best personal finance podcasts, the Stacking Benjamin Show with Joe and his friends makes financial literacy fun.

We see money of inefficiency around us all the time.

We’ve got a few skeletons sitting out in the open, and maybe we need to broom into the closet.

If you know what I mean.

Nope, take that out.

Whatever you’re going for didn’t land right.

Who’s got a shovel and some lime?

Maybe you’d need to do that with your financial picture.

I don’t know.

Find out more by searching the Stacking Benjamin’s podcast wherever you listen.

About these menacing looking.

Believe me, the less you know, the better.

I’m taking home for the team here.

There is something, to be candid, in the present day, that rock and roll mystique, that rock and roll aura has been shattered.

In the thirst for knowledge and devouring everything about everything you love, you don’t have that fan detachment from the people who create art.

I completely agree.

I remember watching Kiss when I was a little kid, like watching Kiss being interviewed on like Tom Schneider or some late night show or something.

Even though they were in costume, it was just like they’re sitting in these stupid chairs and the dumb lighting and then they’re just answering these awkward questions.

I was like, it totally ruined it for me and I was like, eight.

Right.

I was like, I’m not buying this anymore.

A lot of the bands I grew up loving, I didn’t necessarily know what they looked like as a kid.

Yeah.

I just had to judge them based on what I heard.

I like the distance between the men, the monsters, the characters of Mac Sabbath and us civilians, us Earthlings.

Yeah.

Well, apparently, we don’t have a choice because Ronald has this whole thing about how he lives in the 1970s and then he teleports here in some wormhole or something to save us from the current state of music and food and bring us back to a time where it’s organic and then if certain things happen, it screws up the time-space continuum and then I don’t know what’s going to happen.

We’ve all read way too many comic books.

Nothing wrong with that though.

That’s where we’re at, I guess.

So you mentioned that Sabbath reference the download performance.

There’s the video of Ozzy seeing the band for his first time.

Do you have formal feedback from the other core members of the OG Sabbath?

Does Tony Iommi have an opinion?

Nothing from Tony Iommi.

There’s a picture floating around of those guys with Geezer Butler.

It was like, I think Bram Alice stepped out of the picture and he stepped in or something.

That’s amazing.

So I think Geezer has a really amazing sense of humor and sense of really liking.

I just saw a thing that he posted that was like, you know that song, Somebody’s Watching Me by Rockwell?

Yeah, it was like somebody’s watching Snowblind, like the two things combined or something.

He’s like, this is genius.

It’s like, wow, it’s Geezer posting this mashup of Rockwell and Sabbath.

I was listening to his audio book where he reads it, and he was talking about how the best version of Paranoid ever was the Dickies.

You know, the things like this legendary rock band from America, the Dickies, and the Dickies are actually playing with us at some upcoming shows.

They’re opening for us in San Diego and Elm County.

So me also, you know, thinking that, it was so great to hear him mention the Dickies.

That’s the coolest.

And by the way, as a suburban kid growing up in the Chicago area decades ago, if not for Killer Clowns from Outer Space, I probably would have never had the Dickies brought to my attention.

Oh, really?

Oh, my gosh, that was my first exposure.

Was that was the theme song to that movie?

I just just a couple of months ago, I saw in Gardena, they had a showing of that and the Dickies played before it.

Amazing.

Yeah, it still holds up.

It’s brilliant.

Oh, yeah.

It’s one of the best B movies ever, ever.

So in summary, Reggie’s end of August, it is August 28.

It’s the 10th anniversary show of Mac Sabbath.

I can’t imagine a more fun way to spend a night.

You got to hear it, see it, taste it.

It’s all the senses will be fulfilled.

There is literally nothing like this on stage.

This is one of a kind.

It is Mac Sabbath, 10 years running.

It’s amazing.

Mike Odd, how much longer can it last?

So get it while you can, you know.

Thank you for talking Mac Sabbath with me.

Absolutely.

Big pleasure.