Chicago keyboardist and composer Maxx McGathey loves Halloween. The funk group he’s led since 2011 is called Gramps the Vamp, a name that drummer Stevenson Valentor got from a database of Scooby-Doo villains—it comes from a 1977 episode where the gang investigates a vampire haunting a hotel on Skull Island. The band’s instrumental music is moody, comically brooding, and slightly campy. They call it “doom funk.”
“He wants to build a career centered on this holiday,” Valentor says. “I’d say he’s doing damn well.”
Music Box of Horrors Maxx McGathey and his ensemble accompany The Man Who Laughs at noon Saturday. Full schedule at musicboxtheatre.com. Sat 10/19, noon, through Sun 10/20, noon, Music Box Theatre, 3733 N. Southport, $25-$35, most films 17+
Gramps the Vamp, Nitehost, Ovef Ow (as the Bee-52s) Thu 10/31, 9 PM, the Owl, 2521 N. Milwaukee, free, 21+
This is McGathey’s second year in a row presenting an original score at the Music Box of Horrors. Last year, McGathey pitched the Gramps the Vamp version of Nosferatu, but Oestreich turned him down. “I really liked it, but I was like, ‘I really feel like Nosferatu‘s been done—a lot,’” he says. “‘What I’d rather do is put you into something that we are already doing and maybe challenge you.’” Instead McGathey wrote new music to complement the 1927 Alfred Hitchcock murder mystery The Lodger.
By the time McGathey graduated high school in 2008, he’d formed his first extracurricular band, which started out playing classic-rock covers. He also loved jazz and funk, though, and while at Loyola University he cofounded Gramps the Vamp. “I really wanted to form a band that would be fun for house parties,” he says. “I just got the best musicians I could find, and we started playing covers of funk bands I was into at the time, like Lettuce and the Budos Band, or old stuff like Fela Kuti and James Brown.”
McGathey hadn’t seen Nosferatu in its entirety before he got the job, and though he promptly addressed that oversight, his viewings of the movie during the project were mostly piecemeal and obsessive. With notebook in hand, he’d watch each scene at least 40 times and sketch out ideas. In total, he says this added up to maybe 100 viewings of Nosferatu. He looked into other modern live scores for old films and found a lot of atmospheric material that didn’t jibe with his style. “I’m a melodic composer—I like themes, I like melodies,” he says. “I went back to what I do with Gramps the Vamp. ‘How would I approach this scene?’ I really did treat it in a groove-based way.”
For The Lodger, McGathey performed with Valentor and bassist Luc Parcell (of Chicago Afrobeat Project) under the name False Gods Trio. McGathey had built the score out of fragments of music they generated during improvisational sessions. “It wasn’t so much about the specific notes; it was more about the feeling that we were portraying at that moment,” he says. “That was a really liberating experience.” The Lodger screened about six hours into last year’s marathon, which all but guaranteed McGathey a committed audience who were already in it for the long haul; based on the reaction, Oestreich hopes that folks who were there will come back early this year to see what McGathey has cooked up for The Man Who Laughs.
