The Radioactive Chicken Heads performing in Santa Ana, California in 2016. From left to right: Greasy Chicken, Carrot Topp, Puke Boy, Bird Brain, El Pollo Diablo, Pastafarian and Rockin' Robin
Comedy rock is rock music mixed with comedy, often satire and parody.
Santa Ana is the county seat and second most populous city in Orange County, California in the Los Angeles metropolitan area. The United States Census Bureau estimated its 2011 population at 329,427, making Santa Ana the 57th most-populous city in the United States.
Originally formed under the name Joe and the Chicken Heads in 1993, the Chicken Heads are easily recognized by their freakish mutant chicken and vegetable masks as well as their theatrical stage shows, all of which tie into an elaborate backstory and mythology the band has developed over the course of their career and serves as the subject for much of their music, videos, a role-playing computer game and an independently-produced television pilot.
A television pilot is a standalone episode of a television series that is used to sell the show to a television network. At the time of its creation, the pilot is meant to be the testing ground to gauge whether a series will be successful; it is therefore a test episode for the intended television series, an early step in the series development, much like pilot studies serve as precursors to the start of larger activity. In the case of a successful television series, the pilot is commonly the very first episode that is aired of the particular series under its own name; the episode that gets the series "off the ground". A "back door pilot" is an episode of an existing successful series, featuring future tie-in characters of an up-and-coming television series or film. Its purpose is to introduce the characters to an audience before the creators decide on whether or not they intend to pursue a spin-off series with those characters.
Over the course of their career, the Chicken Heads have released five albums, one EP, several singles and seventeen music videos, among other releases. Their most recent album, Tales From The Coop, was released in October 2017.
An extended play record, often referred to as an EP, is a musical recording that contains more tracks than a single, but is usually unqualified as an album or LP. EPs generally contain a minimum of four tracks and maximum of six tracks, and are considered "less expensive and time-consuming" for an artist to produce than an album. An EP originally referred to specific types of vinyl records other than 78 rpm standard play (SP) and LP, but it is now applied to mid-length CDs and downloads as well.
History
Joe and the Chicken Heads (1994-2004)
Joe and the Chicken Heads, as they appeared in 1998.
In a rare out-of-character interview, lead singer Carrot Topp explained that the genesis of The Radioactive Chicken Heads began with two comic books he had written as a teenager, one about a gang of mutant vegetables called The Vegamatics and another called "Joe and the Chicken Heads" about a kid named Joe who sings with a rock band made up of headless chickens.[1] After discovering the comedy metal band Green Jellÿ, a group renowned for their use of puppets and costumes, Carrot Topp ultimately decided to apply these concepts and visuals to a rock band combining elements of both comic books, creating the band's distinctive masks and props himself.[1]
A comic book or comicbook, also called comic magazine or simply comic, is a publication that consists of comic art in the form of sequential juxtaposed panels that represent individual scenes. Panels are often accompanied by brief descriptive prose and written narrative, usually dialog contained in word balloons emblematic of the comics art form. Although comics has some origins in 18th century Japan, comic books were first popularized in the United States and the United Kingdom during the 1930s. The first modern comic book, Famous Funnies, was released in the U.S. in 1933 and was a reprinting of earlier newspaper humor comic strips, which had established many of the story-telling devices used in comics. The term comic book derives from American comic books once being a compilation of comic strips of a humorous tone; however, this practice was replaced by featuring stories of all genres, usually not humorous in tone.
Green Jellÿ is an American comedy rock band formed in 1981. Originally named Green Jellö, the band changed its name due to legal pressure from Kraft Foods, the owners of the Jell-O trademark, who claimed that it was an infringement of their trademark. Despite the spelling difference, the new name and the old are pronounced identically.
Joe and the Chicken Heads formed in early 1994, playing their first show at a Bar Mitzvah in Orange, California on February 26, 1994. Despite recording several demo tapes and appearing on numerous local compilations during the mid-1990s, the Chicken Heads performed few live shows until the arrival of the late 1990s ska revival helped the band attract a wider following within the Orange County's booming ska and punk scene, sharing the stage with such notable ska acts as Link 80, Slow Gherkin and Bim Skala Bim and receiving regular airplay on KUCI's influential Ska Parade radio show, which hosted many up and coming local ska and punk bands. The band's outrageous costumes and live shows soon began attracting publicity both positive and negative from local papers and zines including OC Weekly, LA Weekly, The Daily Trojan, X-TRA and Maximumrocknroll, with Thrasher magazine inexplicably describing them as "more fun than a shopping spree in a Mexican supermarket".[2][3][4]
Bar Mitzvah is a Jewish coming of age ritual for boys. Bat Mitzvah is a Jewish coming of age ritual for girls. The plural is B'nai Mitzvah for boys, and B'not Mitzvah for girls.
