interview by: Larissa Glasser

DethKlok: Metal, pandemonium, and coffee.

Brendon Small is living the ultimate metal dream. This summer, the comedian and musician will thrash and burn the metal world with DethKlok, his new show for “Adult Swim” on the Cartoon Network. For anyone familiar with late night cable, “Adult Swim” offers a rich landscape of worthy diversions like import anime (“Fullmetal Alchemist,” “Cowboy Bebop”), stop-motion with a vicious satiric bent (“Robot Chicken,” “Moral Orel”), and economized, violent mayhem (“Aqua Teen Hunger Force,” “Sealab 2021”).

Brendon started as a guitar student at Berklee College of Music in Boston. Influenced by Steve Morse, Paul Gilbert, Yngwie Malmsteen, Steve Vai, and Joe Satriani, he just knew he wanted to shred with those greats. After graduating, he instead found his vocation in comedy writing. After meeting the creators of “Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist,” Brendon broke onto the scene with “Home Movies,” a cartoon about an eight year-old film auteur. The show ran four seasons on Cartoon Network, and still maintains a loyal fanbase.

With the first season of DethKlok nearing completion, Brendon is ready to meld his biting sense of comedy into the heavy metal of his upbringing. Along with co-creator Tommy Blacha, he conjured DethKlok as the ultimate extreme metal band, and also the most famous. Within the framework of the show, DethKlok will not be what one might expect from a cartoon. The style is realistic and grandiose, even epic. DethKlok handles crowds and revenue that would dwarf even The Beatles. But according to Brendon Small, the band is “Just a thousand times more dangerous and a billion times more stupid.”

With that in mind, DethKlok is a force to be reckoned with. Having secured endorsement deals from Gibson, Krank Amps, Dunlop, Line 6, and even ProTools, the band has the potential to upstage Spinal Tap as the definitive entity in the metal canon.

To catch some behind the scenes views of DethKlok in production, visit http://www.adultswim.com/downloads/podcast/index.html

Ed's note: You can also check out Small wearing nothing but a Viking helmet in April, 2006's issue of "Playgirl." Hopefully "Small" is just in a name.

Maelstrom: DethKlok is in production right now. Do you know when we can expect the debut episode on “Adult Swim”?

Brendon Small: The date they’re telling me is August 6th [2006]. They’ve actually been releasing little teaser trailers on “Adult Swim,” and there are podcasts available through iTunes.

Maelstrom: So the show will be silly, but violent?

Brendon Small: Oh yes, it will be violent. There will be lots of murder and disgusting stuff going on. It’ll be really silly.

Maelstrom: How did the idea for DethKlok first come about?

Brendon Small: Well, I’d been going out over the last five years, just re-acquainting myself with the metal that I’d forgotten about since I went to music school, and gotten into comedy, and I was pretty amazed at how much heavier, faster, and more articulate it had gotten since the metal I’d checked out before.

So “Home Movies” was finished, and I was in Los Angeles trying to sell other shows. Mike Lazzo, the head of “Adult Swim,” called me to ask if I would write some music for another show called “Perfect Hair Forever.” He wanted me to do a grandiose, Queen-sounding thing and I said, “Sure, I love doing that kind of stuff.” So I wrote that and they all got really excited, so I knew they wanted me to pitch some kind of music thing. So me and my buddy Tommy [Blacha, co-creator of DethKlok] had been going out to lots of metal shows like Cannibal Corpse, Behemoth, Nile, bands we were really into.

So one night we were doing this standup routine of Cannibal Corpse doing “Glengarry Glen Ross” [the Pulitzer Prize winning David Mamet play], with Tommy playing George “Corpsegrinder” Fisher as the Shelley “The Machine” Levine character, and I was playing the Williamson character totally straight. So we played that one scene where Williamson confronts Shelly: “How did you know I made it up? How did you know I didn’t go to the bank? You stole the leads, didn’t you?”

