Courtesy AMOD
Audio By Carbonatix
The four members of AMOD, the Denver hardcore-punk band formerly known as American Overdose, don’t take themselves too seriously. But they do have a natural talent for putting together politically charged songs and set lists full of cop-bashing and anti-capitalism, thanks to vocalist Walt Mothman’s tongue-in-cheek lyrics.
Mothman, guitarist Tyler Shilling, drummer Jason Brooks and bassist Matt Luke doubled down on their ideology and controversial message when Westword interviewed the band in May, back when its moniker was still American Overdose and it was opening for the Bronx. “I like to couch really serious issues in humor,” Mothman said at the time. “When I’m singing about how much I hate developers pricing out neighborhoods, that comes out as me encouraging people to steal copper from development yards. Themes like this is really how I communicate a lot of my political beliefs.”
So the bandmates couldn’t help but laugh when a Portland, Oregon, group called Amerakin Overdose reached out to them after reading the interview and asked the Denver band to change its name while simultaneously threatening legal action if it did not. To add to the hilarity, they also noticed the Portlanders had an affinity for the boys in blue.
“It’s kind of funny, because it’s like, all right, you’re this ‘nationally touring’ band, and you’re scared of us because the biggest show we played was with the Bronx, and the other places have been fucking Bar Bar?” Shilling says.
“I made a post where I was like, ‘You really haven’t made it as a rock star until someone threatens you with a cease-and-desist,'” Mothman adds. “All my friends were like, ‘What’s going on?’ And there was a wall of posts like, ‘You’re being sued by Great Value Slipknot!'”
That’s a reference to Amerakin Overdose’s masked on-stage persona – which, to be fair, aligns with the subgenres of hard rock and nu metal that somehow rose to popularity in the early 2000s. That’s when such bands as Mushroomhead (a group with which Amerakin Overdose actually toured, which has been regularly mocked for mimicking Slipknot’s shtick, even though it began a few years before the Iowa collective formed) and Mudvayne went crazy with face paint and ghoulish disguises to provide an element of shock and horror. Those acts have since been labeled as corny “butt rock” that dudes with a wardrobe full of Thin Blue Line merch still listen to.
“They’re like if Hot Topic was a band,” Mothman says of Amerakin Overdose.
“Like, ‘Aesthetically we’re hard, but on the Fourth of July we like to drink Bud Light,’ or probably not Bud Light, but, ‘We like to drink some domestic beer,'” Shilling suggests.
‘”We like to drink something brewed in our radiator,'” adds Mothman.
That’s pretty spot on, since Coors Light seems to be the unofficial lubricant of Amerakin Overdose, at least according to the pictures it posts on social media. But the bootlicking is apparently a recently acquired taste, given that Amerakin Overdose, which was founded in 2010, had a 2011 concert poster showcasing an image of a beaten and bloodied Statue of Liberty being dragged away by two cops wearing Stormtrooper helmets, as well as a 2015 band logo of a skull-faced Uncle Sam busting through a broken map of the United States while flipping the bird.
“Kill your god and take control, sex, Drugs and Rock n Roll,” Amerakin Overdose proudly displays on its Facebook intro, which is “kinda edgy,” Shilling quips.
Still, Mothman and his bandmates took the issue seriously when Amerakin Overdose guitarist Bishop Freeman first reached out to them via Facebook on the morning of Saturday, June 3.
“We are asking that you cease and desist using this name regardless of spelling,” Freeman wrote, adding that he hated “to be the bearer of bad news.”
“As a kind gesture we are reaching out directly before moving forward with any official proceedings,” his message continued. “Hope you can understand why it is not beneficial for us or you to utilize the same name.”
In his response, Mothman asked if his band owns the trademark on “both spellings.”
“Yes,” was Freeman’s reply.
“I suspect they don’t, but now probably do,” Mothman says, “so we made them waste, like, $1,500, hopefully.”
There is no record of anyone officially owning the trademark for either American Overdose or Amerakin Overdose on the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office website, pending or otherwise, as of mid-August.
At the same time that Mothman was corresponding with Freeman, Amerakin Overdose’s manager, Donald J. Mercer, reached out to Westword about the “very controversial” article that “gives a bad name to the image of our band.” If the story was not scrubbed from the website, he threatened, “the next step from us is our entertainment lawyer taking action.
“We have already warned the band to avoid legal action they need to change their band name and I believe they have done so but we also need this article removed to avoid confusion to the band Amerakin Overdose,” Mercer continued. “Our band is not against police and this could hurt our band from getting national shows as we do tour the states.”
The story remains online, and there’s been no followup from Amerakin Overdose’s lawyers. In the meantime, though, the members of American Overdose went ahead with using the amorphous abbreviation. “We decided to do the AMOD thing just because we have recognition under that name,” Mothman explains. “And it lets me do a bit: I love where every time we play a set, I can yell a random name.”
“We worked this out with AMOD,” says Mercer, who adds that the Denver musicians were “very professional and respectful. As for Amerakin Overdose, he reiterates that the band is all about “freedom of speech and speaking/standing up for individual beliefs.”
“We decided to do the AMOD thing just because we have recognition under that name,” Mothman explains. “And it lets me do a bit; I love where every time we play a set I can yell a random name.”
Although its online bio includes opening gigs for Korn, Godsmack, Disturbed and Five Finger Death Punch (more butt-rock bands), Amerakin Overdose hadn’t been particularly active recently. Now, “all of a sudden, they’re posting a million fucking things after a year and a half, two years of doing nothing,” Luke says as he looks up the Oregon group’s social media pages.
Back when the members of AMOD were choosing their band’s initial name, they knew of Amerakin Overdose, but “they seemed pretty inactive,” Brooks says. “They also spell their name differently, so we didn’t think much of it.”
Plus, Brooks had played bass in a band called Overdose America back in California, so he wasn’t worried about any overlap. “I have it tattooed on my chest, too. We just kind of figured that we would continue to use it,” he says, and shrugs.
“Yeah, we didn’t really see any concern in an industrial loud-rock band coming at us,” Mothman chimes in.
The bandmembers laugh, because how else are they supposed to react to such ridiculousness?
“I do want to buy an Amerakin Overdose sticker and put it on my guitar now,” Shilling says.
“I want to play a Halloween set dressed up as them,” Mothman adds.
AMOD isn’t the first band that’s been forced to tweak its tag, Luke says, pointing out that longtime Boston hardcore group American Nightmare went by A.N., then American Nothing, then Give Up the Ghost, and eventually went back to American Nightmare after a Philadelphia American Nightmare threatened to file suit.
Even though AMOD rebranded and has played out under the new title this summer, fans are still refusing to call the act anything but American Overdose. “That’s on them. Our official name is AMOD,” Shilling says with a smirk.
But the name change did have some serious repercussions. “We’re punks in our thirties, and we all have jobs,” Mothman notes. “But we have a decent amount of merch that isn’t as marketable now, even though we put the cost of production into it. When I read that they were doing a cease-and-desist, I was like, ‘Man, to claim ownership over a name and attack a smaller band is really shit.’ Wonder if we were a bunch of teenagers who couldn’t recoup that money?
“They actively are suppressing art and new viewpoints,” he concludes. “I’m going to make fun of them for being a right-wing industrial band, but the beef I have with them is that moral qualm that you’re artists who are attacking art.”
AMOD, or whatever you want to call it, is playing Seventh Circle, 2935 West Seventh Avenue, at 7 p.m. Sunday, August 27, with Wingwalker, R.M.O., Truck Pussy and Watching People Drown. Tickets are a $10-$12 donation, as well as a $5 annual membership fee if you’re not already a Seventh Circle member.
