You figure there’s got to be a great story – or a great fictitious one, at least – behind a song titled “The Boardwalk Body,” right? Well, there is, but fans of “Jackass”-affiliated alternative-metallers CKY will have to wait until the fall to learn all about the inspiration behind frontman Deron Miller’s cryptic lyricism.
Without giving too much of the macabre story away, drummer Jess Margera revealed that the track is about a childhood trip Miller took with his family to Wildwood, New Jersey, where he “full-on found some dead body under the boardwalk.” Thankfully, CKY’s forthcoming yet-untitled fifth LP isn’t a concept piece – that just isn’t their style. Instead, Margera said the boys plan to take a step back and return to the chugging, fuzzed-out guitar glory of 1999’s Volume 1.
“We’re taking it one song at a time, because when you do it like that it’s kind of a pain in the ass, but every song has its own personality,” Margera said of the follow-up to 2005’s An Ã…nswer Can Be Found. The new album is still in the pre-production phase. “We like just banging out 12 songs, because then it just seems like the whole record’s from one session, and all the songs kind of blend together. We try to do that with every record, but the last album we ended up doing in two sessions. I love that last album, but I think we got a little too busy. The riffs were just too much, almost, in my opinion.”
With An Ã…nswer, the band’s last effort for Island Records, Margera felt CKY tried to show off a bit by overwhelming their trademark sound with insane riffs. “It was a total guitar record,” he explained. “On this next one, it’ll still sound like a CKY record, but Deron played me a ton of new riffs, and I’ve been working on a ton of stuff, but a couple of these riffs gave me that feeling I got when we did ’96 Quite Bitter Beings’ [from Volume 1 ]. [One] riff is just so distinctive, and when I first heard it, I called out of work so we could go demo it immediately. On this record, maybe some of the riffs are strong enough to be the chorus, like in ’96.’ I don’t know – I just want to get back to doing that stuff. I just want to get back to good rock.”
The album will be the band’s first for Roadrunner, the label it signed to in December after leaving Island. CKY will self-produce the effort, and according to Margera, of the songs they’ve been working on, only one other has a definitive title: “Hellions on Parade.” CKY will film much of the studio sessions for the recording of the song and hope to release a DVD soon.
In addition to his work with CKY, Margera’s been keeping busy working on various side projects and lending his talents to other bands’ work. He recorded all the drum tracks on Viking Skull’s upcoming Chapter II LP and has formed a band called Partners in Crime with CKY guitarist Chad Ginsburg and Guy Heller of Moistboyz.
But the band he’s most excited about – after CKY, that is – hasn’t even been assigned a name yet. It features Fireball Ministry’s Jim Rota and Clutch main man Neil Fallon.
“I was on a flight back from Germany, and I was looking at my iPod, and I looked at my top 10 list or whatever, and it was just like Clutch, Puny Human, Fireball Ministry, Led Zeppelin,” he said. “So I called everybody but Led Zeppelin, for obvious reasons, because I was recording in my home studio. I just invited them all up to my house, and we worked on two or three songs. That turned into five songs, then eight, 10, and now we have 12 songs.”
Margera said the Fallon-fronted act sounds like equal parts CKY, Clutch and Fireball Ministry, and had its first practice last month, following his pro-skateboarder brother Bam Margera’s wedding to Melissa Rothstein. While the group does intend to release an album, he’s not sure when that will be, given that the bands’ hectic schedules will make tracking the LP difficult.
“It’s like my supergroup, man,” he enthused. “It’s just cool as hell, and I’m psyched about it.”