Then I was telling a friend who works on the “Venture Brothers” cartoon for “Adult Swim” about the routine and he told me, “That should be a show.”

“Oh man, you’re right, that IS the show.”

So I don’t want to categorize the music [as metal], but it’s going to draw from all the bands I liked growing up, along with all these new amazing bands, the death metal, the black metal, the grandiosity of hard rock, but ultimately it’s a comedy. So you can’t really play real death metal, but...

Maelstrom: It’ll be brutal, anyway.

Brendon Small: We’re actually excited about how the music is turning out. It’s brutal when it wants to be, and melodic when it wants to be. So, yeah that was the idea. Cannibal Corpse on Broadway, but invent a band and their sound. There’s a guy in the band from Norway, one from Sweden, and the other guys are American. These are elements of the bands I listen to in the metal world. So they’re not brought together by love or family but by business circumstances. So, in order work as metal, it’s got to be funny.

Maelstrom: So how famous is DethKlok in the show?

Brendon Small: They’re the biggest band in the world, they’re the twelfth largest economy. Bigger than Belgium. As far as the look of the show, everything is grandiose. We’re presenting the show in widescreen, just to show scale. For example, DethKlok lives in this gigantic palace in the fjords of Norway, just this upside-down dragon boat, 100 stories tall. So everything is extravagant, and since they’re such superstars, they don’t know a whole lot about the world, in the way that Paris Hilton cannot hook up her own cable, that sort of thing. But they’re very business savvy, they’re very smart in certain ways, like when it comes to stock trading. I mean, no matter how smart people are, they’re also stupid in some other surprising way. A lot of the characters on “Home Movies” were like that, but “DethKlok” is going to be very different from that show. I’m not interested in repeating myself. It’s sort of like reaching out to a whole new audience, with some of the “Home Movies” fans coming along, hopefully.

A lot of death metal is about brutality, the fact that you’re going to die. You’re simply going to die, and that’s final. The thing is, it might be in a nice way, or you might get ripped to shreds by wolves. But there are lots of things more brutal than death: waiting in line at the DMV, bumper-to-bumper traffic in L.A., going to the dentist. Even the idea of food is brutal – the fact that an animal has to get killed, a lobster has to get boiled alive. It’s totally Cannibal Corpse. So the mundane aspects of everyday life are brutal, and that’s some of what we’re trying to zero in on with this show.

In the first episode, it’s so ridiculous, but DethKlok are about to have the world’s only six-star chef cook them dinner before they play this show just below the Arctic Circle in Norway. And they warn him of the DethKlok curse: their employees, chefs in particular, have died these terrible, horrible deaths. And of course, the chef isn’t worried.

So they get onstage for this gigantic show where 400,000 fans are waiting and literally dying in the snow. And it turns out DethKlok are going to play only one song, “The Duncan Hills Coffee Jingle.” And when they set off these massive pyrotechnics they destroy their own helicopter restaurant, and the chef with it. The rest of the episode is DethKlok trying to figure out how to make their own dinner. It’s pretty ridiculous. It turns out that the chef is still alive, but in pieces. So they start thinking about how to sew him back together, and the episode ends with a DethKlok song, “Sewn Back Together Wrong.”

Maelstrom: Do you compose all of the music in DethKlok?

Brendon Small: Yes, Tommy [Blacha] helps out with the lyrics, but my intention is to create at least one original song per show. Each episode will run around eleven minutes long. We’re planning to run about twenty of them. I’m excited to get the trailer out because the animation looks outstanding.

[AUTHOR’S NOTE: the DethKlok trailer has indeed arrived, and podcasts are also available via iTunes and/or adultswim.com: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1C4FqTfFma8].

We wanted to make the animation look as realistic as possible, because part of what attracts you to metal is the album cover art. It just stays with you as you’re listening, because it can be so intricate and exciting. That actually sets the tone for how you listen to the music, the colors and the shapes, the monsters and the demons. So we wanted the same thing for this show. And the art staff we have working on DethKlok totally get it. They’ve exceeded my expectations. We want it to be the best looking show on TV.

