Formed in December of 2008, Brass Hysteria! fuses a complex mixture of ska, bluegrass, rockabilly and punk. Their on stage antics, versatility as an acoustic street band and amplified band makes them a force to be reckoned with. Rusty "The Mad Scientist" is on lead guitar and vocals, Juan "Dr! Bones" on gut bucket and vocals, Scott "Skiizle" on drums, Chris "Muscles" on the Banjo and Trumpet, Mike "Checkers" on the 2nd guitar, Eric Lefevers on trumpet, Alden Denny on Trombone and ADHDave on Sax.

Little is known about the band’s lead guitarist, The Mad Scientist. He first appeared on the music scene in Chico, CA after receiving a doctorate in Mad Science with a minor in Maniacal Studies from the Hungarian University of Transylvania. After writing a highly acclaimed dissertation on the evil applications of music for the purpose of global domination, he decided to abandon the musically bereft scene in Hungary and head to the west coast of America where he could begin putting his plot for global domination into action. He formed the band Brass Hysteria! with the intention of making music so fiendishly danceable that listeners would actually dance themselves to death. The Mad Scientist, as well as his band of hellions, ran into some trouble when they discovered that the music was so good that fans would continue dancing post-mortem. They now have an ever growing fan base of undead greasers and rude boys and The Mad Scientist has altered his plans for global domination. He now intends to become a rock star and build and army of skanking zombies to do his bidding.

Brass Hysteria!’s bass player, Dr. Bones, was an early experiment of The Mad Scientist. While researching post-mortem reanimation, The Mad Scientist successfully brought the corpse of Dr. Bones back to life in his lab in Transylvania. Dr. Bones began playing the wash tub bass while getting his PhD in Voodoo along with his Mad Scientist progenitor, and when The Mad scientist made his move on the music scene he quickly recruited his bass slapping fire driven alcohol fueled zombie witch doctor compatriot to be the bassist for the band. Dr. Bones has been reported to play his washtub bass with so much undead fury that it often bursts into flames during concerts.



The band’s trumpet player and banjo picker, Queasy Weasel (sometimes referred to a “Muscle”), was a wandering drifter and accomplished troubadour before joining Brass Hysteria!. He grew up in Houston, Texas, where he began competing in body building competitions at the age of fourteen. After winning the prestigious Natural Body Building Championship in 1999 and again in 2001 his life took a turn for the worse. He began using steroids and was caught and disqualified in 2003. Muscle hit the bottle hard and began gambling and fighting with local mechanical bulls for fun. A drunken car accident in 2005 left Muscle in a coma for the next year and a half. He awoke in 2007 to find his muscles atrophied, his savings gambled away, and his loved ones ashamed of his existence. He picked up a banjo at a local pawn shop and robbed an elementary school student for her trumpet and he hit the road, vowing to never return to Texas or the illustrious lifestyle of competitive body building ever again. He wandered for years, riding the rails and hitch-hiking his way across the nation, until he ran into Dr. Bones and The Mad Scientist in a small town in Northern California. Reports say that Muscle attempted to rob the same group of elderly women that The Mad Scientist and Dr. Bones were in the process of robbing when a fist fight broke out. After thoroughly beating the crap out of each other they began drinking and talking about music. Queasy agreed to join Brass Hysteria! on the condition that he gets a portion of the planet after the band achieves their goal of global domination.


In 1948, shortly after the Roswell, New Mexico UFO incident, government scientists began experimenting with a recovered alien technology that weaponized dance. The project was completed in 1956 with the production of a destructively dancing cyborg they called the Atomic Dancing Hyperactive Device, though the men in charge of programming the cyborg lovingly referred to him as ADHDave. Preliminary tests with the destructive dancing machine managed to exceed expectations and ADHDave proved to be capable of dancing entire cities to the ground. Needless to say, it was not long before he escaped from the government facility he was being warehoused in. Any attempt by the government to recover their powerful weapon lead to the immediate and total destruction of any force sent after him. In 2009, while dancing a path of destruction through the Northern California area, ADHDave discovered the infectious music being created by The Mad Scientist, Dr. Bones, and Muscle. He took to Ska violently and immediately and began playing the saxophone for the emerging band. He brings an energy level to Brass Hysteria! that could only have been concocted in post World War II secret government labs.

