Live music and touring are on lockdown right now and fans as well as artists are going through withdrawals. We wanted to come up with something fun to help bridge that distance between fans and artists right now. What we came up with is  something called The Lockdown Lowdown and it’s a Q&A session with fun questions for artists to answer. They’re not your typical interview questions, so it gives you a peek inside of the artists themselves. We’re big music nerds here at I’m Music Magazine and we love learning things like this about the artists that we love. We’re pretty sure that you’ll get a kick out of these, so we hope you’ll take the time to read them. In this installment, we spoke with the three-piece (Matt Wayne, JuJu and Brandon “Funknasty” Cooke) psychedelic, swampy neo-noir blues/rock band The Blood Moon Howlers!

What are five albums that changed your life:

Led Zeppelin-The Complete BBC Sessions (it was the first CD I ever owned – Matt Wayne)
The Dirty Dozen Brass Band-Voodoo
Tom Waits-Real Gone
Dr. John-Locked Down
The Meters-The Meters

Name five artists that influenced you as musicians.

Howlin’ Wolf
The Rolling Stones
Janis Joplin
Red Hot Chili Peppers
Wu-Tang Clan

What are your five favorite live albums?

Aw man! Live albums are our favorite; always love hearing the “mistakes”, arrangements and pure raw energy)

Jimi Hendrix-Live at Monterey
Neil Young-Live at Massey Hall 1971
Tom Waits-Glitter and Doom
Rage Against The Machine-Live At The Grand Olympic Auditorium
Parliament-Live: P Funk Earth Tour

Life on the road; what are five of your craziest/funniest/scariest tour stories?

1. Haha so many! One of the scariest was, we bought our tour van the day we were leaving for tour. We ended up driving through one of the scariest rain/lightning/thunder storms in the southwest we’ve ever seen and the van was used and hadn’t been checked out yet so the alignment was all off and the tires were really bald, so the whole time we were crossing our fingers and listening to our little blue-tooth speaker because the van didn’t (still doesn’t) have a radio.  

2. For our first tour as a band, we were touring with another band, a light show crew, a roadie and a photographer all in the same van and everything wrong and amazing happened. Both band’s merch fell out of the van on the road and the trailer got stuck on a driveway that had too big of a dip within the first 30 minutes of us trying to leave. We slept by the river in the rain, our roadie was never around and always on mushrooms when we needed him, our photographer stepped on a metal pipe and hurt his foot really bad, but we met friends and musicians that we’ve been super close to ever since, and we got to end the tour with a serene jam at the Grand Canyon! 

3. We got blacklisted on Air BnB for a minute from one of the places we stayed at on tour, and we wish we threw the party they said we did haha, but our manager cleared it up and we’re back in business with Air BnB now! 🙂

4. This one is a little difficult to explain but we’re gonna go for it anyways. We started doing this thing where any time “Drunken Lullabies” by Flogging Molly was played on any speaker we had to drop what we were doing no matter what and start wrestling. It’s the only way us howlers know how to deal with feelings on tour! 

5. One of the coolest things that has happened so far is, we met a beer company on tour that wants to make a “Blood Moon Howlers” themed beer. It all got pushed back a little now because of Covid-19 but it’s still in the works.

What are your five favorite movies?

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Pineapple Express
The Big Lebowski
The Good, The Bad and The Ugly
Good Fellas