So Dead Neon. Doom, from Vegas. Awesome as hell. Love the album. Got to interview Jarett Keen, and here are the results. Oh, and he actually name checks Funeral Rain. You’ll notice it below. Enjoy!
Can you tell the readers a little about yourself?
I’m an academically trained writer who has spent too many years teaching subjects like critical theory and creative writing at universities. In Las Vegas, though, I’ve made a living as a commercial writer. I cover the local music and arts and literary scenes for weekly newspapers, as well as the celeb scene for lifestyle mags and national and international newspapers. I also review movies and stage plays and dive bars and strip clubs and whatever else editors throw at me. I’ve written employee newsletters for the major casinos in town. I used to be part of the “stalkerazzi,” tracking the Sin City whereabouts of Ben Affleck and Sandra Bullock and Britney Spears for People magazine. The only thing I haven’t written in Vegas are those girlie catalogs you find here in the streets. It may come to that. Hopefully not.
Have you been a Nevada native your whole life?
No, I was born and raised in Tampa, Florida–death metal capital of the world. I’m in my 30s, so I was a teenager when bands like Death, Obituary, Deicide, Assuck, Morbid Angel, Nasty Savage, Cannibal Corpse, and Savatage were coming up through the underground. I saw them all perform live at venues like The Brass Mug. I’d drive by Morrisound Studio and visit Ace’s to buy cassettes and hit Thoroughbred Music to fondle guitars and dream of being in a band worthy enough of to be a part of the metal scene. But I loved punk and goth and what was then called alternative rock, too, and that led me down a much different musical path and into writing. No one really wrote intelligently about death metal back then. There were a few Florida zines, which I loved at the time but can’t recall the names of now. They’re a few of them mixed up in my comics collection somewhere I think. Today there are so many smart metal forums like Funeral Rain[!!], Teeth of the Divine, Metal Psalter, etc.
You have an actual Doctorate in English. Where did you study at, and how long did it take to get your PhD?
It took me six years to earn my PhD in English from Florida State University. I was 27 when I earned my doctorate, and then I immediately moved to Las Vegas with my wife who is a professor at the university here.
What does having a PhD in English mean for most people as far as having a career goes?
An English PhD really offers no other career career except being an English professor. I’ve made it work to my advantage, though, as a commercial writer and alt-weekly writer, so the doctorate has helped me land many freelance writing gigs. Still, I don’t know too many people with PhDs who do what I do. Most of them are adjunct professors at big colleges and a few are now tenured faculty at universities in remote areas of the country.
What led you to become a Doctor in English?
Growing up, I always loved to read–comic books, sci-fi/fantasy novels, old Rolling Stone album reviews, wild and woolly nonfiction and music writing by Hunter S. Thompson and Lester Bangs. I lost my taste for math and hard science as a teenager and became overly enamored of books.
How do you think having your Doctorate has shaped Dead Neon?
Well, at cocktail parties, my doctorate allows me to better articulate a valid appreciation for heavy metal lyrics, which are often dismissed by academics as being rather silly. Some of my professors would actually bring Bob Dylan lyrics into class and Dylan’s lyrics often appear in poetry textbook anthologies. But I think Dio’s lyrics are just as important and equally as powerful. Not many professors would agree with my assessment, however. That said, bands like Cannibal Corpse don’t really lend credence to my argument. I love Cannibal Corpse.
Dead Neon was created in response to you driving through the Nevada nuclear testing grounds. But what brought your desire to take that drive?
I’d been living in Vegas for seven years and had never visited the test site, which is less than 100 miles from my house. I felt it had to be done if I was going to call myself a real Las Vegan. I wasn’t expecting much, and in fact there isn’t much, but the desolation there is so absolute that it inspired me to form Dead Neon. The Cold War inspired a terrifying level of psychopathology, and the test site is evidence of this.
What kinds of sights did you actually see, as far as humanity goes, in the nuke sites?
