By Aaron Small

“They’re my favourite band in the world, they’re so fucking funny! I just laugh my ass off every time I see them,” said NASHVILLE PUSSY guitarist Ruyter Suys – and now she’s one of them! Known as Constance X, aka Ida Lichterbusch, Ruyter is the newest member of the recently reunited DICK DELICIOUS AND THE TASTY TESTICLES. Prior to disbanding in 2003, the group (sans Suys) issued a trio of albums. Now a fully functioning quartet, DDTT has returned with their crudest and rudest effort yet, A Vulgar Display Of Obscurity; 40 tracks - 23 actual songs and 17 skits - spanning 78 minutes.

“Dick Delicious hit below the belt every fucking time,” gushes Ruyter. “I can’t believe I wasn’t getting enough of my ya-yas out in Nashville Pussy; evidently I had to get a little dirtier. We’d come back from tour and had a couple months off. Dick Delicious had already recorded like 17 tracks for the new album. Me and Hugh (G Rection, aka Rich Whiteman) were driving to the SLAYER concert and he was playing me these songs. It was so fucking good! He asked if I wanted to do some tracks with them. I was like, fuck yeah! So they got me in the studio just outside of Atlanta and I recorded on five songs. By the end of the tracking, I was there for all the practices; I was ready to do whatever was required. I think I impressed them so they asked me if I wanted to join the band. Of course we were doing nothing at the time, so I joined the god-damn band. Plus, they never do shit. They never tour, they just talk shit on the Internet basically. Then as soon as I joined, they were all gung-ho. So we went back in the studio and they added me to pretty much every fucking track. Originally they thought it was finished; then they added me to every single song which is pretty fucking cool.”

Slayer’s influence on A Vulgar Display Of Obscurity spreads even further, as Ruyter attests to. “Me and (Slayer guitarist) Jeff Hanneman are good friends. He gave me the guitar that I’ve been playing with in Dick Delicious. It was one of his personal stage guitars; the ESP Jeff Hanneman signature model. It’s black and it’s got stickers all over it, the fucking coolest thing ever! I just got addicted to playing this guitar. I had to do something with it, it was driving me nuts. It was like a new toy, I was super excited. On the heels of that is when I joined Dick Delicious. Basically, I’m blaming this all on Jeff. He likes the band; he says we’re like THE MENTORS but worse. Getting that guitar really brought back all my high school dreams of playing in a metal band.”

Keeping it all in the family, Ruyter’s husband, Nashville Pussy vocalist/guitarist Blaine Cartwright guests on ‘Probation’. “Yeah he sings on ‘Probation’ which is ironic ‘cause he’s never been on probation. We totally tricked him into it. He had to drive me to practice one day. We were actually doing some tracking at MASTODON’s studio and asked him to come in for a second. But he had to get going, and it was like hey Blaine, can you sing these lines? He just fucking did it. Then it was like, hey Blaine, can you take some promo shots for us? So he took the pictures. We managed to completely bamboozle him. He was just supposed to drop me off. He did not want to sing on it, but what the hell. Afterwards he thought it was pretty cool.”

Ruyter pops her vocal cherry, singing lead on ‘Good Lovin’ Gone Brown’. “Yes I do. No one’s ever heard my beautiful, gentle voice singing about poop before; you can waltz to it.” A lot of people aren’t going to get the joke and be downright offended – “Good! That’s the whole point. The idea is to offend; if we don’t offend you we’re doing something wrong.”

Do DDTT shows draw protestors? “That would be fucking awesome! That would rule. If we had protestors I could die a happy woman. It’s so funny too ‘cause my Mom and Dad come to all the Nashville Pussy shows, they’re huge supporters. Finally, I’m in a band they’ll hate. I told them straight up – don’t listen to this! You’re not going to get it and you’re going to be really mad at me.”

The hilarious video for ‘Feed The Homeless (To Each Other)’ is a prime example. “Oh fuck yeah, that thing rules! Again, one of those great moments where you don’t realize one of your goals in life is this until it’s done – wow, I can’t believe I finally got to be covered in blood! That and cooking a baby! Riding through the neighbourhood with a fucking hockey stick and an axe, it was great! All the neighbours are like, ‘what the fuck are they doing?’ We just filmed it at our drummer’s house. This was guerrilla style; we shot that thing in about four hours. It was so fast and so perfect. The cool thing was the guy who shot it actually works for CNN, so he normally has to do really boring shit; he loved every second of this. My one let-down was that they didn’t get any blood in my eye! I was like, come on boys, have at it. Get it in my eye, get it in my hair – all those things that girls say no to – I want it now!”

