Rock My Monkey: Hello, you are listening to the Rock My Monkey netcast on RockMyMonkey.com. Today we are speaking with Riggs about his band Scum Of The Earth and their new cd, Sleaze Freak. How are you doing today, Riggs?
Riggs: I’m doing just fine.
Rock My Monkey: Cool. What do you think Sleaze Freak offers fans that Blah, Blah, Blah: Love Songs For The New Millennium did not?
Riggs: Hmm. It offers-what does it offer? I don’t know what it offers, but it’s a lot-god, it’s a weird question. It’s got more songs on it. (chuckles) And they’re a lot heavier and more, I don’t know, just fucking degenerate rock punch. A lot more foul content, and a lots of heavier, tuned down lower. It’s just all around.
Rock My Monkey: Now for me, when I listened to it, it seemed like with this album you were a little bit more focused on a goal, a little bit more confident. It seems a little bit stronger of an album just because it’s more of a solid band.
Riggs: I think it’s just because I was more pissed off than I was when I was doing the first one.
Rock My Monkey: How did you get involved with Metal Sanaz, and what songs is she on?
Riggs: Sanaz, I met her years ago whenever she was Waitress Sanaz. She was around, hanging around when we were doing the first cd, and being super helpful in the studio and whatnot. I don’t know. I was just friends with her for a long time. And then she came down filming some shit when we were doing the new record. I just thought it’d be cool getting her singing a song, which took some finagling.
Rock My Monkey: Cool. Cool. Now, what songs is she on?
Riggs: She’s on a song called “Love Pig”.
Rock My Monkey: It’s just the song “Love Pig”, then?
Riggs: Yeah.
Rock My Monkey: “Love Pig” is actually my favorite song on the cd. I know she’s on the song, but it seems like the love song of the year. Is there a special little lady that inspired it?
Riggs: No. That song is just all about bondage. Like hard core bondage.
Rock My Monkey: Your video for “Bombshell From Hell” is pretty much just performance. Is there any chance of any videos coming out, like for “Love Pig”, for example, with any of your concepts or any of the wonderful artwork that Paul Garner is involved in?
Riggs: I wanted to. But it falls into that whole category of MTv doesn’t really play videos anymore. It’s all Jackass and Viva La Bam. And to spend tons of money to make a cool video just isn’t that feasible anymore for any record company. Unless you’re just some gigantic band that sells millions of records. Because for “Bombshell From Hell” I wanted to have a strip club in Hell where all the dudes in the band are getting the shit beat out of them by devil stripper chicks, and kind of go along with the flow of the song. It was just like making a frickin’ movie. It was just way too expensive. And we had a shoestring budget to make a video. Plus the last video we made for MTv that we tried to make all elaborate that spent tons of freakin’ money on, got edited, every cool part got edited out of it. I don’t know. We can’t get away with anything we want to do that to us it doesn’t seem like it’s that bad.
Rock My Monkey: I know that a lot of bands are pretty much just putting the videos on their MySpace page and leaving it at that. That way they can actually have-you can put out a really censored, clean version for MTv and for Fuse, then put the uncensored version up on your MySpace for fans to actually view. It also gives you something to put on the DVD for your cd.
Riggs: Yeah. But see in our case, for the kind of budget that we had to make the video, to edit a video into a clean version would cost about as much as it cost to make that video.
Rock My Monkey: Oh jeez. Alright. Now there is a clean version of the cd that from what I’m to understand does not have the DVD extra on it. Is that correct?
Riggs: Yeah.
Rock My Monkey: How can people tell which one they are buying, and does the clean version have any special warnings on it to let people know that they’re getting the pussy version?
Riggs: Yeah. They haven’t made any clean versions yet. Believe it or not everybody put in an order for the explicit version. Even Wal-Mart.
Rock My Monkey: Interesting.
Riggs: They don’t want any explicit labels on it. Because all these stores now, they’re like ‘Ah, fuck it. Everybody’s downloading MP3s, and having clean versions of cds is like killing our cd sales. We’ll just sell this and fuck it. If somebody complains about it, we’ll take it out of that one store instead of the whole entire chain of stores, and you’ll have to give us a clean version.’ Because we did make a clean version.
Rock My Monkey: There is actually no copies of it out there because nobody wants it?
