Kurt Deimer is a true original. He has forged careers as both an actor and musician and has done both on his own terms. The title of his new record, A Grog Is Born, is a reference to his latest movie Scared To Death. Musically, the record continues to see him blaze his own path with a unique style that stands apart from his peers. Recently, Kurt took some time to chat about the record, the movie, and more!
Please press the PLAY icon below for the MisplacedStraws Kurt Deimer interview –
On the musical evolution between his last record and A Grog is Born – Back when I first arrived in LA in 2020, I’d never even envisioned I’d be front man in a rock band, let alone touring all over with bands like Tesla and Sebastian Bach and Buckcherry and Skid Row. I hadn’t done this in so long, but basically once Chris Lord-Alge and I got together I grew up in Mix LA, if you will. We kept working and banking all these songs. A lot of the songs you hear on A Grog Is Born are ones I purposely, Chris and I, didn’t put on Work Hard, Rock Hard or didn’t put on And So It Begins. We went back, and a lot of those have changed. Like “In Deep”, that’s been on radio now four months in the top media-based 50 rock radio, mainstream rock, and it’s still on the chart. That used to be a song called “He Was Good To Me” that I wrote back in 2019, and then I wanted to do a collab with Josh Todd. He agreed to do it, and he rewrote the lyrics to the music that I had, and it’s just part of that growth, a lot of these songs were in there. I had talked them at first ’cause I couldn’t sing on pitch. My range was very low, which is hard for people to do, but now I can go higher and I picked up a couple octaves. It’s all from hard work and training and singing and finding my voice, if you will. I think that’s what the big difference is. Held onto some gems, and we’ve already working on the third album. The sky’s the limit now. But I agree, the fans are gonna see it’s a total step into a whole new realm of Kurt Deimer music
On the musicians on the record – On A Grog Is Born, it is Phil X doing all the guitars, doing bass, everything. Brian Tichy on drums. Then Chris Lord-Alge, keys, producing, and myself. Then Marco Pera, who plays guitar, is my music director now, who sings all the high when we go live. He has some parts where he’s doing vocals on there, and there’s a couple of other, of my old band mates on “Scared to Death” that have some credits too. But it’s predominantly me, Phil X, and Chris Lord-Alge.
On how his collaboration with Josh Todd came about – We were touring Canada with Steel Panther, Buckcherry and us, and along that tour I found a little casino bar that I could smoke in. The Buckcherry tour manager was in there, my tour manager, and we’re pretty knee-deep into the tour, and I just go, “I’d sure love to do a collab with Josh sometime.” I had this song in mind, because it’s reminded me of the “Crazy Bitch” vibe and “I like the cocaine” (“Lit Up”), I love those two songs. I just love Josh’s voice and him and I are pretty quiet on tour. We got shows to do, and him and I aren’t the most active in the camps because I’ve got so much going on and I have my routine. But the tour manager went to mine, said “Josh is interested”.
Josh and I exchanged numbers. Now, we’re friends, and I sent him the song, the original form of “He Was Good To Me”, ’cause it used to be about the girls, you know, “wake up, every guy out there just wants to take advantage of you”, that type of song. He said, “I love the riff, I love the guitar, I love all that. I’ll do a collab with you, but I got an idea on the lyrics I want.” The rest is history. A month later in Chris Lord-Alge’s studio, we’re cutting the vocals. Chris is all in on the concept, and two days later we went and shot the music video. So, can’t thank Josh enough, and hopefully it’s helping him and Buckcherry just as much as it’s helping Kurt Deimer and what we’re trying to accomplish. I thought it was a great collab, but that’s how it came together.
On covering classic songs with a new twist – We’ll do “Silent Lucidity” first, because it’s coming out tomorrow, and it’s gonna be going to radio here soon, but radio’s very excited about it because it does feature the original Geoff Tate, the guy, the voice that you saw on MTV in front of the orchestra back, way back when. Which inspired me to even wanna do the song. But “Silent Lucidity”, Chris and I had talked about doing that at, as far back as 2020, because I loved the original version. But I wanted to take and make it meatier and more into the current times and reintroduce it to people that had heard the old version, like I did with “Have a Cigar”, and then introduce my version and my interpretation of the song.