Well, there’s no actual humanity out there, unless you count the tour bus, which is full of tourists, mostly old people, and a few onsite pockets of old government workers who aren’t doing anything except eating out of vending machines and drinking what I imagine must be irradiated coffee from the mess hall. I was the youngest person on the bus, and I’m old. I don’t even think the privately contracted security guards at the site gate were younger than 40. They may have looked old because they’re all Iraq and Afghan vets. In any case, the site only consists of giant craters in the desert and of course Doom Town, a very small collection of houses designed to test the affects of a nuclear blast.
What kind of music do you usually listen to, and what bands do you think informed your sound the most?
As a music writer and a kind of music historian of Las Vegas punk/metal, I kept running into the name Goatlord. Turns out Goatlord was a pioneering death-doom band in Vegas that made some startling music in the mid-’80s. Finally got a hold of their stuff just prior to my test site tour, and I was blasting the demos collection, which is called Distorted Birth, and Leonard Cohen’s The Future on this broken iPod all the way to and from and in and around the site. I couldn’t skip songs and had to listen to these two albums all the way straight through over and over again. Goatlord’s music is so perfect in its post-apocalyptic sound and subject matter, lots of great imagery about mutants and soldiers and dark satanic rites, while Cohen’s lyrics are so precise in conjuring the essential brokenness of humanity, that hearing them together while driving across nuke-scarred terrain with a bunch of Red Hat Society ladies left a mark on my soul. I felt I had to sonically recreate the experience somehow by creating an album in which Las Vegas has been hit with some kind of nuke.
You just started playing guitar now, to write the Dead Neon material. Did you take any lessons, or did you figure it out yourself?
I’m not being entirely honest, I guess. I was a choirboy before my voice changed for a big Episcopal church in Tampa and I played bass guitar for a jangle-pop band in high school, so there was a significant amount of musical training and involvement in my life 20 years ago. But I only recently started playing guitar in earnest, and in a very metal style. You know, bending notes, hammer-ons, feedback, harmonics all that stuff. No shredding solos, obviously. But I don’t think flashy technique suits the music of Dead Neon. Hellhammer didn’t need wanky solos either, I figure.
What kind of guitar are you using? Do you have a growing collection, or just one or two?
All I have right now is a pink Hello Kitty Fender that I bought with a case for $99 at Sam Ash. I liked the name Ash, which is what Dead Neon is preaching about—a future of black ash—so that’s why I entered the store. The guitar earns me a lot of quizzical looks, but I don’t care. It sounds great, like something a radioactive mutant would play in a destroyed Vegas.
In the same vein as the last question, what kind of amps and effects are you using? Are you a ‘brand man’ or do you just use what sounds good?
RAT distortion pedal through a Fender Twin, and that’s it. No, I don’t really know any brands. In my defense, I don’t want Dead Neon to sound polished or professional. If I ever have a week to kill, I’d love to experiment with off-brand amps and axes to find the most evil and weird tone possible.
What kind of drum set-up is Jessie rocking with?
No idea. He’s a singer/guitarist in a local and incredible indie-rock band called Minor Suns, so I think the set-up is borrowed or stolen. Jessie is also the producer/engineer. It was his idea to record the album in an abandoned warehouse behind a giant strip club. He has some device called a Korg, which he used to record Dead Neon. There’s a lot of weird crime in the area, and sometimes our recording sessions were interrupted by hookers and drug salesmen looking for clients. You can hear one or more of them screaming in the background trying to get our attention as we’re recording. We left that in because the screams sound like people being eaten alive by zombies.
How about Jaq’s bass rig?
He works in a vintage guitar shop, so he grabs all kinds of crazy things–Orange, Sunn, Ampeg, etc. Whatever he can fit into his beat-up Subaru that day, I imagine. He uses a RAT, too, I believe.
Is Dead Neon a touring band?
We only play Vegas divebars. But we’d love to play an underground metal fest in Bulgaria or something like that. My dream is to be invited to perform at an NWN event.
How has the fan response been to live shows?
