INTERVIEWS
THE BLOODHOUND GANG
Evil Jared and Lupus take a break from puking and barfing to tell Vanguard's Ross McGibbon about themselves.
It’s a long wait before Vanguard gets to talk to The Bloodhound Gang. The support had had their bus broken into and things are in disarray. As we are ushered backstage we enter a dressing room full of gossip and noise. Jimmy Pop is wandering around in his pajamas, Lupus and Jared – or to use their formal titles: Evil Jared Hasslehoff and Lupus Thunder are slouching on the couch and a laptop is being pumped up with the mentalist slogans that will splash the walls of the lightshow tonight. Vanguard Online: What’s your stage show like these days? Jared: We used to have it down. Like in 2000 it wasn’t even like a stage – there was so many audience on and off the stage. We used to grab them and incorporate them into the show. I would offer anyone onstage $100 – that’s like £3 or something – to drink an entire case of Dr Pepper. And they would drink and drink and drink and drink. They wanted the $100 so they’d drink and drink until they were about to puke. We’d leave the stage and put a spotlight on the guy until he puked. Lupus: Every night the guy would puke. Jared: I can’t get enough of that stuff. We’d put a comfy chair on stage, a little table to hold all the drinks. That was the old show. We’d have topless chicks up on stage. V.O: That’s what you’ve got a reputation for.
And then… came the lawsuits. But none of them for that kind of stuff. They were all for like wacky stuff. Like somebody had tickets for the show, the girl couldn’t go for some reason so her friends went and had a really good time and she had a really shit night so somehow we were to blame ‘cos we put on a good show. You know, Americans, we have that reputation because we like to sue people…. Lupus: One of them was at a festival and there was a girl and she was walking past to go over and see, I dunno, Nickelback or something. Looked over to see what we were doing on stage, tripped, broke her ankle. Sued us! Jared: We just did a US tour and every night there was like a nude thing and every night Ifan, our tour manager, would come up and he’d say ‘tonight, don’t do THIS’. The next night – ‘tonight you can do THAT but don’t do THIS’. We ended up with so many lawsuits that we got dumped by our insurance company. The only insurance company that would cover us doesn’t allow us to do anything. We can’t go into the audience, the audience can’t come up on stage. (That doesn’t stop Evil Jared taking a header into the crowd later or a ton of crowd surfing.) The only way we can do a show is if we go out and do our show from 2000 and castrate it. So you’re just going to see a bunch of lame music onstage. Lupus: Ha! Now we actually have to rely on playing our instruments, which we’re not so good at! V.O: Offending people? Lupus: We’ll do some of that if all goes well. Jared: That’s just our nasty personality.
Jared: Well, we’re old now. V.O: Where does that leave you when you’re, like, fifty or sixty? Jared: We’re still there. I’m game. Though I think we should hire kids who look like us to go out and do the Bloodhound Gang experience. V.O: You’ve got quite a young audience out there tonight. Jared: We make juvenile music that’s geared towards twelve year olds. V.O: So when you’re sitting round coming up with stuff have you got something in mind? Jared: Just crap that makes us laugh like in the tour bus or the dressing room. Lupus: It’s just for our amusement and we just happened to get lucky I guess. V.O: It’s the sort of thing that makes you laugh then think – ‘I shouldn’t be laughing at that’. Jared: It’s all a bit wrong. That’s what’s great about it. We get onto talking about other countries, like Finland, and discover The Bloodhound Gang put out HIM’s first four records in the US because no-one else would. Jared: He does not wash his hair and, unlike girls, he doesn’t take his make up off before he goes to bed. So he wakes up looking like Carrie in that Stephen King movie. Jared: Japan – That was creepy. All the bars are, like, in the middle of malls. And the fans there, they would amass in the hotel but they wouldn’t talk, they’d just stare. Lupus: You’d see people pointing and giggling at you. They’d never come over and say ‘hi, can you sign this’. Jared: There were these three chicks in Tokyo. They’d just sit there and wouldn’t leave to eat, sleep or bathe. And we were there for three or four days. I’d come back from the karaoke bar at six in the morning and they’d be there, he’d come down for breakfast at seven o’clock and they’d still be there. All day long there’s these filthy Japanese girls….
Lupus: They wouldn’t even acknowledge you actually, it was the weirdest thing. Jared: We shoulda given them a bottle of saki and got them all tanked up then we coulda had our our way with them. I’d love to get me some of that yellow boogie… Lupus: I haven’t heard that one in years (Laughs) And with that tasteful reminder of the Bloodhound Gang and their sophisticated, subtle humour, we leave you with the invitation to check out our live review.
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