Let’s say you walk into a concert venue—like Pappy and Harriet’s Pioneertown Palace on Friday, Jan. 27—not knowing who you are about to see. The stage lights up; out comes the band, and they’re all dressed up as nightmare-fueled versions of McDonald’s characters.
The Hamburglar is on drums. Something resembling Grimace is on bass. Mayor McCheese is on guitar—and then out comes a frightening take on Ronald McDonald known as Ronald Osbourne. If things couldn’t get any weirder, Ronald lights a grill while McCheese starts to belt out a flawless version of a Black Sabbath song—except the lyrics have been changed to reflect the horrors of fast food.
You’re watching Mac Sabbath, described as “the best fast-food-themed Black Sabbath tribute band ever.” Catch the protest/parody band at Pappy’s on Friday, Jan. 27, with a double-dose of local rock from Flames of Durga and Fever Dog opening up the night.
Part of Mac Sabbath’s shtick is for the musicians to remain anonymous, so I set up an interview with the band’s manager, Mike Odd. It was, indeed, odd.
“There’s nothing normal about how this all went down,” Odd said during a recent phone interview. “I used to have my own oddities museum in East Hollywood called the Rosemary’s Billygoat Odditorium. I’ve kind of been this purveyor of weirdness and oddities and strange things for a long time now, and what happens when you put yourself into that sort of situation is the weird stuff just starts following you around—long after you stop seeking it. Even after I closed the shop and kind of went online with it, I would still get these strange calls, like, ‘Oh, come out to my shed, and take a look at my two-headed otter skeleton.’ I get this call: ‘Oh, you gotta come out to this hamburger franchise, in Chatsworth, and it’s gonna change your life.’
“I thought they’d probably try to sell me on a hamburger bun with the Virgin Mary toasted on there or something. I go down there, and it ends up being this secret kind of fight club, like a middle-of-the-night meeting in the basement of this burger franchise. There are all these people who are employees of this thing, and they have this band playing down there, who are mutated mascots, screaming about GMOs and Monsanto. This Ronald Osborne guy tells me it’s been this secret thing, and that they’ve only done it there, and that he’s choosing me to be the manager and bring it literally above ground because of stuff that I had written in the press about Black Sabbath. I sing for a band called Rosemary’s Billygoat, so I’ve been doing this sort of horror, theatrical, costume-rock thing for, like, 30 years, so I guess, for some reason, they thought that I would be a good person to figure it out.”
Odd said that working Mac Sabbath, and Ronald Osbourne in particular, is abnormal.
“Seven years later, it’s become a full-time job dealing with this really strange individual who will not talk to anybody, and will not acknowledge any modern technology,” Odd said. “He insists that he time-travels from the ’70s, and he won’t listen to anything modern. When I’m trying to be the manager and trying to do normal things, like get them to stream or do MP3s, it just becomes madness.”
While the idea of Mac Sabbath may seem like the result of a bad drug trip, Odd insisted that the band is family-friendly.
“If you look deep into Mac Sabbath lyrics, it really is tearing into the fast-food industry, into the meat industry, into the government being connected, into this sort of conspiracy of poisoning people,” Odd said. “(Osbourne’s) really into getting that message to all ages of people, so because of that, he always talks about being a family band, and there’s no cursing or drug or sex talk or anything like that. It’s all something you can take your kids to—and in that way, he is a lot like a birthday-party clown. His whole thing is to save the world from its current state of sustenance and music and get back to a time where rock was rock, and food was more organic.”
So what’s up with the grill and other stage accompaniments?
“If nothing else, I think it helps get it noticed,” Odd said. “When you go see them, it’s not like it’s some preachy food PSA. It’s a big, theatrical, arena-sized stage show squeezed into a club size-stage—and it’s very exciting. There are all the colors and craziness, which is just spilling over into the audience literally. It kind of fuses the band with the audience and gets people really involved. It’s really something to see. I mean, he’s literally flipping burgers on a smoking grill.”
Mac Sabbath’s show indoors at Pappy and Harriet’s may be the band’s most intimate yet.
“I think that is probably going to be pushing the smallest (venue) almost ever, since the bomb-shelter basement of the shall-remain-nameless burger joint,” Odd said. “There was one very early show, maybe the second or third show that I was involved in, where I couldn’t fit the whole band on the stage, and just the drummer had to go on the stage.”
Mac Sabbath is billed as being the pioneering band of drive-thru metal.
“That’s Ronald’s whole thing!” Odd said. “He says, ‘We invented drive thru metal,’ and he’s always going on about Cinnabon Jovi, Led Zeppelin-N-Out, Chick-fil-AC/DC, or whatever it is, and I would cross it off as just Ronald being crazy. Then we’re in Cleveland one time, and Burger King Diamond comes out singing for this opening band, and Ronald is screaming at me and saying, ‘This is a travesty! How could you let this happen? You must be in on this!’ He goes, ‘I was talking to security, and they said they didn’t know anything about it, but I think they’re telling me a whopper.’”
Mac Sabbath’s song “Frying Pan” (a take on “Iron Man”) includes this lyric: “I once burned your meal / My old job was cooking veal / Now it’s a culinary crime / All our future is pink slime.”
“Drive thru metal is not condoning a drive-thru lifestyle; it’s quite the opposite,” said Odd. “It’s just commenting on it and making you aware of it, and asking you to slow down and see what’s in your food, and investigate it, and be smart about it. There’s this one chemical, I think, that is in most of the buns of fast food in America, and it’s only in America, because it’s banned in every other country. There’s a line in the song ‘Organic Funeral’ which is about the death of real food, and it’s azodicarbonamide. That one-word chemical has the same amount of syllables as an entire line in the Black Sabbath song—and it’s some kind of chemical that they use in yoga mats or something.”
Mac Sabbath, as you might guess, is not interested in typical forms of releasing music.
“The first thing that came out was a coloring book that had a flexi disc in it,” said Odd. “Osbourne’s very cognizant to try to do stuff that’s anti-industry in general—not just anti-food industry, but anti-music industry. A coloring book with a flexi disc is something you’re not going to see a record company put out … but it’s something that does appeal to kids.”
As for Mac Sabbath’s next musical release? Odd said he hopes it’s “something I can produce without contacting Fisher Price.”
Mac Sabbath will perform with Flames of Durga and Fever Dog at 9:30 p.m., Friday, Jan. 27, at Pappy and Harriet’s Pioneertown Palace, 53688 Pioneertown Road, in Pioneertown. Tickets are $20, and the show is all-ages. For tickets or more information, call 760-228-2222, or visit pappyandharriets.com.