Orange is a city located in Orange County, California. It is approximately 3 miles north of the county seat, Santa Ana. Orange is unusual in this region because many of the homes in its Old Town District were built before 1920. While many other cities in the region demolished such houses in the 1960s, Orange decided to preserve them. The small city of Villa Park is surrounded by the city of Orange. The population was 139,812 as of 2014.
A compilation album comprises tracks, which may be previously released or unreleased, usually from several separate recordings by either one or several performers. If by one artist, then generally the tracks were not originally intended for release together as a single work, but may be collected together as a greatest hits album or box set. If from several performers, there may be a theme, topic, time period, or genre which links the tracks, or they may have been intended for release as a single work—such as a tribute album. When the tracks are by the same recording artist, the album may be referred to as a retrospective album or an anthology.
In late 1997, following a staged altercation with The Aquabats, the Chicken Heads waged a mock rivalry against the similarly costumed superhero-themed band, a feud which was even covered in the OC Weekly newspaper at a time when both bands were experiencing notable local popularity. Though this rivalry never reached its fruition onstage, the Chicken Heads received a jokingly disparaging reference on the Ska Parade's infamous "GWAR vs. The Aquabats" radio skit the same year, wherein Aquabats lead singer The MC Bat Commander, turning down an offer to save the world because his band won't get paid, remarks "with that kind of motivation, you can probably get Joe and the Chicken Heads".[5]
The Aquabats are an American rock band formed in Orange County, California in 1994. Throughout many fluctuations in the group's line-up, singer The MC Bat Commander and bassist Crash McLarson have remained the band's two constant fixtures. Since 2006, The Aquabats' members also include keyboardist Jimmy the Robot, drummer Ricky Fitness and guitarist Eagle "Bones" Falconhawk.
In 1998, the Chicken Heads made their national television debut playing the song "Pest Control" on a Halloween-themed episode of Extreme Gong, a short-lived revival of the classic Gong Show game show. Although the band were "gonged" mid-performance, signifying that the call-in voters disapproved of their act and wanted them to stop, the Chicken Heads finished their song anyway, claiming that they were playing so loud that they couldn't hear the gong.[6]
Joe and the Chicken Heads independently released their first and only album Keep on Cluckin' in May 2000, featuring 26 songs which had been recorded over the span of three years. In wake of the album's release, the Chicken Heads began playing shows with much more frequency, forming a touring relationship with their original inspirations Green Jellÿ while also sharing bills with bands including the Angry Samoans, D.I., Litmus Green and The Briefs. In May 2002, the band released their final work under the Joe and the Chicken Heads title, a five-track mini CD single entitled Family Album.
