Weird Gigs: Jess Margera Risks Death
Weird Gigs: Jess Margera Risks Death
Some drummers go from your weekend-warrior gigs to normal “jobs” the following Monday. Not Jess Margera. As part of the cKy “crew,” chances are when you hear a snap, it’s not his sticks.
For those of you who have been under a rock, cKy stands for Camp Kill Yourself – not only the band’s name, but also the name of the infamous pseudo-hara-kiri videos created by professional skateboarder (and Jess’s brother) Bam. Yep, the same cKy videos that ended up on MTV’s smash gross-out show Jackass, where both Margera brothers have been prominently abused.
As part of the crew, the 24-year-old drummer laughs when thinking of his brushes with death. “When I was in Iceland I got on top of a van, like laying on the roof, holding on,” he explains. “The van got up to about 100-105 miles an hour. That was really, really scary. My hands started to slip, I thought I was going to die.”
Particularly noteworthy is the famous shopping-cart scene that featured cKy’s underground hit “96 Quite Bitter Beings” from Volume 1, and Jess as cart-roadkill. “I got really hurt doing that,” he laughs. “I didn’t actually break anything, but I hit my head a lot, and got a lot of road rash.”
Hmm. Play the drums. Road rash. Decisions, decisions. Now that cKy has released its third effort Infiltrate. Destroy. Rebuild., it seems the time has finally come for the drumming Margera to tone down his other job. “The album has sold as much or more than all the videos,” he says. “It hit me like, hey, I can’t be getting hurt. So I’m trying to take it easy.”
