On a Halloween night in 1996, during a stint in the sin and wretchedness of Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, depressed from a failed attempt at starting a drive-through marriage chapel, Reverend Vincent Feedback sat alone, watching TV. Alone save for some nacho cheese chips, and even these seemed to mock his bankruptcy and deficiency: “Not'cho cheese, loser!” The only light in the gloom was the spastic flickering from some offbeat Las Vegas cable channel featuring all night monster movies, and the night's presentation included an absurd rock band dressed up as skeletons playing surf music during the commercial breaks. Suddenly Feedback's skull was filled with an ethereal light of wonder and creation: Surf music = tides of change = Water is Life: Why doesn't Prague have anything like this? THE BAPTISM Sometime later the next year, feeling inspired in the spired city of Prague, Czech Republic, to where he had fled one step ahead of the county registrar, he approached the only musician he knew, a bassplayer named Dan Kenney, and proposed the creation of a Halloween band. Over the months various apoplectic fits of brainstorm had convinced him that the concept could combine Egyptology, human transcendence and strains of his own possible Gypsy ancestry, all while playing cheap covers of three chord rock and roll. The project was to be baptized Black Mummy. Feedback explained to Kenney: Black = the dark, the unrevealed, the undisclosed, the unlit (though Rev. Feedback was often lit in those days). Mummy = Dead history coming back to life. BlackMummy: Mummies ARE black because Egyptians are black, black people once ruled the world - and did as cruel a job of it as any other empire! Yet they left the pyramids, alchemical objects featuring the three points of the triangle: bass, drum and guitar, full of sacred knowledge and mystery. Pyramids leading again to the concept of Mummy, the Walking Dead = movement and life resuscitating into dead concepts of human exaltation and spiritual transcendence. Mummy = a creepy punk = punk rock, Feedback's own undead past buried deep within the sarcophagus of his heart. All members of Black Mummy must play in costume, in the carnivalesque tradition of alter egos, with the covered-up being (Mummy) brought forth from underneath (Black). Dan Kenney, then sporting a devilish goatee and an all-nighter glaze, trembled slightly and nodded. As a follower of both the alchemical and the lackadaisical, the mixing of East and West, the concept appealed to him. Kenney would create the groggy bass notes and Feedback would provide vocals covered with multiple special effects. Members were quickly recruited. A now-lost drummer named either Kuba or Michal appeared. The notorious Prague guitar-whiz Ed Zawadski, with a past inextricably linked with the Ivan Kral Band and more lately with the Ultraphonics, practiced with the band until yielding to the fresh-off-the-plane fill-in of Rochesterite Mark Tyranny, who would end up a permanent Black Mummier. Perhaps the most notable member to round out the band was the other committed Mummy lifer Vitalik Sevchuk, a classically-trained trumpeteer with Chernobyl-scorched roots in the Ukrainian post-punk scene. Tomas Suchomel, a scarecrow with an afro, was recruited as the manager. THE CONFIRMATION The first Black Mummy show of that Halloween 1997 was held in the odd Mala Strana venue of the 'A' Rubin theater, two doors down from the then-hot expatriate waterhole Joe's Bar. The evening proved to be all that could have been expected and feared, a bawdy night of exhilaration and festivity, of misfortune and hot streaks. Women laughed, men cried, Dan Kenney wore a dress while Feedback's homemade mummy costume and composure slowly unraveled. A low budget campaign of xeroxed posters and word-of-(cotton)mouth had packed the house with masqueraders from all walks of life, from loyal friends to random English teachers and CIA attaches to the hipster overflow from Joe's Bar. Costumes ranged from Czech Traditional (Ferda the Ant) to Western Bizarre (Hawaiian-tourist Snake-Strangler). Onstage Black Mummy teetered on their self-imposed totem, in some ways stinking as bad as any rotting 3000-year-old corpse, in other ways rebirthing rock and roll like a pregnant phoenix/kookoo bird as they pounded, wailed and sprayed out tunes from such Halloween-related maestros as Screamin' Jay Hawkins and The Cramps. Classic horror films projected behind the stage as every bandmember had his or her (remember the dresses) electrifying moment, with Sevchuk's horn catalyzing the critical uniqueness of the unlikely and vainglorious evening. Some things went horribly wrong - the theater issuing last minute extortion, equipment spontaneously cracking or hissing forth foam -- and after the show bassist Kenney was heard to mumble some divination about “a curse”. The prescience of his utterance is something no one in their right mind that evening would wish to know. THE LOST SOULS Events leading up to the fateful Halloween 1999 show remain obscure in survivor's memories. Either there were a few shows before a temporary disbanding or there weren't. What is known is that sometime during the year Feedback went on his first pilgrimage to the Balkans. Impressed with the utter dejection and hopelessness of the place, with its silver and rust hills like shrugging shoulders, he changed the spelling of Black Mummy to Blaq Mummy in reference to the Albanian language's predilection for naked Q's. A new drummer was brought in, Carl “Warlock”, later with the Prague band Squall. The concert venue was upgraded to the Meloun Club in Old Town, until and since then a sad place of disco music firmly centered in the burani (hick) zone. Club Melon: Gourd/Pumpkin: Jack o'lantern: smoky flame within excavated headshell: