The Toxhards, a rock band from Los Angeles, are currently on tour opening for the group, Here Come the Mummies. In this interview, I speak to them about their theatrical live shows and lively fan base.
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Bianca Louise Aquino: Hi, I’m Bianca Aquino. I’m a student reporter at LMU. Could you all introduce yourselves and the instruments you play for The Toxhards?
Emerson Harris: Sure. Hi, I’m Emerson. I mainly play, like, rhythm guitar and bass. And that basically covers it.
Casey Donovan: I’m Casey. I play the drums and then I sing up front in the pig song in the pig suit. And…that’s fun.
Alan Macchiarolo: (laughs) I’m Alan. I play bass and sing most of the time, but [Casey] also sings some of the time and he sings the most memorable of the time.
Emerson Harris: You play guitar too.
Alan Macchiarolo: I play guitar and then while he’s singing, I’ll go on drums. Yeah, and then, there’s sometimes some keyboards and then we’ve got a touring member of the band right now, Alex Mayhem, as we call him. He’s just guitar, but he also plays banjo and also keys and he can play bass too. And we’ll probably be throwing him on bass for a few songs.
Emerson Harris: He can play drums.
Alan Macchiarolo: Yeah, everyone plays something at some point, you know.
Casey Donovan: We’re kind of a “musical chairs” situation.
Everyone’s multitalented. So, congratulations on your fall tour! So you just got started performing on the road, how has it been so far?
Emerson Harris: It’s been great.
Alan Macchiarolo: Yeah, we’re opening for this like older funk, costume, Halloween-
Emerson Harris: Jazz fusion funk.
Alan Macchiarolo: Jazz fusion funk outfit called Here Come the Mummies. They’re this sort of like, I don’t even know how to describe it, but they’ve been a staple of, like, Halloween time in like the Midwest and stuff for like 25 years. They’ve been touring, and they’ve built up this very loyal following. They have this song called “Freak Flag”, and the chorus is like,
Alan Macchiarolo and Casey Donovan: (singing) Let your freak, let your freak, let your freak flag fly!
Alan Macchiarolo: Everyone in the crowd holds up a flag that says “Freak”, you know, it’s like it’s kind of like a little cult band.
Emerson Harris: They’re all dressed as mummies and like they’ll like there’s a whole brass section So people will jump out and take solos and stuff. Like the musicianship is unreal. Yeah, they’re really, really good.
Alan Macchiarolo: And so we’ve been opening for them for like almost 30 dates on their tour and we’re supplementing like in between a lot of these opening shows for them, we’re doing our own headline shows. We just did a headline show in Iowa City and we were not expecting the turnout that we had for Iowa City. They came out in droves. The crowd was singing along to all of our songs, like scream singing, you know, like I never had, we’d never had that happen before. As a singer, I was like, struggling to hear myself through the monitor because everyone was so loud. I was like, “Oh my gosh. I’m like, oh no, wait, that’s everybody!” So that’s been really, really fun.
Emerson Harris: Nevertheless, it’s been surreal because we get that and then also we open for the mummies that joins like, you know The House of Blues in Chicago, you know, you’re on stage looking up and you’re like, “Where am I right now? This is incredible.” Yeah, it’s been surreal.
Yeah, that sounds great. So you have a great emphasis on your live performances, like the pig suit and like throwing glass bottles at each other. What is your creative process for that? Do you write the songs with the performances in mind, or do you think of the concepts that you want to do on stage and then write the songs to fit that?
Alan Macchiarolo: That’s a good question. We actually don’t ever think of how we’re gonna perform the song until after the song is done. Like for “The Coffee Song”, during that song there’s an extended jam and then Emerson will go and literally like we have coffee brewing on stage. Like when the show starts we’ll go up and hit the coffee maker, we have it already prepped during soundcheck.
Emerson Harris: Sitting on the bass amp.
Alan Macchiarolo: Sitting on my amp and we’ll have this extended jam and Emerson will put on like a barista outfit that actually, a fan made for us. And he’ll put that on and run into the crowd with a pot of coffee and a few cups, and he’ll pour coffee for like, people in the audience.
Emerson Harris: Like people are raising their hands in the audience.
Oh, wow!
Alan Macchiarolo: Yeah. So like, we didn’t think of doing that, you know, before that song was written or while we were writing that song. It’s like every time we have a new song, we always want to try and find like something that we can do to make that song like memorable. A huge influence would be like something like Stop Making Sense by The Talking Heads which kind of had a huge resurgence this past year, which was awesome.
Emerson Harris: It’s Talking Heads.