The Radioactive Chicken Heads (2004-present)
Growing Mold and early activity (2004-2008)
After a period of time performing as "The Rock N' Roll Chicken Heads" and "The Chicken Heads", Joe and the Chicken Heads permanently changed their name to "The Radioactive Chicken Heads" in mid-2004. According to their website, the "official" tongue-in-cheek reason behind the name change was due to "new government regulations which require all radioactive farm products to be labeled clearly".[7][8]
The Radioactive Chicken Heads self-released their first album under their new name, Growing Mold, in March 2005. Mixed, engineered and featuring instrumental contributions by avant-garde composer Ego Plum, Growing Mold eschewed the skacore influence of the band's early work in favor of exploring more eclectic and experimental musical territory, resulting in a combination of sounds (un)Leash magazine described as "like early Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo meets Dead Kennedys meets gothabilly monster mash". While Growing Mold never reached the radar of any major music publications, the album was praised by local university papers and alternative weeklies, with UC Riverside's Highlander dubbing the Chicken Heads "one of the best bands you've probably never heard of" and OC Weekly calling the album "funny" and "amusingly campy",[9] while the single "I Eat Kids", a cover of a Barry Louis Polisar song, was selected for airplay on the nationally syndicated Dr. Demento Show.[10]
In November 2006, the Chicken Heads made another brief appearance on national television when they were invited to perform on an episode of The Tyra Banks Show as part of an America's Got Talent spoof called "Tyra's Got Talent", which featured weird and unusual talent acts.[7][11] According to Carrot Topp, the Chicken Heads were actually a last minute replacement for another act, an Elvis impersonator in a chicken suit called "Elvis Poultry", who couldn't make the shoot.[1] The band performed the song "Our Last Song" before a mostly confused studio audience, ultimately losing out to John the Running Painter, a painter on a treadmill, by an audience vote of 73% to 27%.[7]
Music for Mutants and national touring (2008–2013)
Following further local touring within Southern California's club circuit, the Chicken Heads self-released their third album Music for Mutants in the summer of 2008, finding the band returning to a more aggressive punk rock sound. In promotion of the album, the Chicken Heads embarked on their first national tour supporting Green Jellÿ and hard rock band Rosemary's Billygoat on what was called the "Hollywood Freak Show", a tour spanning nearly sixty shows in thirty states.[11] During this tour, all three bands toured as the same amalgamated line-up of musicians, virtually changing only the costumes and lead singers between sets.[12][13]
Around this time, the Chicken Heads began focusing on producing music videos showcasing the band's prop work and theatricality. Between 2007 and 2010, four music videos were independently filmed for the songs "I Looked Into the Mirror", "Pest Control", "Badd Bunny" and "I Eat Kids", each one heavily featuring elaborate puppetry, costuming and cartoonish set design. This period also found the Chicken Heads receiving new exposure in low-budget horror films, recording on Count Smokula's song "Poultrygeist" for the soundtrack to the 2008 Troma Entertainment production Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead and writing the theme song to the horror comedy Atom the Amazing Zombie Killer, which featured stop-motion animated cameos from the band members during the film's opening credits sequence.[14][15]
In 2009, the Chicken Heads released Poultry Uprising, a 14-song collection of rarities and unreleased tracks dating as far back to the band's earliest years as Joe and the Chicken Heads. The same year, lead singer Carrot Topp produced a compilation album on the Chicken Heads' own label Snail Sounds Records entitled We're Not Kidding!, a tribute to children's musician Barry Louis Polisar, featuring sixty artists including The Vespers, DeLeon, Rebecca Loebe, Tor Hyams, In the Audience and a duet between Polisar and the Chicken Heads.[16]We're Not Kidding! received high praise from children's publications, winning the 2010 Parents' Choice Award.[17]
The Chicken Heads launched an Indiegogo campaign in November 2011 to help fund production on both a 15-minute prospective television pilot based on the band's fictional exploits and the release of a DVD including music videos and a live concert performance filmed in 2008.[18] Although the campaign ultimately failed to meet its funding goal, the band continued work on numerous projects over the next two years, filming seven more music videos for both the band's original songs, including "Deviled Egg", directed by Hollywood special effects artist Jim Ojala, which was highlighted on horror channel Fearnet as their "Music Video of the Week",[19] and humorous punk rock covers of popular songs, most notably the Imagine DragonsGrammy Award-winning song "Radioactive", which was released as a single. In July 2013, the Chicken Heads self-released Badd Bunny Breakout, a comedic RPGcomputer game based on the band's characters and mythology and featuring a soundtrack of 16-bit remixes of the group's songs.[20]
The Chicken Heads appeared once again on national television in 2012 when they were featured on a segment of the TLC reality show My Crazy Obsession which focused on Zizi Howell, a woman obsessed with carrots. Howell was filmed going to a Chicken Heads concert at a Freak Show Wrestling event in Las Vegas, where she joined the band onstage and conducted a brief interview with Carrot Topp.[21][22]
Current activity (2014–present)
The Chicken Heads playing at Los Angeles' Meltdown Comics on July 13, 2013.