Riggs: Yeah. There hasn’t been any made of it yet. So if there were to be a clean version of it, there it wouldn’t have like that 28 page booklet in it. It would just be probably one page with the cover, and then the little thanks page behind it. Because all the artwork people had problems with. Which is why the record had to be pushed back even. Because all the places in the Midwest that print all these cd booklets refused to print the Scum Of The Earth ones. Because they were so offended by it.
Rock My Monkey: Business must be good if they can turn away work.
Riggs: I guess. They just had to push the date back for the record. In The Devil Made Me Do It 2 there’s a picture of a chick sitting there looking at a devil on one shoulder snorting a bunch of cocaine and looking at a devil on the other shoulder drinking a bottle of booze, and she’s sitting there pondering, ‘Hmm, which one should I do?’ Every page in the cd booklet, it isn’t that bad. It’s not like, you know, to us anyways. You’ve probably seen it.
Rock My Monkey: To me it looks like it’s typical rock and roll stuff. It’s stuff that’s not too different than stuff that The Rolling Stones flirted with in the 60’s.
Riggs: People are just so fucking uptight these days. It has a picture of a chick in a leather pig suit tied to, or handcuffed to a stripper pole, and they’re ‘Oh, jesus, save us.’ I mean, come on. They just refused to print the cd booklet. The DVD is not any better. It doesn’t really have anything to do with recording the record. It’s a bunch of chicks sucking on each other’s titties and drunk, insane retardedness. And they’re like, fuck this, we don’t want to have anything to do with this.
Rock My Monkey: What song on the cd has, do you think has the chance of being your Ace Of Spades, the song that fans demand for decades to come.
Riggs: I have no idea.
Rock My Monkey: No song that you think has a really strong hook to it?
Riggs: Uh…
Rock My Monkey: Maybe an anthem for the year?
Riggs: I don’t know. Because we’ve already done a tour, and played a bunch of the new songs. Probably about half of them we were playing on the tour that we just did. So nobody knew the songs, but the ones they seemed to catch onto the easiest and people were into were “The Bombshell From Hell” and the song “I Am Monster”.
Rock My Monkey: Cool.
Riggs: Those two seemed to be the ones that everybody liked when we were on tour, but they haven’t heard the record, so I don’t know.
Rock My Monkey: On the DVD extra you guys are talking about a movie that the band was in, or part of, and that you got, there’s a scene where you got beat up in. What’s the dirt on that?
Riggs: Oh, no, I didn’t get beat up in a scene. I was trying to get-well, that movie was called The Life Of Lucky Cucumber. The same dudes that did that “T.V.: The Movie”, you know, “Life Of The Party”, just super funny movies. “Baseketball”, “Orgazmo”, and all those movies. So it’s supposed to be a comedy movie. So they had that dude from “American Pie” down there, the Sherminator.
Rock My Monkey: Oh, okay.
Riggs: That’s how this whole story came about. I was trying to get the bass player to let me film The Sherminator beating him up on the sidewalk outside to put on the DVD. So he could get beat up by The Sherminator. But he wouldn’t do it. So that didn’t happen. But yeah, they put a little part in there for me in the movie where I’m kind of like Rob Schneider, ‘You can do it! Rip his fuckin’ head off!’ kind of part. I just did a little stupid part like that.
Rock My Monkey: You guys were also involved in the psychological thriller “Devil Girl”. What was the band’s involvement, and when can people expect to see that?
Riggs: That, we didn’t have anything to do with that movie. We just have some songs in that movie. We have like four songs in that movie. And I really don’t know much about that movie. I know they had the premiere of it on the 5th of October out in L.A. and in Philadelphia. Or a screening, whatever it was. I was all busy with tour stuff, so I didn’t keep up with it as well as I should have. But I mean, the movie seems really fucking cool. If nobody knows what it is, it’s about a chick and like a muscle car that breaks down. She goes into some tittie bar where there’s like this devil girl dancing in there and some evil clown that frequents the strip club. And it just turns into some a big battle with some evil clown and a devil chick and muscle cars, and a strip club.
Rock My Monkey: Your artwork, as I said before, is done by Paul Garner. How much of that was his imagination, and how much of that is your direction?
