Southern Culture on the Skids: The Mr. Skin Interview

Some people think of Southern Culture on the Skids as a novelty act--but you're a true product of Southern culture.

I grew up in Henderson, North Carolina, until I was about thirteen years old. We had two drive-in theaters--the Henderson Drive-In and the Moonlite. That's when I was bothering my mother to take me to double features with Samson vs. the Vampire Women and a Roger Corman movie. It'd be Attack of the Crab Monsters or Attack of the Giant Leeches or some kind of eco-terror threat.

Samson vs. the Vampire Women is actually a Santo movie--and SCOTS paid tribute to Santo on a tribute album. Are there other film icons that have influenced your songwriting?

As far as cinema goes, just Santo. I've had a great time writing songs about the real people we've met, like "King of the Mountain." That's about a guy we met outside of Tennessee selling moonshine out of his car. But there are a lot of Southern movies that mean a lot to me, like Macon County Line. One of my fondest memories as a child was seeing White Lightning and Gator with my dad. We always watched wrestling and Porter Wagoner on Saturdays too.

If this was back in the '70s, it would've been when Southern movie theaters changed out their features on Friday and Wednesday.

We had a double feature running from Tuesday to Thursday, and then a weekend of exploitation films. I was into all the Hammer films, and the drive-ins had a Hammer film almost every Saturday, or a Japanese import like Frankenstein Conquers the World. I remember that on a double bill with Atragon.

That was all in a small town with a population of maybe 10,000 people. It was exactly the same stuff playing in Times Square. A lot of those exploitation movies were made in the South. There was Earl Owensby in North Carolina, and Herschell Gordon Lewis in Florida--and he was working with David Friedman, another great Southerner.

Any memories of your first nude scenes?

I hate to say it, but my first nude scene was when I got my mom to take me to see The Last Picture Show. Cybill Shepherd (Picture: 1 - 2) got naked, and she made me leave. We were living in California when I got old enough to see R-rated films, so the first one I saw without my mom was The Gore Gore Girls--or maybe The Groove Tube (Picture: 1 - 2). The Gore Gore Girls was genius, with softcore meeting horror. I don't know if Herschell Gordon Lewis gets credit for that. 2,000 Maniacs! played constantly in North Carolina.

We always hope to see Hee Haw Honeys or Tura Satana-types at your concerts.

It's funny, because we defy categorization. Sometimes we've had three generations coming to see us down South. We're the only band that they can all agree to play in the car. Then we get the Bettie Page rockabilly chicks, and we also get girls who work in offices. We had a burlesque group join us recently down South. They all had on Candy Johnson outfits and go-go danced our whole set.

Southern drive-ins started to die out in the '80s, but nobody had video stores like the South did. The small-town stores would get all the most obscure titles.

You are so right about that. If you went to Chapel Hill, which is a college town full of academic types, they had nothing. You had to drive out a while, and then you'd find all the good horror and titty movies.

I remember when the first Psychotronic Encyclopedia came out in the '80s. I was reliving my youth with that one. That was a beautiful time, when all those movies became available on video through companies like Something Weird.

We found a drive-in the last time we were in North Carolina, but it was showing Hulk. That was kind of a disappointment.

Oh, it was all low-budget exploitation movies back then. That's what came to drive-ins. To me, that was the heyday of softcore R movies--Naughty Stewardesses (Picture: 1 - 2 - 3) and the R-rated horror films and the R-rated sex comedies. I don't know what happened to all that. I guess the same thing that happened to Times Square.