In December 2014, the Chicken Heads released a parody cover of Elvis Presley's "Burning Love", re-written as the Hanukkah-themed "Burning Latke". Heeb, a satirical Jewish magazine, singled it out as one of the "Worst Hanukkah Videos Of 2014", criticizing the "too obvious" parody lyrics but nevertheless praising the rest of the Chicken Heads' work as "genuinely fun".[23] The Chicken Heads spent most of 2015 touring sporadically, including a three-show engagement in Lima, Peru in May. The band received further international attention when Polish radio network Antyradio ranked the Chicken Heads #18 on their list of the "Top 20 Rock and Metal Freaks", a list of costumed and theatrical rock bands, and in 2014 OC Weekly ranked them ninth on their list of the top ten horror punk bands.[11][24] In 2014 and 2015, the band appeared on KNBC's 1st Look and KABC-TV's Eye on LA, respectively, on local interest shows highlighting the California Institute of Abnormalarts, both of which featured the Chicken Heads performing on the venue's stage in specially-recorded segments.[25][26]
On March 28, 2015, The Steve Allen Theater hosted The Radioactive Chicken Heads Tanksgiving Special, a surrealist three-act comedy play featuring the music of and live accompaniment by the Chicken Heads, written and directed by composer and frequent Chicken Heads collaborator Ego Plum. Set in a dystopianalternate history where Colonel Sanders is depicted as an imperialist dictator presiding over a land where rock music is outlawed, the play follows a quartet of Chicken Head puppets who discover and subsequently learn to play rock and roll music in an attempt to overthrow Sanders' regime. In addition to the Chicken Heads, the play's cast included GWAR's Hunter Jackson (as his Techno Destructo persona), Haunted Garage's Dukey Flyswatter and Mike Odd of Rosemary's Billygoat and Mac Sabbath in speaking roles.
On August 14, 2017, the Chicken Heads appeared on the ABC revival of The Gong Show, marking the band's second appearance on a Gong Show incarnation following 1998's Extreme Gong. The band performed a cover of The Trashmen's 1963 hit "Surfin' Bird", but were gonged after 41 seconds by guest judge Jack Black.[27] The same day, the Chicken Heads released a music video of their recording of "Surfin' Bird" to YouTube.
After several years in production, the Chicken Heads independently released their fourth album Tales From The Coop on October 13, 2017. Produced by the Chicken Heads, Dave Klein, Jeff Forrest and Star Mendoza, Tales From The Coop takes the form of a concept album centered on the band's fictional backstory and menagerie of villains, featuring musical guest appearances from Klein, Dukey Flyswatter, Dominique Lenore Persi, Count Smokula and Ronald Osbourne, as well as a songwriting co-credit by Sleepy Brown of Organized Noise. The following day, the Chicken Heads premiered their long-in-production television pilot "The Radioactive Chicken Heads Show" at the OC Film Fiesta film festival in Santa Ana. The pilot will continue to screen at several more film festivals throughout southern California before eventually receiving an online release.
Over the last twenty years, the Chicken Heads have featured an erratic and frequently rotating line-up of musicians and instrumentalists, and have performed with as many as four to twelve musicians at a time over the course of their career. The band has sometimes included upwards of three guitarists on stage and often utilize a keyboardist and/or an accordionist, while their horn section, when present, has ranged from a three-piece ensemble of trumpet, trombone and saxophone to a single trumpet. At one point in 1998, the band even included a violinist as part of their stage show.[2] As of 2017, the band maintains a steadier line-up of between six and eight musicians, typically featuring a trumpeter and keyboardist, along with an additional one or two members on costume accompaniment.
Originally inspired by comedy metal bands Green Jellÿ and GWAR, the Chicken Heads' first incarnation as Joe and the Chicken Heads produced their most abrasive material, boasting a sound predominantly grounded in heavy metal and hardcore and mixed with elements of ska punk and funk rock.[3] Contemporary reviews of the band's shows drew comparisons such as "Fishbone meets GWAR" or "GWAR meets The Aquabats", while some reviewers coined unique terms like "doom ska" and "chicken-doom-ska-rock" to describe their mix of styles.[4]
Following their name change to The Radioactive Chicken Heads, the band began transitioning into a less thrashy and more melodic style of punk rock, emphasizing an offbeat eclectic edge inspired by the likes of The Residents and Oingo Boingo, while also expanding their sound into occasional one-off genre experiments in styles ranging from reggae to rockabilly. The Chicken Heads' 2005 album Growing Mold featured a mix of punk, rock and blues songs interspersed with accordion and marimba-driven instrumentals, while their 2008 follow-up Music for Mutants returned to an entirely punk, rock and metal-oriented sound although with an increased use of keyboards and brass instruments. The OC Weekly has described the band's current style as a cross "between GWAR and The B-52s...a sound that might work well scoring a John Waters, Ed Wood or Russ Meyer film", while Loudwire summarized them as "the Dead Kennedys on acid".[28][29]
Lyrically, the Chicken Heads have cited song parodist "Weird Al" Yankovic and children's musician Barry Louis Polisar as primary influences, and incorporate a similar style of puns and absurdist humor into their songwriting.[28] Many of the band's songs center around their fictional backstory as mutant chickens, sometimes focusing on specific band members and stage villains, or references to bird-related popular culture such as "Headless Mike", an ode to the 1940s carnival attraction Mike the Headless Chicken. During their "Joe" era, the band performed many parody versions of popular punk rock songs, including "Put the Cheese Away (Keep It Refrigerated)", a spoof of The Offspring's "Come Out and Play (Keep 'Em Separated)", and "Just for the Taste of It", which repurposed Rancid's "Salvation" into a commercial jingle for Diet Coke.