I actually, I cut the first demo of that with Chris on November 12th, 2020, and it just happened to be the night before my grandmother passed at 106 years old. Because nobody could visit her in the nursing home. But I just ironically did the day before “Silent Lucidity”, and the way I always interpret it is that, all those people that we’ve lost in our lives, they’re looking down on us in silent lucidity, taking care of us while we’re still on this earthly journey. Grandma passed the next day. We tucked that away, but I’ll never forget that. Then, a couple years ago, when we started working on A Grog Is Born, that was definitely one we were gonna put on and Chris and I are like, “Let’s call Geoff,” because Geoff had collabed with me on “Burn Together” and has been such a big supporter of mine even from the beginning. I wouldn’t be here without him. Geoff and Susan (Tate) were stoked. They love our version. They love the power of it. They love the message of it, my interpretation of it bringing awareness to suicide and suicide prevention, and they were all in. Geoff took a day and flew in, and that’s the video we’re in the studio putting our hearts into this song, Phil X cutting his guitar in the song. It’s not about us, it’s about bringing awareness to the suicide pandemic that we go through every year, every decade of life. I think it’s gonna touch a lot of lives.
Hopefully, we’ll be doing a lot to help suicide prevention places, and I think it’s gonna spread all over the world and really take a big step in helping a lot of people. So I hope you dig it, but that’s why I did it and the way I did it. It’s very similar to “Have a Cigar”. What did Chris say back in the day? He said, “We’re just gonna take some of these little intricacies out of the original, not have that little talking in the middle, make it more powerful guitar solo, have your deep voice underlying Geoff’s, and just make it really rock and really powerful.” Bring it into the 2020s, if you will.
Then “In the Air Tonight”, we had played around with that four or five years ago, and I actually talked it the first time. I was going, It was like, “I can feel it coming,” just doing the, my Kurt Deimer talk like in the past. But now I can sing, so just Marco and I went into the studio and he got it out, and Chris pushed me to octaves I’ve never done before, and we got it, and we got it, and Marco can even go higher. Again, I just wanted to take the softness out of the original version and just make it like, “Yes, can you feel it?” Because I lived my whole life, I can feel it coming, that people are starting to take notice that what we’re doing is pretty unique. It’s our own brand of rock, and it’s, I think it’s really needed in these times, and maybe it’ll open up doors to other people to just be who they are and just do it the way they do it. So that’s why we did that. We just wanted to make them powerful, rock hard, be great to see live, and two of my favorite songs from the past, and just make them more ballsy, if you will, and just more powerful.
On his support of suicide prevention – I’m all, even live if you’ve seen me, I’m all about, common sense, peace, love, kindness. We all just need to get along, come together, take care of each other in this crazy world we live in. I just like to share things like that. Like “In the Air”‘s gonna be in my movie Relapse, which is a drama that’ll be coming out next year. I play the dad who’s a rock star of a daughter who’s a pop star who has a drug addiction, and we’re bringing awareness to fentanyl and all the things it does to kill our society. “In the Air” is featured as the song at the end of that movie. Even Phil Collins’ brain trust or whoever approves it with mine, they let us put the song, my version in there at very low cost because of the cause, and they obviously had to have liked my interpretation of it. So, I like to do that in my songs, and I think it’s very important to bring awareness to everything we can in life to, for the betterment of all our lives.
On the tie between A Grog is Born and Scared To Death – “In Deep” is in the movie in one of the scenes with Lyn Shaye, and my song “Live or Die”, off And So It Begins, is in the movie. The other song that’s in the movie obviously is “Scared to Death”, which director Paul Boyd had me write specifically for the movie.