Fan response in Vegas has been wonderful, but we tend to draw a lot of black metal fans and crust-punkers. Not much of a doom-metal community in Vegas, despite the Doom in June fest this year and hopefully next. There were no local bands on that bill last summer, simply because there are no real doom-metal bands in Vegas, unless you count Spun in Darkness, who are death-doom and fantastic.
The album was released on tape, independently. Is there any plans to release it on CD as well?
I don’t enjoy the CD format much anymore. I only made the album available digitally for review and file-sharing purposes. I have an old boombox set up in my writing office and I just crank black metal cassettes on it all day and night long.
Do you think you would ever sign to a label? And if so, what would the label have to be offering before you even thought of it?
We are signed to a cassette label called Ecophagy Records here in Las Vegas. The advantage is that they buy tapes from us, sell them, and then buy more tapes. We only made 100 and they’re almost gone, so I’m tempted to make more. But I don’t think so. We’ll probably just move on to the next album, which we’ve already contracted to Hex Records, another great cassette-only label here in town. The only bigger labels I would sign with are good ones like NWN, Profound Lore, Ibex Moon, Southern Lord, 20 Buck Spin, and so on. These days I think bands have to offer something to a label to be signed, like a willingness to tour their butts off. I don’t see a point in getting signed to a bigger outfit unless you’re in it to make money. That is not the goal of Dead Neon. We just want to break even and not lose money and have fun making art.
What does the name Dead Neon mean to you?
It means the end of Vegas, wiped out by a dirty bomb or nuke attack or some kind of man-made disaster. It means a shattered Strip with the lights out, forever and ever, and the survivors struggling and failing to survive, and God’s face turned away for the last time.
Will future songs and albums be based on your drive through the test sites?
No. Dead Neon II: Casinonomicon is already written, and this time I’m exploring the idea of Las Vegas as a Satanic, supernatural playground, where people lose their souls and worse.
Do you think you’ll ever travel to other test sites for inspiration?
Don’t even know of any other sites. They’re probably all the same, just massive impact craters in the middle of nowhere. Everyone should visit the Nevada Test Site, which is now called the Nevada National Security Site or N2S2. It will fill you with banal dread.
Of all the ways you could have expressed your experience, why did you choose music? And more specifically, why doom metal?
Well, the test site experience also inspired me to edit an anthology of post-apocalyptic short stories for the University of Nevada Press called Dead Neon: Tales of Near-Future Las Vegas. The book contains 14 stories written by Vegas-based and Vegas-familiar authors. Doom metal has always, for me, been about the final days, the end of the world. So it’s the perfect metal subgenre. Thrash would’ve been fun, but there’s already plenty of great post-apocalyptic thrash and thrash-punk out there like Toxic Holocaust and Wastelander. But because of my lack of technical skill and chops thrash at this point, it’s pretty difficult for me to write thrash riffs and pull it off effectively. If I ever do a thrash album, I’ll probably just write the lyrics and sing and let someone else handle the guitar stuff.
Was there any other styles of music you experimented with?
No, but I’ve been toying with writing a folk-metal album. I have a nylon string guitar, so I’m experimenting with that right now.
Considering your schooling, you probably enjoy reading a little. What do you read for personal enjoyment?
I enjoy reading mostly obscure and very violent books that metalheads would get a kick out of: Thomas Disch’s The Genocides, John Williams’ Butcher’s Crossing, Tom Franklin’s Smonk, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Andrew Huebner’s American By Blood, William Kotzwinkle’s Dr. Rat, David Gunn’s Death’s Head, and Matthew Derby’s Super Flat Times. To name more than a few.
Do you think any of your personal reading influence your music or lyrics?
Oh, most definitely. I can’t imagine reading books without metal blasting in the background, or blasting metal without a great book nearby.
Any final thoughts you’d like to add?
Next time you’re in Vegas, check out the Atomic Testing Museum. It’s an eerily fascinating place to learn about the Cold War in Nevada.