Band mythology
Having initially originated as a comic book concept, The Radioactive Chicken Heads have maintained an elaborate fictional narrative regarding the origins and universe of their characters, detailed and expanded upon through their official press biographies, in-character interviews, song lyrics, music videos, video game and television pilot.[30]
The Chicken Heads' origin stories can be separated into two distinct eras, delineated by the band's name change from "Joe and the Chicken Heads" into "The Radioactive Chicken Heads". As "Joe and the Chicken Heads", the group's story began on Uncle Max's farm, an otherwise normal California farm located underneath a series of high-tension electromagnetic power lines and regularly subject to government-led experiments in genetic engineering which produced massively-sized sentient vegetables, among which was the seven-foot tall carrot, Carrot Topp. Finding themselves bored with farm life, Carrot Topp and the other mutant vegetables started a punk rock band called The Vegematics, an endeavor which soon ended in tragedy when Badd Bunny, a rabbit mutated into an evil ten-ton beast by the same radiation, broke into their rehearsal space and devoured most of the members.[31]
The following Spring, Badd Bunny sabotaged Uncle Max's annual Easter egg hunt by beating up the Easter Bunny and planting dozens of "genetically modified super-sized-mega-jumbo eggs" around the farm, hatching an army of gigantic mutant chickens. Max's nephew, a slightly unbalanced farmhand named Joe, saw a lucrative business opportunity and taught each of the chicken beasts how to play instruments, eventually debuting on the county fair circuit as the nation's premiere man/chicken musical combo: "Joe and the Chicken Heads". Ultimately, the rising tensions of "artistic differences" within the band drove Joe to behead his bandmates and sell their meaty bodies to an unnamed "Colonel", leaving Carrot Topp to save his poultry pals by taking their heads and sewing them onto an assortment of human bodies he collected from the dumpster behind the local cryogenics lab, starting a whole new band bent on rock and roll stardom.[31]
Although elements of the Chicken Heads' original origin story served as the basis for the 2013 video game Badd Bunny Breakout, the band's official backstory was almost entirely retconned following their name change to "The Radioactive Chicken Heads" in 2004, completely removing the character of Joe and the setting of Uncle Max's farm. As most thoroughly detailed in Tales From The Coop and "The Radioactive Chicken Heads Show", Carrot Topp and the Chicken Heads are instead presented as the accidental creations of Dr. Baron Von Kluckinstein, a maniacal mad scientist conducting experiments on vegetables and poultry to make super-sized "frankenfoods". Kept as prisoners in his secret laboratory, the Chicken Heads eventually break out to live freely as a vegetable/poultry punk band, all the while fighting off Dr. Kluckinstein's sizable menagerie of monsters and creatures ordered to bring them back to captivity.
Live shows
A typical collection of oddities at a Chicken Heads show in Los Angeles in March 2013.
In a similar vein to other bands with fictionalized personas like GWAR and The Aquabats, the Chicken Heads are known for staging wild, theatrical live shows utilizing various props and costumed characters tying loosely into their thematic aesthetic. Due to the band members' attempt to retain anonymity, the Chicken Heads are rarely seen without their trademark masks and costumes and never grant interviews outside of their character personas, and thus always perform in full costume; although Carrot Topp sings while holding a dynamic microphone, a wirelessheadset microphone is used on the inside of his mask to provide voice clarity.
