By George Koroneos

It's hard to visit the Garden State and not notice the Tombstone Brawler's name plastered on almost every show flyer. The band has been rocking the East Coast for seven years with their brand of full-on rock n' roll and creepy psychobilly lyrics. Life In A Bungalo caught the Tombstones at a Civil Unrest Wednesday show at Connections. The band tore the place up with a more traditional rockabilly style (think Americana Punk) rather than the motorpsycho death metal that's been exported out of Europe lately. Highlights included a note for note translation of Iron Maiden's "Number of the Beast" from metal to honky tonk. Check out the band today (6/25) at the "South Orange Peel Out" and July 16 at the Lucky Cat in Brooklyn, NY.

There are five guys in the band. Doesn't that break some sort of law of psychobilly? Why go that route?
Pete: Cause we rule. Seriously, it’s because we need two guitarists for the type of music we want to play, and it gives us a much fuller sound.

So how did you guys get together?
Regis: Well I’m the only original member. We started like seven years ago, and it was more of a surf rock 'n' roll type thing, because I was listening to real traditional music. Members started changing and we finally got a real rhythm section and a great lead singer that showed up to practice all the time. I work great with Zacher and together we do great guitar work. We just kind of know where the other is going.

Did you always play a psychobilly style?
Regis: Chuck always did. I originally started out in Broken Heroes, but I always like rockabilly and blue grass. It’s what I grew up with. Chuck was in one of the first psychobilly bands out of Seattle called Los Gatos Locos, and when we got him, that’s when the band started to sound like a psychobilly band.

Charlie "Chuck" Splatterhead: You can label us psychobilly but we do a lot of real down to the roots music. If you were going to take a few styles of music and describe what we do there’s a rockabilly influence, a psychobilly influence. There’s a blue grass and surf influence. If you look at the original psychobilly like the Meteors, there was a lot of surf influence that a lot of the modern psychobilly bands bypass. I think it belongs in the music and we try to keep it in there.

Having grown up in New Jersey, I clearly remember the boom of punk rock bands in the mid-‘90s. There were shows every week and you could always find a good time somewhere. How do you guys think the New Jersey scene has changed in the last ten years?
Regis: To me, a lot of the people that tend to come to our shows, at least in Jersey, are a lot of the older crowd that used to be involved in the old hardcore scene in Jersey. We have a lot of the old Pipeline kids that come to our gigs. We are really proud of what we do, and we definitely are a psychobilly band, but we try not to pigeonhole ourselves by playing with psychobilly bands all the time. We like to play with punk rock bands. We get more of a response out of a punk crowd than we do from the psychobilly crowd because that’s more geared around a haircut then it is about the music. The scene now… You know I can’t really say what’s going on with the younger crowd because we don’t really play for a younger crowd that often. We play bars, and for most of the older crowd that use to be around back then that are still hanging around.

Pete: Psychobilly is the skinhead retirement plan around New York and New Jersey.

Paul: Punk is dead. Around 1994, there were a ton of bands from New York like the LES Stitches, the Blanks and all those great fucking bands, and when they broke up, punk died in NY. We’re just doing what we love. It’s great that there is a scene in Texas, but we’re not following a trend, we are just doing what we love.

Pete: We’d like to see a scene grow in New York. You know what’s great about LA? In LA you can get 900 people at a psychobilly show. I’ve seen it. In New York you can barely get 100.

Chuck: And that’s a good draw around here even for a big psychobilly band. Even when the Nekromantix and the Horrorpops came through town with Roger Miret, doing that punk vs. psycho tour, there were 450 people there. A band like ours can go out to Hollywood and co-headline a gig and 750 plus kids will come out. There’s money to be made on the west coast and there’s a good time to be had by all.

Pete: Regardless, this is where we are from and we are trying to build something here. I’ve seen it grow over the last year and I hope more people start coming to shows and more people get into this type of music. We are offering them something different then going to see your average three chord punk band, which to me, I have no interest in any more. There are exceptions to the rule, but we are hoping that a scene develops and it’s happening slowly.

Chuck: We are trying to get out there and just play as much as we can. Just get it out there, run it up the flagpole and see what happens. We’re having a good time,

What do you guys have going on right now? Are you touring behind an album?
Chuck: We’re not touring. We just finished recording our second album, “Meathook Lover,” and we have a 7” coming out. We all have careers and families between us, so we aren’t ready to jump in the van and tour the world for the next six months or anything like that. We did a stint in Europe last year, and when something good comes along we jump on it. Right now we’re just active in the area. We get ourselves out there at least in the home base and expand from there.

What was Europe like?
Paul: It was weird. We would go to one place and the crowd reaction would be fucking great. The crowd reaction would be awesome. We could act like typical Americans and they would love it. And sometimes they wouldn’t get our humor. We’d come on and we’d be fucking around with them and it would get lost in the translation. They would end up taking us too seriously. We went to Frankfurt, Germany, and thanked them for inventing the hot dog, and apparently they took real offence to it.

Chuck: To be honest, the scene in Europe, right now, is smaller than it was. The focus is on the U.S. right now. Unfortunately, it’s on the West Coast. All the European bands that I’m trying to get in touch with are all trying to get over here. The scene pretty much died out in Europe years ago. Now you have some of these bands that are bringing younger kids into it, but hopefully the kids get into some of the originators of the music not just the polished stuff that’s out there right now. It’s very similar to the punk rock scene in the ‘80s where it was huge in LA for years and remained somewhat small on the east coast until the late ‘80s when the hardcore scene started to flourish. There is a difference in the sounds and styles between the bands out there and over here, and there always is going to be a difference no matter what kind of music you’re playing.