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Lazaro's Dog.
 "I got a budgie for Christmas, which is for my birthday as well. It's called Reg. He doesn't talk yet, though. And Corey from the band has a turkey. I'm not joking. He has a pet turkey in his backyard. He is the Ozzie Osbourne of the Northern suburbs. He's got the turkey, he's got peacocks, he's got rabbits, and he's got like about twenty kids. It's brilliant. I've already signed him up for a three movie deal. I'm going to make a lot of money out of him one day."
Lazaro's Dog have been called many things, but cowards, according to Vic Pisani, they are not. As the band prepare to re-unite for their pre-Christmas extravaganza, he wants the world to know that the power of their collective love for all things avian is such that it trumps all else, including it seems, any concerns they might have otherwise had about cementing their place in history as ground zero for the antipodean assault of the bird flu pandemic.
"Look, we're not afraid of any diseases that might happen to be sweeping the world and might wipe out half the population. In fact, as soon as we heard that there was a possible epidemic happening, we all went out and bought birds, just to show how fuckin' tough we are. And Corey went out and bought a fuckin' turkey."
The Lazaro's Dog Christmas show has become an institution of sorts ever since the band first decided that nothing could both symbolize and celebrate the season of goodwill and tolerance like the coming together of melodic pop and wrestling.
"The original Christmas show started off as a wrestle-fest, so there's always a chance of wrestling happening again somehow. I mean if I ever get stuck in a room with the other guys from Lazaro's Dog for five minutes it's going to drive me up the wall so it could happen. But the real reason behind this show is that this is our first gig in about a year and we thought maybe if you get out of this thing for long enough, people might actually start to forget how shit you were and will start to think that maybe you were good and come back to the fold. We're hoping someone will start a rumour that we're bad boys so we can sell the gig out to a whole bunch of older men in black t-shirts."
So the real agenda here isn't music so much as historical revisionism?
"Yeah, I guess, if you want to intellectualise it. We actually started jamming again for the first time in a year or more in the last couple of weeks and have come up with a few things that are all pretty much of the same standard - which is pretty shit, but who knows? Shit songs seem to get a lot of airplay at the moment so maybe we're on a winner."
So those who make the trek to Fowler's won't be seeing a spent force of backwards-looking has-beens, but rather, a living, breathing dynamo; a machine of pure musical creativity, then?
"No, I think they'll be seeing both: a live, creative machine of has-beens. We started doing it all years ago when we were young and enthusiastic and still believed that rock'n'roll could change the world. Now it's just an excuse to get together. We actually haven't played in ages. We're getting to be an example to young bands to just strive for mediocrity. You just have to do it because you'd get disappointed doing anything else. What's going on here anyway? I thought after you've been around at dB for a bit you get some decent interviews. Not the bottom-of-the-barrel, bargain-bin Lazaro's Dog interview."
Despite his comedic self-effacement ("I honestly don't know when the last album came out. I think I've blocked it from my mind... I started therapy three years ago, so I guess it must have been sometime around then."), I actually get the impression Pisani is quite looking forward to returning to the stage to inflict some mayhem with the rest of the Dog. Either way, he's certainly not short of facetious suggestions for themes and tones for this article.
"I thought maybe you'd start with something like 'Local Adelaide Sellouts, Lazaro's Dog'..."
No, I thought I'd end with it instead.
Jeremy Reglar
 | Lazaro's Dog hold Rock'n'Roll Xmas Wrestle Fest VI at Fowler's Live on Fri 23 Dec with High Stakes, Sumi, The Dairy Brothers and Day On Fire. |
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