What you see above is a labor of love. Which isn’t to say that other projects I do aren’t. I put my all into everything I do. But I really like this band, the Memphis Morticians. They’re awesome garage punk rockabilly; a decidedly Detroit sort of sound. Though they’re from NYC, they definitely have that dirty, grimy, Detroit-ness about them. Plus they have a song for us drivers of dead sleds. ‘Nuff said. If you’re in Detroit when the show’s on (Friday, April 1st), I highly recommend you shell out the ten bones to see these primitive trash men from outer space.
As for the inspiration, I went through a lot of steps to get to this. Originally, I had wanted to do a full-on illustration of a 1955 Cadillac hearse, all black and lowered and lookin’ evil with these big pipes coming out back belching smoke. And inside said smoke would be all the copy. But that turned out to be way too labor intensive, once I got into it. So I scrapped that for the time being, and thought about some sort of imagery with a toe-pincher in an open grave… but then I realized I’ve done something similar twice before. So what to do? Well next I started with the idea of an antique bottle of embalming fluid. Then that evolved into just using the labels themselves as inspiration, and making the whole poster look like a giant label of embalming fluid (hence the cross bones).
And as always, clicken to embiggen.
Nix
Tags: antique, crow, Detroit, embalming, fluid, garage, memphis morticians, mortuary, psychobilly, punk, rockabilly, vintage