Alan Macchiarolo: (laughs) Sorry, Talking Heads. There is no “The”, I’m sorry. Just like I love Pretenders and Eagles. But like, another great show from David Byrne and company was American Utopia, which he did on Broadway for many years, and there’s a film of that as well that Spike Lee directed, actually. And every single song has some sort of lighting element or theatrical element or immersive element for the audience that they don’t repeat. They just do it for that song and that makes every single song very distinctive and that’s like a huge influence as to what we do.
We never play the same set list twice. So, we’ll have like a similar sequence of songs but we’ll always swap something out. Like, we’ll swap out a cover, we’ll swap out a couple originals. So, if you come to our shows, every single song is going to be very different in terms of like some sort of, theatrical. I mean people could say “gimmick” and it is, it could be a little gimmicky. It’s a little novelty sort of thing but it makes it memorable.
Not only will you have that per song, you’ll also never see the same show twice if you come and see us live. We really pride ourselves on, I guess being as diverse in our live performances as possible because as like music fans ourselves, that’s the type of live shows we love seeing.
Like I love going to see like Dead and Company. I also love like seeing a band like Rush who, you know, God rest in peace Neil Peart, the greatest musician who ever lived. Like their shows were very like, there’s one element per song that you will remember for the rest of your life, and then the next song has another element. Those types of shows are extremely influential. So, we just kind of take all these different influences and see how we can make it our own.
I see on a lot of your comments on social media, it’s always like, “someone has to be a theater kid”, stuff like that.
Alan Macchiarolo: We give off theater kid energy for sure.
Emerson Harris: Mm-Hmm. a hundred percent.
It’s not a bad thing. (laughs)
Alan Macchiarolo: No, not at all.
Casey Donovan: That’s an accurate observation.
Alan Macchiarolo: Look, I’ll say this, like, that was like the sort of theater stuff that I did, like in high school. We all met in the theater club. It was called “The Players Society”. Yeah, at Chapman University. That club was interesting because it was all student written shows for the most part.So, like, someone in this club would write a show and then we would put it on in a classroom with, like, a table and a chair. You know what I’m saying?
Emerson Harris: That more like, we did, like, my first show with them was a stage adaptation of Tommy Wiseau’s The Room. You know? Because I play Mark. You know, so it was, it was kind of all over the map.
Alan Macchiarolo: Yeah, it was a very “meme-y” sort of thing. And it was a lot of fun. It was just a lot of hanging out. And then a lot of those shows was basically like everyone in rehearsal trying to make each other laugh as much as possible, and that would bleed into the shows. That’s kind of our whole vibe is like when we’re rehearsing and when we’re even during soundcheck, we’re dropping references and, and just saying things to try and make ourselves laugh, or even pitching bits, like, “Oh, why don’t we have everything drop out except the banjo?” And then we’ll just go from there, like, “Oh, nice!” And then we do it, we just start laughing, we can’t even-
Emerson Harris: I was gonna say, Angus itself is kind of an example of that, because it was just [Casey] showing up in the hog suit, because you were like, “LOL, what if I got the hog suit online?” and showed up in it, you know?
Alan Macchiarolo: Yeah, like, “Angus, the Prize Winning Hog” which is one of our heaviest progressive rock songs, and as the Rush fan, I didn’t write it, [Casey] did. He’s a Weezer stan, and he writes this like, three and a half minute dream theater album. He wrote it, he walked in, his eyes may have been blood-red from certain substances. And he’s plunking out the notes on a piano. And he’s like, He’s like, “can you do this but metal?” And I’m like, “Okay, yes.”
And, when we were talking about how to do that live, we’re all getting together for rehearsal and then we get a call from him and he just says simply “Look outside”. We look out the window and peeking over his car is the ears and eyes of this seven-foot-tall pig suit inflatable pig suit and we’re like, “Oh my god!” Fifty bucks on Amazon, and that fifty bucks on Amazon was probably the biggest, most important investment ever made in our career.
Emerson Harris. The most incredible ROI. (laughs)
Your latest single, “Satan’s Little Hell Song”, has tracks of your fans’ voices as the choir. What’s it like having such a supportive and interactive fanbase?
Emerson Harris: Oh, it’s awesome. Yeah, we can’t, yeah. It’s really fabulous.
Alan Macchiarolo: It was… an out of left field idea. Cause we’ve discovered that our fans are very interested in being a part of something creative in terms of [interacting with] the band. As we tour, fans will give us friendship bracelets, and there’s a lot of people crocheting stuff for us, and we have a collection of things that we are adding to the stage of stuff that our fans like to give us. And that’s just the nicest… Even saying the word, like the phrase, “our fans” is insane. It’s insane to us. We can’t even wrap our heads around it, but it is true. And, I think, a way to pay it forward as a music fan myself.
