The Slow Poisoner

"The Slow Poisoner (alias Andrew Goldfarb) is a one man surrealistic rock and roll band who hails from San Francisco and has been playing to audiences across America since 1995. With an electric guitar and bass drum he plays catchy, offbeat songs whose lyrical subjects include swamp witches, sinister flowers, strange hungers and giant worms that drive hot rods.

Like a late night horror movie host or a creepy camp counselor, the Slow Poisoner invites the audience into a weird world of his own design. He displays paintings to accompany the music and puts on a wild show that has been known to include dancing spiders, severed fingers and a giant head that devours him onstage. He describes his sound as a cross between Johnny Cash and Alice Cooper - rootsy but weird, like a hoedown on mars. Other influences include Screamin' Jay Hawkins, Edgar Allen Poe, The Cramps, Roy Orbison, Wall of Voodoo, Bela Lugosi and The Doors.

The Slow Poisoner started out as the leader of a five piece band, "The Slow Poisoners," named after a chapter in Charles Mackay's 1854 book "Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds" which detailed a murderous fad among 17th century European wives. Over the course of ten years the group slowly became thinner and thinner as the other members disappeared; eventually an apparition of an eight-fisted cephalopod (the Rocktopus) instructed Andrew to go it alone, and since 2005 that is what he has done, touring across the country and playing venues that range from libraries to science fiction conventions, beauty parlors and laundromats."