‘I Wanna Kill The Black Eyed Peas’ is undoubtedly the signature song from A Vulgar Display Of Obscurity. “I hate The Black Eyed Peas; they just suck,” proclaims Ruyter. “They’re fucking horrible. The coolest thing Fergie ever did was pee her pants. I’m going to take it one step further and shit my pants on stage.”

It’s time for Dick himself (aka Sean Coonery) to weigh in on exactly how he would kill The Black Eyed Peas. “In the most painful way possible… I think I would make them watch their own Super Bowl performance over and over again until they die. I don’t really follow sports but somebody told me Black Eyed Peas were doing the Super Bowl, I basically just ate Aterol after Aterol and did that video on my computer. I thought it would be funny if you could read the words. You can hear them, but actually seeing it. I was just pounding that they would come out and suck, and they sure delivered!”

Dick delivers an obvious reference to PANTERA’s A Vulgar Display Of Power with both the cover art and album title, A Vulgar Display Of Obscurity. “It isn’t the first time we’ve made fun of other heavy metal bands’ album titles. Instead of We Sold Our Souls For Rock ‘N Roll by BLACK SABBATH, we had an album called We Sold Our Souls For Sloppy Holes. My idea was to do a take-off on Pantera, but when the dude’s getting punched in the face, everything we sing about is being spurted out of his mouth.” Namely: Viagara, The Black Eyed Peas, Jagermeister, a toilet and some crack cocaine. Is Dick looking to be endorsed by Viagara and Jagermeister? “That would save me a ton of money if they would do that. At least we’re not looking for a lawsuit.”

Homage to IRON MAIDEN occurs in `The Odor Of The Floater’. “Yeah, they were a big influence on everybody in the band. Iron Maiden was the first concert I ever saw – Powerslave, 1985. It kind of spoiled me for all concerts after that ‘cause I thought they were all going to be that cool. I think I saw VAN HALEN after that and it was like, where’s their Eddie?”

Brent Hinds, Troy Sanders and Bill Kelliher of Mastodon appear on a combined total of six tracks on the album. “I’ve known all those guys since before there was Mastodon, in different bands they’ve played with in Atlanta. We’ve always been friends. When we were recording, we just hit ‘em up, Brent especially likes the band. He was all about doing it. They’re super cool guys and we’re thankful to have them. We kind of fuck ourselves musically by not sticking to one genre. Most bands are punk bands or metal bands or whatever; we kind of hop all over the place. We can write in any style that we want and the glue that holds it all together is the ridiculous lyrics.”

Comedy metal seems an appropriate adjective for Dick Delicious And The Tasty Testicles. According to Dick, “a lot of the other people who do it are not that good.” But he will admit a fondness for S.O.D. and CARNIVORE with the late Peter Steele. “We like to think we’re comedy metal but we can actually play our instruments. Even though it might sound a bit sloppy on the album, it’s because I live in LA, the rest of the guys live in Atlanta and Ruyter lives wherever. So we had four or five days of rehearsals and we wrote that many songs. Some of it’s a little loose around the edges, but I think that adds to the charm.”

Is there a subject that’s taboo; anything you wouldn’t write about? “Ah, that’s an interesting question. Maybe not child abuse… I think as long as you can make it funny, it’s alright. And also in some way poke a little fun at yourself.” Dick could be labelled everything from misogynistic to homophobic to racist; however the people who would label him as such are totally missing the joke. “Yeah, at the end of ‘A Friend With Cocaine Is A Good Friend’ there’s a skit with a Jew and a Nazi in the bathroom doing the coke. When the Jew does the coke, all of a sudden he starts talking like a black man saying, ‘I know you didn’t mean that Holocaust.’ Originally we weren’t going to leave it on the album, but by omitting it we’d be more racist. If you just go out and offend everyone, I don’t think any one particular group can get that angry.”

This must be a labour of love as DDTT aren’t about to rocket up the Billboard charts. “Obviously we’re not making any money; it’s something we do for fun. I work in the porn business – I’m not a porn star or anything but I kind of run the business. Other people go on vacation; we rock out with our cock out. That’s pretty much what it is. It’d be nice to sell a few copies and break even. We’re always surprised where people are ordering a disc from, it’s crazy. People in France, Australia – places we’ve never set foot in. People out there are listening. I’d actually love to get over to Europe ‘cause it seems that’s where we sell more discs.”

Visit DickDelicious.com for more.