ERIC BEARD remembers the first time he saw Dave Michael perform, back in the early ’90s in a San Jose warehouse where Michael’s metal band Marquis de Sade hung out.”They were getting ready to practice and I said, ‘Where’s the singer?’ They said, ‘He’s upstairs in the closet, with his cape on, upside down,'” recalls Beard. “Then I remember they started playing a song and he ran down—there were like 10 steps, and he probably hit two of them on the way down—and his eyes were so red because he’d been upside down in a closet for an hour, and he’s got a cape on. And I’m like, ‘This guy’s possessed.'”For Michael at the time, it was just par for the course. “Yeah, I used to hang in the closet and just tweak myself out before a show. I don’t smoke at all, I don’t do weed or any of that—I’m way allergic to drugs. All I do is drink,” he says. “At the time, I didn’t like wearing clothes. So there’d be a big party going on and I’d just take off my clothes and walk around naked.”Little wonder that Beard would consider him the perfect frontman for a shock-rock band based around the unlikely pairing of evil clowns and astronauts, with a big side helping of explosives and silly string. It did, however, take him 12 years to do so. While still in their teens, they played briefly together in the more straightforward Xanthis, but then Michael co-founded the long-running South Bay metal band Imagika. Beard went to school, at Chico State, then moved to Southern California.
“I wrote some stuff for Motorhead, and trying to write rhythm tracks for people. I was doing studio work down in Hollywood,” he says. Meanwhile, back in the South Bay, Beard’s brother Mike, who books shows through his Man Down Productions, happened to give a disc of solo rhythm tracks Beard had been working on to Michael. “He calls me up,” says Beard, “and says, ‘I saw your brother, he gave me a CD, and I’ve written five songs to your stuff and I’m sending it to you.'””I just hounded him,” admits Michael. “He was in San Diego, and I flew down there, I didn’t care. I was like, ‘I’m going to work with him.’ Cause the music that he wrote was just like, holy crap! He had a lot of stuff, drums and guitars. I ended up taking it and structuring it, writing the lyrics and stuff. We had already clicked, but when we started working on stuff, and writing-wise, we started getting each other. I lacked a lot of things he has, and I wish I could say vice versa.”
By 2005, Beard had moved back to the South Bay, and Bomb & Scary was born at Rock Bottom Brewery in Campbell, where the duo would just throw out bizarre ideas until something stuck.
“First we were going to be Holy Cheeses. We were laughing, thinking about coming out onstage and throwing slabs of cheese,” says Michael. “We’d have some beers, and we’d just have a good time. He’d draw pictures, ‘How about you in a cage? And then there’s flying monkeys and stuff!'”
“He would say, ‘You’re the bomb,'” remembers Beard. “And he was always scary, the way he is. I said, ‘Our name should just be me and you, like Dave & Eric,’ I think I said ‘Tom and Jerry,’ and then ‘Bomb & Scary.'”
And so were the characters of Bomb and Scary born. At first, they played as a duo, with a 99-inch video screen behind them, to a click track. They also both wore makeup. Beard wasn’t comfortable wearing it, so he went with an astronaut jumpsuit emblazoned with a bomb on the back. When they added a bassist and drummer, they’d don matching jumpsuits.
But for Michael, the facepaint was a revelation. “It changed me. It gave me another personality, it really did,” he says.Michael even came up with maybe the weirdest backstory in the history of shock rock: “The story for Scary, in my brain, was that these astronauts went to one of Mars’ moons. They landed there and they fell through a hole, and there was a whole world of clowns. Bomb blew up one part of a building that was an insane asylum. He saw Scary breaking up a fight between a rolled-up piece of baloney and a butterfly.”Incredibly, the story only gets more insane from there, but it ends with Bomb spiriting Scary away to Earth to create chaos. This is how Michael’s brain works, and the pairing of the two has made for an interesting contrast. Beard is the musical mastermind, and also the analyst. When the band plays live, it’s not unusual to find him looking deep in thought, or scowling if the music doesn’t come out exactly right. Michael, on the other hand, is the daredevil. He’s turned his Scary character into not so much an evil clown as a dark ringleader, welcoming fans into the “Funhouse,” before that song, and posing maniacally for the sea of cameras that inevitably rise up out of the audience. The pair surround themselves with chaos both backstage and during their set, with crucified clowns up against he wall, a legion of jumpsuited band members and roadies, and a mascot named Chuckles with a giant evil-clown head who works the crowd, high-fiving fans and shooting silly string.
Perhaps the strangest thing at a Bomb & Scary show is that despite all the dark-carnival trappings, everyone is smiling and laughing. The vibe is so incredibly different than Insane Clown Posse, a group to which Bomb & Scary constantly have to fight off comparisons. The emphasis is much more on the music, a factor decidedly lacking in other shock-metal acts like Gwar.
Scary, though, is still likely to say anything or do something random at any time, like lick his staff comprised of Linda Blair’s head on a stick. “I just let him do what he does,” says Beard. “The bottom line is we love what we’re doing musically. We love heavy music, and we believe in our songs. The theatrics are a bonus.”
