alice rutherford

Drummer and multi-instrumentalisit Dominic Cipolla started the Phantom Family Halo in Louisville and released The Legend Of Black Six on Cold Sweat this year. He speaks from Chicago as part of a semi-rotating line-up (now Corey Smith, Tyler Trotter, Axel Cooper and Derek Burke) on tour with Acid Mothers Guru Guru.

How is tour rapport between Mani from Guru Guru and Acid Mothers and you?
They’re really nice and awesome and completely amazing and inspiring. I’ve been trying to not be too much of a dork around Mani.
What are you too afraid to ask?
A lot just about Germany in the early ‘70s. Trying to figure out who they’d play shows with. All kinds of things, all the way down to the visual things. I try to be slick and slow about it. But he’s so nice—he just wants to talk. He’s totally into macrobiotic and Japanese food. Apparently Mani’s been eating macrobiotic food for like thirty years. He plays and looks amazing. I was like, ‘Man, you have twice as much energy as me, and you’re twice as old!’ And he’s like, ‘No, no, you totally play hard!’ And Kawabata is like—some sonic samurai-warrior person. He says very few words and then completely melts your brain and is amazing any time he does anything. And they’re all so nice! Every night they’re like, ‘We really like your band!’
What do you say about that?
‘Thank you very much, very very nice, thank you!’ It’s totally insane.
What do you like best about Paul Laffoley?
I don’t know if it’s easy to explain, but I think he’s definitely tapped into somewhere else. I feel like in the future, his paintings are going to be seen as formulas for changing the way people live somehow. He’s more than just an artist. I saw him on the Disinformation DVD—I saw that and was fully destroyed by it. It’s weird because I’ve gone to all kinds of art museums while traveling and no one has any of his art. The one where you can put your hands on it—I wanna actually see that one. I wanna be in front of that someday. Does he still live in like a boiler room?
If he doesn’t, he should.
I’ve always heard of him in a boiler room, painting—getting messages from somewhere else.
What other visionary artists do you like?
Jodorowsky—I have a problem with that guy.
Like personally?
No, a good problem. I wish life looked like that all the time.
Have you heard of the Hopkinsville Goblins?
What is that? A sports team?
No, they were some UFO aliens that got in a shootout in Kentucky in the ‘50s.
What? That’s awesome. Seems like something we’d hear about.
Is the Waverly Hills sanatorium really haunted?
Absolutely. But now you can go there on tours. When we were teenagers, we’d break in and roam around and get chased away by security.
What kind of creepy things did you see?
You don’t have to see anything. Just being in there creeps you out. It’s dark and cold and thousands and thousands of people have died there. There’s a death chute—so many people were dying all the time that they’d send the bodies down a chute on the back of the building, so the people who were sick wouldn’t see the bodies every day. And there was a truck at the bottom. It’s like a laundry chute. You can climb down it. Another place is Eastern Cemetery—my all-time favorite Lousiville spot. It started in like the late 1700s and basically the people who ran it kept passing the ownership over, and shady people would end up owning it and not paying attention to the people who had been buried earlier. So for like a hundred years, people were buried on top of each other.
Like bunk beds?
It got to the point a few years ago where coffins were just coming out of the ground. And there’s a part for babies—where all the babies were buried. They had to bring in archaeologists to figure out what was going on. Families couldn’t find their relatives. People were freaking out. They had like 1,200 slots for graves and found like 1,800 bodies. I love it. I go there all the time. It’s probably my favorite place. There’s an old chapel inside and that’s haunted, and in the basement is the crematorium machine. We’ve been hanging out there. They don’t bury people there anymore. They should just turn it into a botanical garden and allow flowers and shit to grow.
Do you go there on Valentine’s Day?
We used to for all kinds of holidays. If anyone comes to visit, I take them there.
Have you ever eaten ice cream in the crematorium?
No, I haven’t. That sounds weird.
What were Mickey and Sylvia’s greatest contributions to American music?
Man, I just put that on our web page—there’s other stuff that isn’t even real. The Ferry Four, I know that’s real. Michelangelo, that’s fake.
Michelangelo is real.
There’s a band?
He was a ‘70s psychedelic folk guy. It’s something you would be into.
I totally just made all that up. I remember being like—I don’t wanna really tell the truth. That’s why all those names are on the record, but actually when I put it together, it was just two of us—me and Michael McMahon, who just got done doing the Slint tour. So a lot of stuff is completely fabricated. All the names are totally fake. I’m actually the only person playing on the whole record, except for a couple of guitar parts done by Michael. Everything else is just me over the course of six months. But on the record, I listed a ton of people because I was freaked out about nobody doing anything with the music if it was just… a guy. I wanted it to seem like a band.
How did you learn to play?
I started playing drums when I was like eight years old. But before that I even knew—I was bothering my parents to get me a drum set. My dad was into Al Jolson and Mario Lanza and my mom was into Black Sabbath and Hank Williams, Sr., and my brothers were into different generations of rock ‘n’ roll. And I was the youngest, so I was constantly just absorbing all this shit. And eventually a serious monster was created.
Is Julian Cope the world’s leading authority on heavy rock?
I don’t know about heavy rock, but he is definitely familiar with music you listen to while you’re on drugs. Maybe he’s the leading authority on that.
What is the best Kentucky bourbon and why?
Jim Beam. Why? It’s the one. Everything else falls to the wayside.

PHANTOM FAMILY HALO PLAYS TUES., SEPT. 11, WITH ACID MOTHERS GURU GURU AT THE TROUBADOUR, 9081 SANTA MONICA BLVD., WEST HOLLYWOOD. 8 PM / $15 / ALL AGES. WWW.TROUBADOUR.COM.