We’ve been very careful to not make the show look cartoony, but larger than life. If [we] have the guys standing in the grocery store, [we] put them in a metal pose. They’re fuckin’ tough guys who will kick your ass. We actually took the art staff to go see Behemoth when they played here in L.A., as an example of how we want DethKlok to perform on stage. Also keep in mind this is NOT glam metal, these guys don’t look that way. They smell bad. They’ve not changed their jeans in four months.

Another thing is, we’re not making fun of metal, but celebrity culture. We love metal, and feel protective of it, as any fan should. But the funny thing about celebrities is that we tend to worship people who cause bad things to happen.

Maelstrom: So what happened when you graduated Berklee?

Brendon Small: I graduated in 1997, and decided I didn’t know where I wanted to go with music, exactly so after taking some writing classes at Emerson I felt like getting into comedy. In a way it was like getting over stage fright and all that stupid stuff, plus I was interested in writing. So I stuck around Boston for another four years doing standup in Harvard Square at The Hong Kong. It was cool because there was a lot of stage time and I needed that. Playing music live and doing standup comedy were totally different, because you get an immediate response from comedy. You know if your intention is making its way across the audience, because they laugh. If you play music, people [tend to] clap no matter what, unless they’re a really shitty audience. So I felt more confident that I was getting my point across with comedy than with music.

Maelstrom: Your musical influences are pretty well covered in this article by way of introduction, so we’d like to know some of your comedic influences.

Brendon Small: Woody Allen, Albert Brooks, and The Marx Brothers. Every once in a while I judge what I do against their work. They made me think differently.

Maelstrom: So which guitarists get your attention nowadays?

Brendon Small: Jeff Loomis from Nevermore, he does all of this really crazy economy picking, it’s awesome. I watch some of his video clips and realize how difficult some of those techniques are.

Maelstrom: Will there be any cameo appearances by metal celebrities in DethKlok?

Brendon Small: Well, they won’t play themselves, but James Hetfield and Kirk Hammet from Metallica are going to be in it, Michael Amott from Arch Enemy, and Jeff Loomis. I’ve spoken with King Diamond a few times, he’s the coolest guy I’ve ever talked to on the phone. So hopefully we’ll record him in June. Mark Hamill [of Star Wars fame] is on the show, too. The metal heads should know that.

Maelstrom: What do you think about the state of heavy metal today?

Brendon Small: I’m actually really excited that people are playing their guitars again. That’s a big deal for me, because I’ve always been attracted to virtuosity when it serves the song. It’s aggression, as far as I’m concerned. It has a place. Drummers are kicking more ass, too. I just really like the brutality of it. Metal has evolved, plus it’s not obscure anymore. It’s so much easier to find information nowadays, and there’s so much to check out. People have learned how to produce metal better too, you can hear individual parts happening, and that makes the wall of sound better.

Maelstrom: How has the response been so far to the DethKlok previews you’ve posted online?

Brendon Small: We want the music to be awesome, but it’s got to be funny too. A lot of people have e-mailed me saying “This isn’t death metal,” or “This isn’t black metal,” but we never set out to create [DethKlok] as any one style of music. But people take their metal so seriously, which I think is fine because I would be protective, too, if someone was fucking with the music that I loved. So I’m totally with them on that.

I feel confident in saying that in the wrong hands, this show would really suck. The music wouldn’t be authentic. But we’re going to deliver a show that will be. We set out to pair comedy with the awesome, grandiose elements that we love in metal, which hopefully fans will relate to.

[L to R: William Murderface, Skwisgaar Skwigelf, Nathan Explosion, Pickles the Drummer, and Toki Wartooth]

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http://www.brendonsmall.com

http://www.myspace.com/brendonsmall

http://www.myspace.com/DethKlok