Getting With The Program: Q & A With The Spook Lights

By Less Lee Moore

From Legends of America:

According to the legend, the spook light was first seen by Indians along the infamous Trail of Tears in 1836; however, the first “official” report occurred in 1881 in a publication called the Ozark Spook Light.

Image from The Hornet Spook Light

The ball of fire, described as varying from the size of a baseball to a basketball, dances and spins down the center of the road at high speeds, rising and hovering above the treetops, before it retreats and disappears. Others have said it sways from side to side, like a lantern being carried by some invisible force. In any event, the orange fire-like ball has reportedly been appearing nightly for well over a one hundred years. . . Though many paranormal and scientific investigators have studied the light, including the Army Corps of Engineers, no one has been able to provide a conclusive answer as to the origin of the light. Many explanations have been presented over the years including escaping natural gas, reflecting car lights and billboards, and will-o’-the-wisps, a luminescence created by rotting organic matter. However, all of these explanations all fall short of being conclusive.

[Editor’s Note: Popshifter is sad to report that since this interview was conducted Ruby passed on over the Rainbow Bridge in the sky. She will be greatly missed.]

Popshifter: Who are The Spook Lights?

Scary Manilow: singer
Curvacia VaVoom: surf guitarist
Jetboy: fuzz guitarist
The Meld: drums

Popshifter: How did you get started? What is “THE PROGRAM”? What is “exotic trash culture” and why is it so vital to our survival?

Curvacia VaVoom: For years I wrote and performed songs on my acoustic guitar and banjo. My themes of choice were ballads of populist uprisings, along with a romantic series of songs using natural disasters as sexual metaphors. Electric guitars sketched me out because if I picked one up I knew my peers would all be macho egomaniacs who didn’t appear interested in sharing stage space with any pussy power. Yet the traditional combo of “girl with acoustic guitar” eventually pigeonholes females into a soft-focused seat in singer/songwriter venues. I didn’t feel I was causing much trouble.

At home I started playing mean, scary, surf gang songs on my acoustic guitar. Scary Manilow encouraged me, pretty much in any direction I wanted, and soon enough I found myself trotting out of the music store with the cheapest electric hollow body could find and a small Vox amp with a gain setting on it that gave it that slightly warm and blown-out sound that I craved.

Scary Manilow and I spent most of our free time collecting odds and ends from the world of exotic trash. This included a lot of horror movies made with little or no money from the 50s and 60s. I started mimicking the scary little soundtracks from movies like Teenage Strangler and Robot Monster. This is where I came to appreciate the balance of not being adept enough of a guitar player to get the riffs right, but having a different kind of skill where my attempts may be way off-kilter, but are a whole other creation around which I can write an entirely different song.

Out of lack of money and lack of motivation we forgot about the record stores for a while and began picking our records from the trash, garage sales, and thrift stores. Every now and then there would be that one amazing find, something we’d never heard of that took us to a whole other planet, the Planet Sleazetopia.

Before meeting Scary Manilow I was already kind of an alien who preferred the company of myself, my animals and plants, my songs, and my trash treasures to the rest of the world. One day I said to myself: WHY BE ALONE IN A CROWD WHEN I CAN DO WHAT I WANT BY MYSELF? WHY BOTHER BEING AN OUTSIDER IN A DREARY AND BORING WORLD WHEN I CAN BE THE INSIDER OF MY OWN INVENTED WORLD?

Around this time I started obsessing of on the catch phrase “You need to get with the program.” To me, the mere existence of that phrase was evidence that our culture is ruled by an unwritten handbook that defeats millions into trying to catch up with a strict campaign of uniform guidelines, whether they fit or not. How can this work? I had silently decided to withdraw from THE program and live within MY program. Only for me, the handbook of rules wouldn’t be so unspoken. I would be out in the open with the fact that my Program supports all people living in an interdependent universe of separate pockets of self-invented “programs” and cultures that may or may not overlap.

Robot Monster

Click to read more from The Spook Lights on. . .

Elderly delinquents
Low-budget movies
What’s wrong with Hollywood?
Horror movies and what’s next on The Program

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