Every Chicken Heads show regularly features a host of extraneous characters outside of the main musicians, including both non-musician members who dance and interact with the audience during the band's set and "villains" who appear onstage to engage Carrot Topp in staged combat. These villains are mostly specific to the songs being played by the band, such as Badd Bunny and Liquid Fat appearing during their respective eponymous songs or "Chucky Cheeze" for "Pest Control", or thematically match the subject of the song, such as "Evil Carrot", a skeletal version of Carrot Topp, who appears during the song "I Looked Into the Mirror".[32][33]
Rather than traditional music venues, the Chicken Heads are known to primarily play unconventional locations and events not generally recognized for hosting live music. While the band has often frequented such establishments as comic book stores and bowling alleys, among the Chicken Heads' more unusual recent performances included spots at several Long BeachZombie Walks,[34]Sinn Bodhi's Freak Show Wrestling events in California and Las Vegas[35] and opening for screenings of the Oingo Boingo musical film Forbidden Zone[36] and the Los Angeles production of Re-Animator: The Musical.[37] The Chicken Heads are also a common fixture at the California Institute of Abnormalarts, a North Hollywood nightclub famous for its extensive sideshow and carnival memorabilia which exclusively hosts offbeat musical groups and freak shows, having first played there in 2000.[25]
Badd Bunny Breakout
On July 13, 2013, the Chicken Heads, in collaboration with independent game company Patient Corgi, released Badd Bunny Breakout, a role-playingcomputer game modeled and styled after classic Super Nintendo-era RPGs such as Final Fantasy and Chrono Trigger. First announced on the band's website on September 6, 2012, Badd Bunny Breakout spent roughly a year in development, designed by Ian Luckey and Colleen Luckey with creative input by the Chicken Heads. The game was released as a free digital download on Patient Corgi's website, with a limited pressing of "Collector's Edition" CD-ROMs being made available through the Chicken Heads' website and live shows.[20]
The soundtrack for Badd Bunny Breakout consists primarily of SNES-inspired 16-bit remixes of the Chicken Heads' songs, composed by co-developer Ian Luckey, a member of the San Diego video game music cover band Kirby's Dream Band. A 49-track soundtrack album was packaged with the CD-ROM release and also made available for free download through both Patient Corgi's website and the Chicken Heads' Bandcamp account.
In promotion of the game, the Chicken Heads hosted and performed at a game release party at the Nerdist Theater inside Los Angeles' Meltdown Comics on the day of Badd Bunny Breakout's release, where the game was displayed for public play. The following week, the band performed a set at the 2013 Gam3rcon, an independent gaming convention which coincides with the San Diego Comic-Con International, playing to an audience of roughly 3000 attendees.[38] The Chicken Heads subsequently performed at the 2014 and 2015 Gam3rcons, and has since shared bills with several video game-themed bands, most notably having performed several times each with The Protomen, The Megas and Mega Ran.[39][40]
Members
Over the course of the last twenty years as a band, the Chicken Heads have experienced countless fluctuations in their typically five to ten-member line-up, and thus different characters occasionally play or used to play different instruments than the ones attributed below. The following list reflects the Chicken Heads' "official" line-up, as listed on the band's social media accounts and most recent video projects:
Current/active members
Lead singer Carrot Topp remains the sole constant member of the Chicken Heads since forming the band in 1993.
The Chicken Heads performing at the California Institute of Abnormalarts in December 2015, where they've been featured in several television appearances.
Cheri Tomato, Puke Boy and Bird Brain served as Count Smokula's backing band for a live performance of his song "Zombie" on a syndicated version of Tom Green's web show.
Live performance with interview during a segment about the California Institute of Abnormal Arts for the Al Extremo news program on Spanish-language channel Azteca América.
Live footage of the band's set at Freakshow Wrestling with a brief interview during a segment about Zizi Howell, a woman obsessed with carrots.[21][22]
The California Institute of Abnormalarts was highlighted on a segment of the lifestyles show hosted by Audrina Patridge, which featured the Chicken Heads performing part of "The Curse of Frankenchicken" on the venue's stage.[25]
The California Institute of Abnormalarts was again highlighted in a Halloween-themed episode of the KABC-TV local public interest program Eye on LA, featuring the Chicken Heads performing on the venue's stage, as well as showing several members dancing to a performance by Los Angeles horror rock band The Rhythm Coffin.[26]
Live performance of "Surfin' Bird" on a national revival of the 1976 game show.[27]
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