This one’s gonna be kinda tough, people. On a lot of levels…
A few months ago, I wrote about the more “public” aspects that can come with being a comicbook professional. Interviews, store signings, convention appearances, etc… it all seems to come with the dinner. I suppose, for certain people, this kind of spotlight suddenly shining down on them might seem slightly daunting, at first. Totally understandable. Not everyone wants to post their face on TikTok, share their innermost thoughts on X or talk candidly to the world on any platform. And, believe it or not, conducting oneself appropriately in “the press” -- whatever that means these days -- is not something that comes naturally to most people, no matter what their level of talent in their chosen field might be. It often takes a bit of practice to get even somewhat comfortable with it. Even if you spent countless hours as a delusional kid, interviewing yourself in the shower about all the shit you haven’t done yet, you’re never 100% prepared for the real thing.
But as I wrote about before, I had an ever-so-slight advantage (if you could call it that) when I first started showing up in Wizard Magazine, the Comics Journal, the Comic Buyer’s Guide and Comic Shop News… or on the early comic news websites like Newsarama and Comic Book Resources… or did countless one-offs with other media outlets of all shapes and sizes, most of which didn’t end up going the distance.
Here’s a page from my creator spotlight article/interview from a 1998 issue of Wizard Magazine. As you can see, they brought a professional photographer into my shitty Hollywood apartment to… I dunno… catch the writer at work in his natural habitat, I guess? In the photo, you can plainly see my humble beginnings, hunting and pecking on a crummy little laptop that, these days, probably wouldn’t hold a single issue’s worth of full-color jpegs. You can also see, I had some sense of how to pose so I didn’t look completely awkward (aside from slouching so much in my chair that it looked like I had some kind of beer gut happening)…
Anyway, like I was saying… the very meager advantage I had was that, a few years prior to breaking in as a comicbook professional, I had already done my fair share of press -- for the band I was in back when the city of Memphis, Tennessee was the place I called home (although, as you’ll soon see for yourselves, I had a… complicated relationship with good ol’ Bluff City). The Devil Brothers might’ve been a decent rock n’ roll combo in our young heyday, but we were damn good at making noise. Here… now… I present the proof.
(just know as we once again venture into the distant past… that I’m experiencing a painful, full-on body cringe revisiting these articles…)
The first bit of press we received was in a cool, little fanzine -- fairly new at the time -- called Shake, Rattle & Roll. I had known the publisher and founder personally when we both attended Memphis State University (before he started publishing and before I dropped out) so once my band was effectively up and running, it wasn’t too terribly difficult to provide his new publishing venture a bit of content. If I recall, the article and accompanying photo was, more than anything, a bit of performance art on everybody’s part (including the writer’s).
In case you’re wondering, I’m the punk with the ridiculous, hand-lettered graffiti scrawled all over his arms…
Classy, huh?
While that first article might’ve been a bit of a goof, our next appearance was anything but. Writer John Floyd was the main music journalist for the free local paper, The Memphis Flyer (the current online version can be found here). He’d come out to see us play a gig at Club Six-One-Six and this article (featuring a fairly earnest interview with yours truly) was the result. When his headline boldly claimed that we “may be Memphis’ finest hard rockers”, I can tell you that some folks took that shit seriously.
As you can see, even at 22 years old, I was already an absolutely scintillating interview subject…!
That kind of press soon had a few major record labels sniffing around our door. At that time, I was working a day job as a fry cook at a pair of local strip clubs, Tiffany’s (located at the corner of Getwell and Winchester) and Platinum Plus (on Mt. Moriah in Midtown). Sadly, both clubs have long since closed their doors, but believe me, there was no better place for a young punk rocker (who had recently dropped out of college) to have worked. Life was pretty sweet, but ultimately the record company interest didn’t amount to much more than a typical popcorn fart.
Finally, a year later -- and just two months before I made my fateful move to sunny California -- we showed up in the main city newspaper, The Commercial Appeal. This was as mainstream as it got, when it came to print media in Memphis. This was the paper that was delivered to most people’s doorstep every day… and here we were, full of piss and attitude, all over the entertainment page. C’mon, the headline says it all…
I mean… yikes. I honestly can’t say how many “bridges” we had actually “burned”. Probably a lot more in our minds than there actually was in reality. We made our own mark, that’s for sure. Although, truthfully, it was more like we left a bit of a scar.
Regardless, my thesis still stands. I’m sincerely grateful that I got a lot of dumb shit out of my system in the local Memphis media outlets (such as they were at the time) before my public persona was eventually unleashed nationwide in the pages of Wizard Magazine and other outlets.
As the great James T. Kirk once said, we learn by doing…
Joe Casey
USA
great
The real question is... Is there any music from The Devil Brothers out there that is accessible?