Brass Hysteria!’s Rhythm guitarist, Mad Mike Checkers, grew up on the streets of New Orleans as an orphan. He subsisted off of tin cans and gasoline until he discovered his prodigious abilities in the little talked about sport of underground full contact cage checkers that was emerging in New Orleans at the time. During one fateful tournament when Mad Mike was climbing his way to the top things got out of control and he beat his opponent to death with the checker board. Allegedly. After being thrown from the underground full contact checkers scene Mad Mike went on to invent both spite and PCP. He used his newly made fortune from PCP sales to buy the guitar Jesus Christ once hypnotized his customers with and left New Orleans for Northern California. Upon arriving in Chico he got into a bar fight with the members of Brass Hysteria! over who could win in a bar fight, them or him. He used his recently acquired magic guitar to hypnotize the band mid-brawl. Dr. Bones, being a zombie and therefore allergic to hypnosis, smashed Mad Mike in the face with his grizzly bear in the midst of his hypnotic rhythms and broke the hellish spell. They quickly shrugged off their grudge like a fine fur coat. The band appreciated Mad Mike’s abilities so much that they demanded he join the band. Mike readily agreed because he didn’t have anything better to do. And to this day Muscle still thinks he’s a chicken.


Brass Hysteria!’s drummer, Skizz, was a squatter on the streets of New York prior to joining the band. He moved to California with the hopes of breaking into the porn industry but soon realized that the real money was in gay porn. He, obviously, quickly abandoned his aspirations to become a porn star. One night while squatting in an abandoned house in Northern California he got drunk and accidently struck an accord with Satan, trading a portion of his soul (the legs and left hand of it) for a masterful ability to play the evilest of all instruments—the drums. Fortunately, due to Lucifer’s decline in popularity since the 80’s, Satan’s publicist had been pushing him to do some PR work, and Skizz’s drunken desire to join a band and become wildly famous provided The Dark Lord with a perfect opportunity to spread His name. Skizz joined a series of bands that all proved to be unable to slake his desire for mayhem. Among them were The Lucifriends, The Bezulbuddies, Hippy Dickpunch and the Face Fuck Five, The Satones, and Bobby Beatbox and the Butt Bumpers. He discovered Brass Hysteria! in 2010 and he immediately took to their infectious music and their dubious intentions. The band admired his demonic mastery of the drums and demanded that he join the band. They have been accomplices in mischief ever since.


Paleontologists discovered Eroc (pronounced e-rock) Gruk in the Neander Valley in Germany in 2002. He was frozen solid in a block of ice thousands of years ago and was put on display at the National Archeological Museum in Athens, Greece. During the Anarchist riots in Athens in 2008 a group of hot blooded revolutionaries broke in to the museum and thawed Eroc with the intention of making him a part of their Anarchist terrorist cell. After teaching Eroc English they discovered that he was once a tribal shaman for a group of Anarchist cavemen that were resisting a larger group of cavemen trying to organize and control the whole of caveman existence. Eroc, being an accomplished shaman, channeled rebellious spirits into the Ox horn he would play at pagan ceremonies and helped his clan destroy the ruling class of cavemen with sonic blasts from his possessed horn. The terrorist cell got him a trumpet and helped him channel even more rebellious spirits than the ones he had access to in his caveman days and they encouraged him to smash the upper class of Greece so they could all live in nice communes. Hating the idea of commune life, Eroc told the Grecian Anarchists to fuck themselves and left for Northern California, where he had heard of something bigger going on—Brass Hysteria!. Brass Hysteria! heard one mighty blast from Eroc’s possessed Anarchy trumpet and accepted him into the band with open arms and bleeding ears.