Not everyone knows our backstory and who we are and where we came from. We’re real people, from the streets, who love to put in work and have been through so much trauma & turmoil in our lives that music ended up becoming an outlet for us. Rather than becoming full-fledged criminals and drug addicts, we’re here.
– Grumpy.
GRUMPY: I made a magazine with Roger Gastman [Beyond the Streets] years ago… Anyone who’s worked with Roger knows he has a passion for creating books. But in this day and age, people don’t really read, much less buy literature. If he ever invites you over to his house, you’ll see thousands of copies of passion projects stacked to the ceiling that just didn’t sell.
So it was clear to me this guy was here to represent the culture – graffiti, art, music – and not cashing in on that. When he approached me about creating the documentary, I was like, “Bro, we’re all still alive, the band’s still together?” It didn’t make sense to me.
He told me he thought it was important for people to see that the movement we’ve been able to curate is happening now, to inspire more people to create, participate, and do their own.
It also helped showcase a lot of videographers, photographers, and other musicians that surround the band as well.
In August 2017 Mike was serving an eight-month sentence after being busted in a stolen rental car full of forged checks and cloned credit cards. Grumpy was keeping Mike’s spirits up from the outside with regular calls and commissary contributions. The two had met a few years before while smoking crack on Skid Row, but now they were both committed to staying clean and living better lives.
Grumpy and Mike had met Meka at a trap house in a gang-controlled neighborhood in Central Los Angeles. Meka had stolen a bunch of musical equipment from an unlocked church and brought it back to the house one night. He would claw at a guitar while Grumpy would blast away on drums until all hours — no one on their block would’ve dared to call in a noise complaint. Mike was a hip-hop head who never cared much about the punk music Grumpy and Meka were playing, but all three of them bonded over their mutual addiction to writing graffiti. They had all grown up as taggers and skateboarders, who quickly slid into crime and drugs in their teens. Mike was raised around some less-than-ethical adults after his dad went to prison, and he became a meth dealer after dropping out of school in the ninth grade.
Grumpy fell into hardcore drugs after joining a graffiti crew at age twelve, and he funded his addiction by regularly stealing and crashing cars for a guy running an insurance scam. Meka left home as a teenager to run with a punk rock crew that squatted in an abandoned hotel, where a lack of running toilets resulted in a room dedicated to stockpiling human feces. Through their late teens and twenties, the three of them grappled with worsening drug problems and found themselves oscillating between homelessness and incarceration. By the time they were all in their thirties, graffiti was still an outlet and an unshakable obsession, but they were trying their best to leave their other destructive habits behind.
While Mike was serving his time, Grumpy and Meka put together a band called the Silver Teeth Bandits with their friends Bender on guitar and Matt on vocals. But one night Matt got drunk and naked, and rubbed his bare ass on Grumpy’s drum throne, and Grumpy responded by breaking Matt’s jaw. The next time Mike called Grumpy from jail, Grumpy broached the subject of Mike becoming their new singer…”
MIKER: Roger has a good platform and knows exactly what he’s doing, all the time. We were honored to be part of it. Our whole collaboration was maybe 3 years in the making.
GRUMPY: When we first started, it was hard to find bands that wanted to play after COVID because they were scared of backlash or getting sick. We did a lot of mixed bills with random people because we were just trying to do shows. A lot of those bands wouldn’t normally fit into a punk rock lineup, so our fanbase adopted a lot of those people as well.
We all come from different subcultures, and that translates into our fan base. At any DEAD CITY gig you can expect a lot of graffiti writers, gang members, people that normally listen to hip-hop, and lots of people that just like to party and do drugs. And, of course, punk rockers/hardcore kids.
MIKER: A lot of Dead City fans might not necessarily have been a fan of punk rock before going to a Dead City show. I feel like we brought a lot of different types of people together; it’s been a privilege to showcase that on tour.
Everybody should represent their city, and I feel like DEAD CITY really represents LOS ANGELES to the fullest no matter where we go.
The music we make is an outlet for expressing aggression, but in real life, I’m a pretty chill guy. At the documentary screening, I had people come up to me crying, saying they never knew the side of me that was shown on the screen. Moments like that remind me it’s cool to be vulnerable. You can’t always go around thinking you’re the sh*t, you know?
GRUMPY: There’s a lot of people that love us, and there’s a lot of people that hate on us. I feel like a lot of the haters are just kind of jealous that there’s bands that have been around ten, fifteen years who haven’t been able to pull a crowd like we do. They envy that.
The doc only had three screenings, so it hasn’t impacted us too directly yet. Maybe a network picks it up and it becomes more accessible, opening doors for bigger tours. But that’s just logistics.
At the end of the day, we’re still making music for the love of it, and I don’t see that stopping. More than anything, if it gets out there, we just want to reach some kid who needs to see that you can claw your way out of whatever life handed you. Just keep pushing.
– Dead City for Dead Relatives.