Mummy, Blaq. Halloween, 1999: A night to remember, or a night to be express-trained to the Bohnice mental hospital and beg for electroshock therapy to forget, depending. The night the Curse Proved Real. The opening acts: nutty puppets jangled by the mad Ukrainian performance artist Igor Tschay, and the Funkhop band Hummingbird fronted by another font of multifaceted manic creativity, American Alex Barber. Tschay, a visual artist as well as a performer, was little known to the western expatriate community dues to its general inclusivity and language fears. Barber, on the other hand, was a Prague celebrity to that crowd, an inspired stand up performer of music and comedy as well as a gifted freeform writer of poetry, prose, cartoons and confession. Barber: late night interlocutor of profound rants over much too many drinks. Tschay: blazing-eyed head-shaved teetotaler who once appeared at his opening wearing his art, a collection of index cards with his tiny paintings. Barber and Tschay, from worlds apart, and both of a same type set apart, unsatisfied, escaping, pushing, discontented, two creative artists at polar opposites of the same coin, the opening acts of Blaq Mummy Halloween 1999. Within a year, Tschay and Barber would be both dead. Both passed away under somewhat obscure and singular circumstances, Barber in a physical collapse due to toxic reaction of unspecified cause despite a healthy stint back in the States, and Tschay from an arson attack on the Belgium squat he had ensconced in after sneaking across the border to Western Europe. That the night may have been cursed was also more immediately apparent at the time. When the club sold out by 9 p.m. crowds of frustrated fans pushed in against the glowering thuggish Meloun doormen. When Blaq Mummy went on after Tschai and Hummingbird's acts, the stage electricity promptly blew out half way through their set. The costumed players abandoned ship, taking refuge in a small closet space as the club's DJ started playing wretched disco music. Some time later and for no obvious reason the band retook the stage and finding the power returned then plunged into a distorted rendition of Screamin' Jay Hawkin's “Alligator Wine”. Feedback brought onstage a plastic bottled of fermenting unfiltered wine the Czechs called burcak, thinking that the small fountain effect that always occurred on opening a bottle of the fermenting stuff would be an entertaining prop during the song. However when he went to unscrew the jug exploded - some unknown force had triggered the fermentation of the juice to such an extent that its contents were under extreme pressure. The bottle ripped open and the Meloun's high arched ceiling was coated with red drippings and silt as the entire two liters of burcak emptied themselves in the blink of an eye. The club would later accuse Blaq Mummy of using explosive devices onstage and get them banned from Old Town. More calamities followed in this second set, for instance the bass amp was seen to lift up and slam down into irreparable damage. Founding member Kenney was unnerved enough that he would eventually flee the band, shave his pointy chinhair and take a dayjob wearing a tie. Manager Suchomel, taking the heat for these and a multitude of other complications, suffered a nervous breakdown before the night ended, his voice raising two octaves as he cried over and over “I can't take it.” The night, to Feedback at least, seemed a stressful and ruinous disaster. At least until people started coming up to him in the ensuing days and proclaiming they had the time of their lives. RECLAMATION Fast forward to 2002. Blaq Mummy concerts have come and gone. Halloween 2000 in an off-the-beaten-tram-track venue called the Raven's Nest went off with little disaster and featured girlband The Apples along with a snakehandler and firebreather. Tribute concerts were played on the deaths of John Lee Hooker and Screamin Jay Hawkins - the latter show being shut down after one song by the club management. The Halloween 2001 show was cancelled due to its proximity to the 9-11 terrorist attacks. Thus we reach the present and the imminent Halloween concert of 2002, and the question must be asked, will it be a night of Fun or Folly? Fake Fright or True Terror? Cheerful Release or Chastened Regret? Some signs of curse have continued right up to recent events. The Antedilivuvian flooding of Prague this last Summer filled Rev. Feedback's home chapel with two meters of toxic bilgewater, destroying a vintage synthesizer he used to achieve his vocal effects, and he recently suffered a mysterious physical seizure that landed him in a Prague intensive care ward. But the gravelly voice from the oxygen tent announced that the Halloween show must go on, and measures have been taken this year to dispel any bad mojo from coming the way of the upcoming Halloween extravaganza*. Good time bands that proved bad-luck proof in past concerts, like the salsapop geniuses Tam Tam Orchestra, are being brought in. Mystics are being consulted to conduct onsite preconcert rituals of good hoodoo - targeted incense, helpful incantations. Scores of Balkan Roma are lighting candles in Orthodox churches and praying for only white magic to prevail at this concert. Lastly the band is once again changing its name for the concert, this time to Brackish Mummery. “Brackish” to supplicate Mother Nature in honor of the power of her recent flood, and “Mummery” to stress the blissful traditions of costumes and play versus the morbid concerns of a holiday devoted to the deceased spirits and monsters of the night. Of course, whether the spectral world takes any notice of the scrabbling precautions of fearful mortals is totally unknown, and their effects on future Blaq Mummy shows remain to be seen.* *The show suffered no deaths or disaster