If a band that I loved was like having a thing where it’s like, “Hey, if you sing on this thing, we’ll bury you in a mix of, you know, this giant choir of everyone else,” I would hop on that immediately. It’s [about] thinking of things that as a music fan, what would I want out of a band? What would I be interested in doing as a fan of this band? How would I like to interact with them? And that seemed like a great idea.
It started off as… Do we want people like,-’cause our fans are very creative- do we want them to maybe make something and send it to us and we could put it in a video? But we thought that was just a logistical nightmare. And then I was like, well, we have this hook in the song where it’s, we’re all just singing, do-do-do-do! Do-do-do-do-do! (sings) And we were like, I want to just have a bunch of people who will send their stuff in. And, um, this poor guy (points to Emerson), he mixes all of our music, and he had to take-
Emerson Harris: All of it and make it a choir.
Alan Macchiarolo: He had to line every single one up.
Emerson Harris: Once the hard part of like aligning it was all done, just like hitting play, you’re like, “Oh sh*t, that f–king works! That’s so good.” It’s nice to just have people who are like, so inclined to want to participate and be that close with the music. You know what I mean? It almost speaks to how much what we do means to them, which is crazy to think about.
Photography by Hannah Gini
So that leads to your upcoming album, Your Neighborhood. Can you share more about the concept, because it’s a concept album, and how it is writing songs for characters and plotlines?
Alan Macchiarolo: It’s a concept record that’s basically a near death experience, the entire first half is a guy listening to the radio and the songs that he hears are the songs on the album. But then he gets in a car accident, and the entire second half of the record is that near death experience playing out, you know, what would be in real life, just a split second, it plays out over the entire second side. He sees people in his life that have passed on, he goes to hell and sees his afterlife could be, accepting that he might not have been the greatest person. Ultimately, it is an album of self-acceptance.
Emerson Harris: Personal responsibility.
Alan Macchiarolo: Personal responsibility and advocating for your self-worth because I think personal responsibility and self-worth, they go hand in hand. And that is essentially what Your Neighborhood is going to be about. One of the best songs on the record is actually a song Emerson wrote about his dad.
Emerson Harris: It’s kind of crazy how perfectly it ended up sort of fitting right in to the narrative. You know, it’s like not all the tracks that we’ve written for this, we went from, “Oh, and this song will be for the…”. Some things just sort of managed to, in their natural coming-to-be. Even “Satan’s Little Hell Song” was conceived way before this record ever was. We adjusted some things as we were working with it to make it work, not like it’s shoehorned. It’s all fitting together very nicely but it’s interesting the different sort of directions thatiIt’s all sort of culminating to work out the through line, which has been a challenge, but also being kind of exciting.
Do you have a release date?
Alan Macchiarolo: Not a release date, but hopefully in the spring. We’re actually on these days off we have from tour. We’re based out of Los Angeles, but-
Emerson Harris: We’re in the studio right now.
Alan Macchiarolo: We’re literally in the studio in Michigan. Right here. Working on the record. So, today we’re taking the afternoon off, but tomorrow we’re gonna do like a bunch of overdubs and vocals for one of the songs and just, like, (snaps) literally keep working. Some of the songs don’t have lyrics yet, and so we’re playing them live. I’m literally making up words on stage, performing them. And then I’m listening back to the recordings of the shows and going, “I actually really like that line. That line is really cool,” cause I, I feel like, Sometimes, like, sitting down and trying to be all “Thom Yorke smart” about what you’re writing is very difficult, you know?
So it’s like, a lot of times… This stream of consciousness thing that, like, just sort of is expelled out of you. Like, you can’t even describe it. It doesn’t feel like you are doing it. It’s like some sort of, you know, higher power. It’s, it’s sort of like writing a song for you, and it’s like, just kind of surrendering yourself to that almost unconscious, you know, part of the brain that is just all emotion.
Emerson: Soft brain.
Alan Macchiarolo: Yeah, soft brain is very useful. A lot of like, a lot of lyrics that-
Emerson Harris: A lot of the lyrics from the one about my dad came from that, sort of just like, trying to put myself in that headspace of letting sort of the words just sort of come out, you know?
Thank you so much to Alan, Casey, and Emerson for speaking with me and best of luck to The Toxhards on their tour!
This transcription was edited for clarity.
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