23 pictures of SOB

Ricky Butcher, Sol Butcher and Doug Borski are the Sons of Butcher.

Butchers by day, rockers by night.

But in real life they are Trevor Zeibarth, Dave Dunham and Jay Zeibarth, three warm, witty and highly creative young men with a sense of humour as twisted as the human digestive tract.

I had the pleasure of sitting down with them prior to Saturday's show at the Speak Easy.

Although they have been together for three years, this current tour is a first for Sons of Butcher and they are best known for their edgy, controversial and slightly sick Teletoon late-night cartoon of the same name.

The cartoon style is a unique combination of live action heads in an otherwise animated world allowing for greater line-crossing potential than a completely live action series would permit.

And they do cross many lines including amputation, steroids, sex, masturbation and various other bodily functions.

The Sons of Butcher are not for the timid or faint of heart and they tell me I would not like to be inside their head.

Nor would they even think about allowing their kids, if they had any, watch the show.

But which came first, the music or the show?

Trevor: "The music sort of came first. It was recorded with the show in mind but never had a show. And then with that music, we showed it to Max Smith who is Red Green's son. I was working on the Red Green show. He started hearing those tunes and he knew we had an idea for a show in there somewhere. So we started developing it more based on those songs."

Jay: "I was working on a web cartoon based on this kind of idea but I never really did anything with it. It just kinda sat there for a long time and he had the music. I kinda had a few things drawn, so with the music and those few drawings, Max said this could be something more than a web cartoon."

Now that the cartoon has grown in popularity, even beating South Park in ratings, and has entered its second season, the animation is now done at Smiley Guy Studios in Toronto.

But the Sons of Butcher had very modest beginnings.

Trevor: "We did our first demo ourselves. We didn't even have a tripod. We strapped a camera to an oil drum and shot the heads against a ping-pong table because we didn't have a green screen."

Jay: "We took our shirts off and painted ourselves green. It was horrible."

That demo was presented to Teletoon and the rest is history.

In addition to the cartoon, another phenomenon is energizing their success.

YouTube.

Joining OK Go at the top of the low budget video ranks, the Sons of Butcher video for F*** the S*** has created a huge Internet buzz as it has been passed around the world and spoofed by youngsters with rock and roll aspirations.

The members of the band had no idea this simple tune would cause the brouhaha it has.

Jay: "It was actually in one of my scripts. I said 'Ricky plays a highly offensive song.' And he brought it and he said 'Here it is and it's called F***the S***' and we laughed our asses off. From there it just snowballed."

Trevor: "We never even thought it would be on our first album."

Their second album, Meatlantis, is set for release in November of this year and the Sons of Butcher feel it is bigger, better and meatier than the first, due in part to the production brilliance of Jordan Zadorozny who has worked with Sam Roberts, Hole and Mandy Moore.

With a name like Meatlantis and a cartoon set mostly in a bloody, gruesome butcher shop, they receive surprising no backlash from the vegan or vegetarian public.

Jay: "The vegans I've talked to said it actually has a pretty pro-vegan message because we make meat look so gross that you actually wanna become a vegetarian. A lot of the animators are vegetarians and they love it."

They appreciate that touring is most likely the best way to promote their show.

If due to some unforeseen calamity they had to choose either the cartoon or the band, they would stick with the cartoon and leave the tiring life of touring festering on the side of the road.

Jay: "We stay up until five and then wake up at seven to get on the bus to do it all over again. It starts to wear on you a little bit, instead of just showing up and acting with my head for an hour and going home."

Did someone mention a Gemini?

That's right, the Sons of Butcher won a Gemini award for best website which was designed by Jay in about half an hour and cost nothing but a ten-dollar-a-month hosting fee, beating out Canadian Idol, a million-dollar website.

Proving that less is more.

As thrilling as this honour may be, they were not even invited to attend the awards ceremony.

Trevor: "No matter what happens, there's never any repercussions. We won it but where is it? No one called us. Do we get one? Do we not get one? Do we go somewhere? How do we get it?"

Jay: "We're the black sheep of everything we do. We never get invited to anything."

Dave: "We never even get wrap parties for our crew. We never even get those. It's better than digging ditches, I guess."

Sons of Butcher is definitely better than digging ditches, for their observers anyway.

The show opened as Orbax, an old-school sideshow freak performer, inserted and/or hammered nails, forks and condoms into his nose, walked on glass and had a cinder block smashed to smithereens as it rested on his tender bits while he sat bare-butt in broken glass.

Ouch.

The shuddering and cringing had barely subsided when the members of Sons of Butcher marched out to the stage clad from head to toe in spandex, mere shadows of the three relatively normal, together guys I had interviewed just a few hours prior.

They performed their entire show as living, breathing incarnations of their cartoon characters to the delight of the diehard fans in attendance, a few of which were confined to the hallway outside the venue due to the age restriction.

But this did not stop them from enjoying the show as members of the band periodically made trips out to the hallway to give them their own private mini-performances.

The music was loud and charmingly crude with a blatant 80s metal influence with all three members taking turns in the spotlight trying to out-cheese each other as Orbax and his two electronic, clever wielding demon pigs danced through the audience.

It was a sight to behold.

The party did not stop with the music as fans clambered to have everything signed by members of the Sons of Butcher including merch and various body parts.

They posed for pictures, sold merch and hung out laughing and joking with the audience for well over an hour.

The Sons of Butcher love one thing more than meat.

Their fans.