The Disco Biscuits celebrated Halloween at Worcester, MA’s Palladium on Friday and Saturday, a beloved venue where the Philadelphia-bred group hosted a New Year’s Eve show in 2000 and even filmed an official DVD in 2004. As promised, on Halloween proper the group crafted a live, improvised score to Tim Burton’s 1988 classic Beetlejuice. The band used their first set to jam along with the enduring goth-camp movie while dressed as Beetlejuice characters, sampling Danny Elfman’s original theme song along the way. They also nodded to the original Beetlejuice soundtrack by sampling and riffing on Harry Belafonte’s “Day-O (The Banana Boat Song)” and “Jump In The Line (Shake Senora)” during the appropriate sequences. It was the latest in a series of movie nights, a tradition that began on December 31, 1999 when the Disco Biscuits performed to Akira.
After wrapping up Beetlejuice on Saturday, the Disco Biscuits returned for an improv-heavy second that that kicked off with a run from “42” into their debut take on John Carpenter’s Halloween theme, “Cyclone” and a version of “Morph Dusseldorf” that sampled Michael Jackson’s Halloween-appropriate “Thriller.” A standalone “Shelby Rose” closed the set, but the Biscuits then returned for an encore run from “Fire Will Exchange” back into “42.”
A few days earlier, the group teased the Halloween theme at Hartford, CT’s Infinity Music Hall on Thursday during “Shem-Rah Boo.” The horror film was one of several options the Biscuits asked fans to vote on for the Halloween movie night, with Beetlejuice ultimately winning; Halloweentown, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Sleepy Hollow and The Nightmare Before Christmas were the other selections on the ballot.
After the shows, Disco Biscuits bassist Marc Brownstein shared the following:
We have had the most fun on this tour. I don’t know when the last time was that we had this much fun on stage this consistently.
Confidence is earned and I feel like we earned a little bit of it this tour by working our asses off, on and off stage, on the road and at home, to make sure we were bringing the best experience for the fans. Sure, it seems obvious that a band should practice regularly but the reality of a lot of bands like us is that they don’t live in the same cities and can only practice at random times that are pre planned around tours. But now we are all local to Philly. Ya see, when the biscuits started, the reason we had success early on was that we treated practice like our day jobs. We showed up every day and worked long hours together. Spending hours on end learning complex classical and jazz compositions. Writing. Recording. Improvising.
This tour we have all had the pleasure of seeing that version of the disco biscuits step back on stage. Four guys that are so well prepared because they spent hours and hours together at home working on old compositions, new songs, movie preparation. This week I knew Spy was going to be flawless. I knew Shem Rah was going to be played to perfection. I knew because we played them SO MANY times before bringing them to stage that there was no way we could miss even one note. That kind of confidence translates to flow state on stage. You don’t have to think, you can just let it happen. And flow state translates to a blissful joy that emanates throughout the room, through the band and the crowd alike.
I am proud of my bandmates for showing up to practice over and over again, 31 years in, committed to making this biscuits the best we’ve ever been. It’s such a pleasure when everything starts to align.
It’s been a year with Marlon and we are starting to see the band reach potentials that we knew we would if we committed to this and treated it like the most important thing in our lives.
Help me say congrats to my little bro on an amazing year. Marlon is B4L!
The Disco Biscuits will kick off a six-show run at Ardmore, PA’s The Ardmore Music Hall on December 14. For more on the group’s current plans, be sure to read our recent feature interview with Brownstein.
