IT’S ALIVE! Chuck Biscuits Death Hoax

Punk drummer walks among us! Blogger who "broke" the news of his death, however, ain't too happy...

By Fred Mills

Happy Halloween! I'd like to say my face is red, both from embarrassment and anger at being duped, but I've long been a fan of rock ‘n' roll hoaxes, dating back to the great Masked Marauders spoof in 1969. I mean, I even warmed up to the Dwarves hoax that the scum-rockers pulled on Sub Pop (and themselves) in 1992, so you could say that I'm kinda disposed to shenanigans and tomfoolery, as evidenced by the Captain Beefheart album/tour prank we at BLURT pulled some time ago (twice, actually) and the John Wesley Harding conspiracy we cooked up with JWH.

So the emails in the inbox this morning alerting me that the news yesterday of the untimely demise of legendary punk drummer Chuck Biscuits was in fact a hoax didn't faze me much - in fact, I laughed out loud. Well, throat cancer's no laughing matter, but still... all's fair in rock ‘n' roll, especially with Halloween just a couple of days away. Plus, there were multiple media outlets reporting on the death, including, if memory serves, one with an Associated Press byline; this is what happens when overworked/underpaid music scribes don't have time to do too much in-depth fact checking. I mean, BLURT does have 12 interns, all luscious-but-capable, but they are technically sex slaves, so...

There's a really good account of how the Biscuits hoax unfolded over at Brooklyn Vegan. Apparently a writer and huge Misfits fan named James Greene Jr. got pranked into believing that Biscuits had been terminally ill and finally passed away on Saturday. Greene published the news, and his story subsequently got picked up by the press. The rest is viral history.

As Brooklyn Vegan reports, though, confirmation has come from both D.O.A.'s Joe Keithley and the Circle Jerk's Keith Morris tht Biscuits is still very much among the living - or, in keeping with the Halloween season, you could say he's back among the living and currently walks among us. Greene still appears to be in a state of shock about having been duped, however, so you could probably characterize him as being kinda like a zombie at the moment...