Return of the Serial Killers

SOME bands light fireworks or build elaborate backdrops to liven up their stage shows.

The Serial Killers would attack a man in a wheelchair and pull ropes of bloody guts from his belly as he howled in agony. Or they'd drag a pregnant spectator onstage, wrench a two-headed baby from between her legs and then pass it around like a football. And that nun protesting their immorality with her Bible nearby? They'd drop her pants and burn her bum with a branding iron.

It was all fake, of course, but such antics - appalling or amusing, depending on your sense of humor - made the pioneering gore-punk band a mainstay of Philadelphia's underground punk-rock scene in the 1980s.

This week, the "only band that splatters" reunites after 23 years for four performances in the Philadelphia area. The reunion, they hope, will be a revival: They'd like to re-release their album, "Roadside Rendezvous" (the original was printed on red vinyl and came with a bag of dirt that band members dug from Philly killer Gary Heidnik's yard), and maybe even issue a new album and merchandise.

"The whole punk nostalgia trip is really marketable," lead singer Paul Bearer said recently. "We were definitely a cult band, but we were anachronistic; we were really ahead of our time. The trash-culture stuff that we loved and had to dig for like buried treasure is now mass-marketable."

Long before Marilyn Manson sang about Satan and sadism, Philadelphia's Serial Killers shocked and thrilled its audience with lyrics about killers like Heidnik and Wisconsin's Ed Gein.

The opening verse of their song "Heidnik's House of Horrors": "He had a basement straight out of hell, the Marquis de Sade would have thought it was swell."

And from "The Illegitimate Son of Ed Gein": "There once was a man named Ed, who wouldn't take a woman to bed. If he wanted to fiddle, he'd slice up her middle and hang her remains in the shed."

The band's members, who played together for four years and toured nationally twice, now are scattered.

Tim Nelson, who cofounded the band, lives in Plainfield, Wis. - Gein's hometown, as it happens - where he works at a wood-research laboratory, testing wood strengths. Known as Tim "The Strangler" Omen onstage, Nelson is the band's guitarist and principal songwriter.

The band's other founder and lead singer, "The King" Paul Bearer, declined to share his real name, saying that more people know him by his stage name. He lives in Columbus, Ohio, where he is "jubilantly divorced" and a "part-time carny and full-time man of leisure."

Stuntman and background vocalist "Mega Jimmy" Dougherty, of Marlton Lakes, N.J., retired in 2009 from the Camden County Sheriff's Office, where he worked for 26 years. His current band: Double Penetration.

And drummer Randy "The Rapist" Mayhem is a/k/a Randy Burbage, of Brookhaven. He works as a maintenance mechanic at Riddle Memorial Hospital.

Guitarist "Dr. Steven Butcher" also declined to give his real name, because he still works as a musician and worries that his Serial Killers alter ego might cost him some gigs.

Still, the band relishes the revulsion that some might feel for them and reminisce fondly about the "angry feminists" who protested one long-ago show with signs saying "Castrate the Serial Killers!"

"We polarized everybody," Bearer said. "You either loved us or hated us - you either got the work or you didn't.

"It's better to get a negative reaction than no reaction."

Blog: phillyconfidential.com