Riggs: Well, I just send him little notes, like ‘This song is about bondage and blah, blah, blah.’ And he’d have the song title, so he drew up the chick in the leather pig suit. Some stuff, I’d be like ‘Dude, have me standing on a pile of dead bodies and breaking a spine in half in a trailer park.’ And he’d do that. Just kind of back and forth. He’d have some ideas and I’d have some ideas.
Rock My Monkey: Okay, so there’s a little bit of back and forth. How did you actually get involved with him? How did you guys hook up?
Riggs: Through MySpace, of course.
Rock My Monkey: Really? Interesting. Okay. Now, your drummer, Ivan, did some guest work recently with a band called Paths Of Glory. I was wondering if you had actually heard any of that, and what you think of it.
Riggs: No, I haven’t heard any of it. I didn’t know he was doing that.
Rock My Monkey: Oh, okay. Actually, Paths Of Glory is actually some friends of ours, so I was actually wondering if you had actually heard it. Now, I know that when we saw you guys last time, you guys had a couple of little, couple of things to make the live shows a little bit more theatrical. What can people expect from this upcoming tour, and for the tours for this album, have you added anything in there? How much of a show can people expect?
Riggs: It’s a lot like the one we had before, because that’s really about all we can fit into a club. We just made it a little, a lot eviler looking. It’s got like the devil on the cross. Still has the devil head blow the smoke out into the crowd, when they fucking work. I don’t know. We actually have way too much stuff to even put up onstage as of now. A whole trailer full of crap that we just got to pick and choose what we can put in there, and where it’ll fit.
Rock My Monkey: What are the tour plans for, I guess for the rest of the year, and maybe coming up close on the new year?
Riggs: We’re working on something right now that I should know about in a couple days, hopefully by the end of this week.
Rock My Monkey: So no tour plans have been announced, or nothing that’s solid yet?
Riggs: Correct. They’re going to have some meeting about it tomorrow, actually, that hopefully I’ll hear.
Rock My Monkey: Is this going to be-can you at least say if this is going to be Jägermeister tour?
Riggs: I don’t think so. We’re trying to get onto a bigger tour, onto an opening slot, so we can get out and play in front of a lot of people. Instead of going and doing a headlining tour again, playing in clubs to 200 people or less.
Rock My Monkey: Other than that, any other plans people should know about as far as Scum Of The Earth is concerned?
Riggs: We’re just going to be doing a lot of stuff. I mean, we do go out on this next tour. Like Sanaz, she was going to come out with us again for about two weeks, and film a bunch of stuff. That’s all stuff that’s still in the works, that I’m not sure what they’re going to do with that footage. But something. Plan on making another video for that song “I Am Monster”. And Sanaz wanted to make a video for some song that we could do some crazy shit in, even if we could only use it for the internet kind of stuff.
Rock My Monkey: I notice on the DVD it actually says she’s got her own production company going. Is she the actually the one that put together the DVD and all that?
Riggs: Yeah.
Rock My Monkey: So she might be doing the next video then?
Riggs: Possibly. Hopefully. She wants to do it, if we can get our schedules all together.
Rock My Monkey: In closing I have one final question. Every year we do choose one final question that we ask every single band from classic rock legends to the most extreme death metal bands at the end of every interview, partially to stump people but also to see who wusses out and won’t answer. This year I’m asking people to look into their crystal ball and predict what political figure, world leader, musician, celebrity, anybody well known, anybody world wide famous, who do you think might die before the end of the year?
Riggs: Hmm. There’s so many to pick from. Let me think. I don’t know. I could choose between the people with bad drug habits or the people who are just really old who used to have bad drug habits.
Rock My Monkey: Well, the people drug habits are always the most fun.
Riggs: Or the people that drink and drive. Before the year. Man, that’s not very much time. A few months. Hmm. I would have to say, it would have to be probably Britney Spears. That’s what I’d say.
Rock My Monkey: She’s my favorite answer for that right now, too. Cool. I thank you very much for doing the interview, and anybody that’s listening to the audio version can go to RockMyMonkey.com for the full featured version with clickable links, readable text, and many more wonderful features. I’m asking people to click on the album cover above and below this interview to purchase Sleaze Freak by Scum Of The Earth. And I do hope to see you guys up on tour in the Northwest sometime soon. Thank you very much for your time.
