The evil that Supersuckers do

It’s 10 o’clock in the morning. The average rock star is usually still fast asleep at this hour, more often than not recuperating from the previous night, but Supersuckers front man and registered low-end maniac Eddie Spaghetti is wide awake.

Not only that, he’s playing the part of stay-at-home dad, feeding his son breakfast and supervising the little terror while he plays a Spider-Man game on the computer.

Spaghetti, who is a larger than life, wickedly sarcastic fellow, is full of surprises this morning. Take the fact that in addition to being a rebel rocker, he’s also pretty damn good at crossword puzzles. “I’m not bad,” he chuckles, “I’m a human crossword juggernaut.”

The irony of his last statement, specifically the “I’m not bad” part, lingers in the air. You see, Spaghetti and his sonic cohorts—Ron Heathman, guitar; Dancing Eagle, drums; “Thunder” Bolton, guitar—have spent the past 15 years living the “sex, drugs, and rock-'n'-roll” cliché to the hilt. (Granted, in the ‘Suckers case the “drugs” are generally replaced by copious amounts of cold beer, but you get the gist.) Over the course of eight albums, this rag-tag quartet of hell raisers has specialized in raucous, balls-to-the-wall rock ‘n’ roll, the kind of music that begs to be blasted loudly and usually sounds better when confined within the walls of a dank, smoky club after several cold ones have been tossed back.

The band’s latest album, Motherfuckers Be Trippin', continues its descent into the loud, chugging maelstrom of classic barebones rock ‘n’ roll. It’s evil in the way all classic rock is: defiant, obnoxious and rendered in a completely devil-may-care swath of relentless energy.

As to who exactly these “motherfuckers” in the title might be, Spaghetti replies somewhat cryptically, “Just the motherfuckers in general. They be trippin'. Why? Because they do be. Simple as that.”

And is he trippin'? He smiles sardonically and replies without a hint of hesitation, “Totally. Always” Even around his son? “He’s trippin’ the hardest.”

Yes, it’s true. Eddie Spaghetti makes his living “doing the devil’s work,” but he is also a devoted father and husband. Eddie the Fourth, or “Quattro,” as he’s been nicknamed, already appears to have some of his daddy’s hell-raising inclinations coursing through his tiny veins. This becomes apparent when he asks his daddy for some milk and Eddie points across the room to where Quattro flung his glass only moments before. “You threw your milk across the room. I see it sittin’ right over there, you little rebel.”

Given his father’s lifestyle, one can’t help but wonder if little Quattro is truly evil or just a rambunctious little rug rat. “Well, you know, he’s evil like we are,” Spaghetti says of his son. “He’s playfully evil.” It runs in the family. “I was born with a tail; he was born with a horn, which we had to remove. If he’d had two, I would have left them. But he only had the one, so it had to go. He had kind of a unicorn thing goin’ on. That’s a little bit too peaceful.” Luckily for little Eddie, the horn removal was painless. “Yeah, it went along with his circumcision,” reveals his father. “We saved the horn,” he adds, “but we fed the foreskin to the dog.”

Tails and horns aside, does Spaghetti believe that rock needs to have a certain amount of evil attached to it to be exciting and relevant? “It does for me,” he responds. “I mean, that’s the whole trip, you know? It’s like I love all things rock, and I love even the clichés of rock ‘n’ roll, you know, the sex, the drugs, the killing. For me the whole imagery of starting as far back as Robert Johnson going to the crossroads and selling his soul to the devil and AC/DC and on through the history of I guess what we would call rock ‘n’ roll. … I think this theme that you are somehow in touch with and allowed and encouraged to tap into the ‘dark side of life,’ I think that’s what makes it interesting to me.”

Interesting, sure, but is it healthy? "In a way I think it is because I have this outlet for this side of me, and if I was working at the post office who’s to say that I wouldn’t whip out a gun and mow down my co-workers." Spaghetti chuckles devilishly. He’s got a point. Let’s just hope that Eddie continues to play the bass and that the Supersuckers persist in making ribald rock ‘n’ roll for a long time to come.