Rob Kersey: We did meet Jimmy from touring with Indorphine a few times and that band did take a nosedive. I don’t really want to comment of the drama behind that, but it just didn’t work out. When it all started to go down, we called him and said if he needed a band, we had a spot. We had already lost our bassist and were working with a temporary fill-in, Cas (Cassidy Nee) from Screaming Mechanical Brain. With bringing Jimmy into the band, we called him and said, ‘Trouble in paradise?’ He said yes, so we said ‘If you wanna come over and join our stupid band, we have a spot for you.’ He thought for about three seconds and said ‘Sure!’
How rare is it that you can find somebody who matches the mindset and personality of your band?
For us, it’s a miracle. We can’t just bring anybody in. You really have to understand what we’re doing and be able to contribute, and Jimmy contributed to the new record a lot. It would have turned out like it did without him. It’s very obvious if you hear it, especially if you know Indorphine at all. You can really hear Jimmy all over this record.
So what’s the word on the DVD you have coming out? That’s something you’ve done entirely on your own, correct?
Yes we did.
In fact, you really do everything on your own; recording, booking tours, the works. The only thing that Rock Ridge really does for you is distribution.
Rock Ridge is an amazing label for us because they really don’t have to do anything. They let us do all the work and they just make the money! It’s mutually beneficial because we’re control freaks. If you throw a producer our way, we’d just be like ‘Oh god, get him out of here.’ Especially with the type of comedy that we throw into the metal, we have to be at the helm. Like I said about bringing in another band member, you have to bring in the right guy.
The only person that might be able to produce an album for us would be Weird Al, maybe. But we do everything ourselves. The DVD was me in particular. I sat through the 30 hours of footage we had and did all the editing and all of that, mainly because we don’t have enough money to pay somebody to do it. We just sit down in front of a computer and figure it out. That’s how that goes, man. We’re a metal band, we don’t have money.
So it’s safe to assume that Psychostick wouldn’t thrive on a label like Century Media.
We had a couple of offers from some bigger labels at one point in time, but we haven’t been approached a whole lot because we’re a very risky venture. We’re not formulaic or someone that they can feel safe sinking money into or go to the investors and ask them to sink money into. They don’t know. “Oh God, comedy metal? It’s never been done, we can’t do it.”‘Well good, leave us the hell alone. Hopefully, we’ll sell a bazillion records on our own. Then they’ll come crying, “Can we work with you now?” Why? We don’t need you. No!
You’re on your way, man. I understand you recently scanned 100,000 digital tracks.
Yeah, and we’ve sold over 50,000 albums so that’s not a bad thing at all. We’ve got high hopes for Sandwich, so if that tanks I guess we’ll all just drive the van off a cliff.
Before you drive that van off the cliff, you’ll be taking it across the country on another massive road outing. Take this interview home by talking about your tour plans.
We’re splitting this tour up into three different volumes. We had to order three different t-shirt designs because this tour is so huge. We’re going everywhere; everywhere in the
US, mind you. We’re not venturing outside of the States yet.
We’re hitting every area we can possibly hit, a lot of new places and some we’ve been to before. We’re calling it the “CD Release Party Tour” because the actual CD release show is in Sioux Falls, SD, which is pretty far from our home in Phoenix. We just decided to make the entire tour our CD release party and see how that goes. Big things abound with this new record and we’re really excited about this tour.
