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Kill the Wabbit
You can also see some other videos on my Coughlan House Site |
 Yes, I know that
actual Vikings probably didn’t wear pointy hats.
It’s a bloody music video, not BBC History. |
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Q&A with Kill the Wabbit
Q: Where is Kill the Wabbit located?
A: We originated in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
in 1993, but more than half our catalog was
recorded while living in St. John’s,
Newfoundland. Several tracks do not appear here
because they got rained on. I now record from
time to time in my home in Korea, and I involve
Mark when I can.
Q: How did you come up with the band name Kill
the Wabbit?
A: It comes from the Bugs Bunny cartoon What’s
Opera, Doc?, where Elmer is a theatrical
Viking singing a song about hunting. The band
members decided on Kill the Wabbit after
vigorous market research. Actually, I remember
coming up with the name suddenly during our
first recordings. As police reports say, alcohol
was a factor.
So far, fortunately, Warner Brothers doesn’t
know or doesn’t care about the name. As all the
music and video here is free and non-profit I
believe it falls under fair use.
Q: What difference does the name make? How can
you be a band when you don’t regularly record
together.. and you don’t actually play live..
and no one would ever pay good money for your
music anyway?
A: Wait a minute! I’m the one writing these
questions! They’re supposed to be fawning and
complimentary to the band. Okay, Q & A over!
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| What does the yell in The
Viking Song mean? This is from “The Battle
of Maldon,” an Old English poem about a battle
between the English and the Vikings in AD 991.
Hige sceal þe heardra / heorte þe cenre
mod sceal þe mare / þe ure mægen lytlað!
(“Our resolve must be harder, our hearts
keener, and our spirits greater, by as much as
our strength diminishes!”)
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| Heralds of Cheese |
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| When I lived in
Newfoundland in the nineties, I recorded with Mike
Winsor (guitar) and Scott Batten (bass, rhythm
guitar). I played drums and sometimes bass and
keyboards. It was refreshing to do things this
way. Heralds of Cheese was a sort of un-band of
Joe Satriani-meets-Jan Hammer. No live
performances; no videos; no second takes! |
| Artless was my
first real band (1990-91), formed when we
were students at Concordia College in
Edmonton. We started out, as most do,
playing cover versions under the slightly
cheesy name Visionary but we
progressed to writing and recording
original songs. Noel Nibblett (vocals) and
Alex Chu (guitar) were better songwriters
than I was, so I stuck to percussion and
recording. We also had Jim Mulligan
(rhythm guitar) and Trevor Grinde &
Corey Payne (bass). |
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Ken &
the Cowflops |
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| My first recorded work was Ken
& the Cowflops, in which I played every
instrument. If you like Yello, Herbie Hancock, or
Kraftwerk you will perhaps like this. There were
no Cowflops; it was just the name I chose to use
for my solo work. Like most people, I never
expected to see the inside of a recording studio
and so I began to build my own. All of these
recordings were made by myself using technology
which slowly improved from two cassette decks
mixed together, to a four-track recorder, to
producing almost studio-quality recordings on my
computer with MIDI and digital editing programs,
all on a budget of likely less than what U2 spend
on coffee. I have had some of this material played
on a few radio stations and have performed live a
few times. |
CKO Radio was
the name of an imaginary radio station
that my friend Paul Horsman invented in
1983 when we were grade 10 students in
Edmonton at Concordia High School. Paul
and Roland Schwaldt began writing and
recording short skits for CKO with a tape
deck and a record player. I joined in
1984, and over the next two years an album
of comedy shorts took shape. In 1989 we
began a second album, now equipped with
multi-track tape recorders and sampling
keyboards. I eventually become the
recording engineer and some of the skits
became pretty complex.
Some of these radio spots have been played
on campus radio. As some of them use bits
of copyright music in the background, I
can’t do much with them commercially at
present, but you’re welcome to listen to a
few clips for fun. There are no
obscenities in these recordings, but the
subject matter isn’t suitable for
children. |
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| Paul
Horsman & Roland Schwaldt at the end
of CKO I, March 1986. |
A
recording session in November 1991:
Roland, Paul, Ken. |
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Making a rock video is twenty times as much work
as I expected, and I sympathize with those poor
bands who spend weeks on their video and end up
being made fun of on Much-Music’s Video
Fromage the next year.
I ended up spending about $170 on my first
computer-edited video, the Viking Song. I was
able to do this because I had help from the
Education department at MUN, which lent me a
camera, and from the Arts & Culture centre
in St. John’s, which lent me some costumes. I
then spent two weeks on Adobe Premiere editing
five gigs of video files (that was a lot
in October 2000) and trying to keep my computer
from dying under the load.
My later videos have been somewhat less
ambitious than the Viking video, as I no longer
have access to a large cast of friends I can
bribe with cheap beer to put on goofy costumes.
I also don’t have the luxury of spending a month
building costumes and assembling harps. Nowadays
I tend to just use clip art for props and a lot
of After Effects plugins. If you’re going to cut
corners, don’t go halfway.
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To make a rock video, you need a video camera, a
color screen, and a program like Premiere that
crashes every five minutes. |
You also need some friends to act in your video.
The sillier the friends, the better. Music
videos are not high art.
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Viking babes Danielle, Michelle, and Tammy,
with homemade outfits and "improv" dance
choreography.
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Myself burning my harp, a la
Hendrix. The harp wouldn’t burn and so we had
to use newspapers and fix it in the mix.
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Morphing images together in software is fun,
although it will take all day to
render on your computer.
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And sometimes women might dance in their
underwear. Hey, it was artistically
meaningful to the song, alright! |
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Contact Ken for
weddings, bar mitzvahs, summer blockbusters, or
Olympic theme anthems:
© 2023 Ken Eckert / Moldy Rutabaga Music, inc. Legal notes
Some recordings on this site
feature brief excerpts of copyrighted recordings
as background samples, or are cover versions of
copyrighted music. No money is made from this
site, and the performances here are for personal
use and may not be sold.
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