So, I took my experience from playing the Grog, the horror icon, one of the stars in the movie alongside Lyn Shaye and Bill Moseley, and I interpreted what we experienced in that house and just the main dynamics of the whole pieces of the story. it was an honor to write that, so it ties in. We thought it’d be appropriate to put it on the album. Then one night I’m just sitting having a little vodka water and my usual think tank time late at night, and I’m like, we’re introducing the Grog to the world. The Grog can go so many places over the upcoming years. It’s a unique character. He’s got a tale, a past, that we’ve created, and I loved when Barbra Streisand came out and Kris Kristofferson and it was A Star Is Born from the ’70s. So, I called my management and I go, “I want the ’70s kind of font. Look at A Star Is Born, but what’s being born now is a Grog and all the things that Grog is gonna do. So, I want to do A Grog Is Born.” My parents, God rest their souls up in heaven, I just knew I had these pictures. My mom had just passed a couple years ago, my dad earlier in the in 2016, and my sister in ’13. I lost my whole family of four except me. I had these pictures as I had been going through all the stuff of me and my mom and dad at probably a Penney’s or a Sears back in the day when I was born, and there’s little me. I said, “We’ll just put a tickler on me.” This is called the tickler. I go, “Put that on that picture.” There’s one of me in the chair, Mom got me when I was, like, three. I go, “Put that tickler on that one. That’ll be the back cover.” Then you put me when I was in The Circus Birds before I quit music, when I had the long hair from The Cure and all that shit. Put it on that, and then put me on, in there as I am now, and A Grog Is Born. We’ll start out and you can see when the Grog was born, and here it is. It’s cool to honor my parents. I think it’s a really retro art. I think it’s a collector’s item for sure, and it’ll just remind people a lot of their family and honoring their families. It’s beautiful to see my mother and father, who I wouldn’t be here talking to you just getting the respect they deserve for what a great job they did giving me a chance to succeed in life and always having my back through the toughest times. It really touches me to be able to do that.
On touring – We just played Earth Day Birthday. We were the most played song on radio at WJRR in Orlando, and then we played Earth Day Birthday. Then we played in Jacksonville, at Jackrabbit’s OCC Roadhouse in Tampa, and we just played West End in Sanford. So those were all great shows in the last few weeks, and we also showed the movie, and we just headlined it and did our own headline and had great turnouts at every one. We’re gonna go back and do Leesburg Bike Fest at Gator Harley stage on April 24th. We’re headlining that Friday night. Then we’re putting together tours right now. I’m gonna go all over the US. I’ve got my next movie, Hillbilly Hollow, coming out in the fall. Which features a lot of my music from back in the day. So, we’re gonna be promoting that. It’ll come out in theaters.
Scared to Death coming out on streaming in May, so we’re gonna keep doing stuff on that. But yeah, we fully plan to tour the whole US, do headline shows. If there’s a show we do with somebody else, it’s gotta be right. We’ve got a show with Halestorm on July 17th out in Omaha. That’s gonna be a big one. We’re gonna be doing Sturgis. We’re gonna be doing a bike rally up in Boise that heads from Boise to Sturgis, and I wanna go back through Canada again. So, USA and Canada for sure this year, and hopefully, with the movies taking off overseas and all that, we gotta get to Europe, we gotta get to South America, because we’re building fans all over the place.
So, we’re gonna be touring nonstop. We just took the last few months to get the album done, reboot. I got the band to where it’s just phenomenal now. We have a great camp. We all get along. There’s no di- divisiveness, and that’s a big part of it, and things that people don’t see behind the scenes. It’s a lot of hard work, but we’re at a really good place now and ready to tour like crazy.
On his new Vodka – One, one more surprise for your fans. In May, my vodka brand’s coming out. You’ll be able to buy it in a liquor store near you or order it at a bar. It’s Kurt Deimer presents Dimes, D-I-M-E-S, ultra-premium vodka. Mix it with water, you can’t even taste it. It’s so good. So that’ll be coming out, and I’m stoked. All you gotta do is say, “Give me a shot of Dimes.”
