 "Photo: Courtesy Photo")
Picnic Casket are:
A.J. Dudick (22, songwriter, guitar)
Zak Taillon (20, guitar)
Ben Gabory (21, guitar)
A.J. Ferriera (24, drums)
TNH: Describe your band using mythical creatures (they can be fighting or "on crack").
AJ Dudick: It's a bear and a hydra fighting in the mall during the holiday season, and the bear is on a skateboard near the Cinnabon, and hydras are - I don't know if you know this - are kind of drawn to Cinnabons, like sailors are drawn to harpies.
TNH: You're thinking of Sirens.
AJ: Harpies, Sirens, banshees, imps - I didn't read Tolkien as a kid.
TNH: It's classic mythology.
AJ: So yeah, a bear with kind of robot-ish features fighting a hydra in the mall during the holiday season. But it's kind of happy, too.
TNH: Tell me about the history of Picnic Casket.
AJ: Picnic Casket started during Spring Break of 2006 when I was really bored, and I was messing around with multi-tracking programs and drum machine programs, and I was just really bored so I started writing riffs and making this song, and eventually I just kind of rode with it. That same week I made five more songs - I've never been able to do this ever again, make this many songs - and that became the first demo/EP. I burned it for some friends, and kind of passed it around, and people liked it and started saying, "Hey, you should start playing shows." And I'm like, "How am I going to play shows?" And they're like, "Just play guitar with backup tracks." So I did that, I wasn't really sure about it because it's really weird, just one guy playing guitar with a bunch of stuff in the background, and people really liked it. I've played in Pennsylvania, Vermont, Connecticut, Massachusettes, Maine - and people kind of liked it enough to keep seeing it and keep seeing it . . .
TNH: A while back, you had a Top Ten video on YouTube for almost six weeks. Explain.
AJ: My friend who took the video in Pennsylvania actually uploaded it to YouTube, and he was reading the YouTube F.A.Q.s, and one of them was "How Does A Video Get Featured?" Well, people email [YouTube] and say, "I really like this video, could you please feature it?" He emailed them as a joke and asked, "Hey, feature this video, I really like it," and lo and behold, I'm driving in my car one day and I get a call, and they're like, "Uhhh…you're on the front page of YouTube." I go home, and lo and behold, there it is. That was probably the craziest thing that's ever happened to me because, I mean, I was on the front page of the most visited website on Earth, next to Myspace. And I thought something would happen because of that, I thought you know, a record company or a promoter might see that … like everybody's like, "Woop, now you're famous, you've made it." Not in the least bit. All I got was a bunch of really, really slanderous comments from a bunch of 14-year-olds saying "Go kill yourself."
TNH: Walk me through a day in the life of a Picnic Casket (you).
AJ: I wake up at around 5:00 a.m. to go to work at AT&T, and I'll probably brush off my car and take a two-second shower and stumble into work at least four minutes late, and take calls from angry people all day, eat a burrito at Dos [Amigos] on my lunch break, go home and just f***in' play guitar and try to write stuff. If I don't have plans with friends or something, it's just Wake Up, Work, Guitar and Repeat.
TNH: Who's your biggest musical inspiration, and how do you take your coffee?
AJ: I actually don't drink coffee, I drink tea. I drink tea straight (no milk, no sugar) because I don't think it's really good for you any other way. Um. but my biggest musical influences that I find, one on the melodic side of it is basically all video game music, because that what I grew up listening to. Basically, a lot of people think [Picnic Casket] sounds like video game music, and I didn't mean to do that, it just comes out that way because it's basically implanted in my brain since age three. Even when I was a little older, in the Nineties, when kids would talk about Pearl Jam and stuff like that, I was kind of like, "whatever - video game music is better than this." When I turned about 14, one day my dad turns on the radio and leaves it on a Rock & Roll station and I hear [Metallica's] "Master of Puppets," and it scared the living sh** out of me. I'd never heard anything like that before . . . I felt like, this is the most brutal, heavy thing I've ever heard in my entire life - I love this so much. Metallica quickly became my favorite band from [age] 14 to 16. When I started playing guitar, I was more into punk rock, but I still went back and learned all the Metallica songs. Picnic Casket is just the melding of video game music, Metallica and punk rock.
TNH: Any celebrity crushes?
AJ: I haven't seen "Juno" yet, but every little interview with that chick from "Juno," I think she's just adorable.
TNH: She's also 11 [years old].
AJ: [pause] No she's not. No she is not. You're going to make me sound like the biggest creep-hole on the face of the friggin planet. Now look at me, you got my face all red.
TNH: Where does Picnic Casket go from here?
AJ: I'm just trying to make it sound a lot more listenable, because I wrote a lot of the songs from just dicking around, doing whatever. But lately when I've been writing songs, I've been trying to make them a lot more listenable . . . so people who don't usually listen to instrumental music will like it.
TNH: Any last words?
AJ: Pepperoni and cheese. It's an Oregon Trail joke. That didn't even make any sense. Oh my god.
Catch Picnic Casket play live with Transistor Transistor tonight, February 29 at 9:00 p.m. at Dos Amigos in Dover (286 Central Ave). Free show! Visit www.myspace.com/picnicasket to hear recordings.
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