A look back at Kepi Ghoulie’s September 2026 residency at MySpace Phoenix
Welcome to Kepiland! Kepi Ghoulie did a month-long residency in Phoenix, AZ for September 2026, joined by friends and locals. So, I ventured out into the triple digit heat, to check it out. If you are not familiar with Kepi’s music and history, Kepi was in the long-running punk rock band, the Groovie Ghoulies, who started in the early nineteen eighties and were more Saturday Morning Cartoon fun than horror punk. His music is a poppy mix of Ramones style punk along with ‘50’s rockabilly and ‘60’s garage rock. When Groovie Ghoulies ended in 2007, he expanded his sound to include country and classic rock with a healthy mix of Tom Petty and Rolling Stones, but he never lost his punk rock roots.
MySpace is a small venue on Roosevelt Street in Phoenix. Kepi decorated the space with old flyers, original artwork, cardboard cutouts of original art, and he kept adding more each day. He had a museum worth of artwork and a rich catalog of hits to fill the place with a great atmosphere for the month. The whole area is like a mix of Universal Monsters, meets Edward Gorey, meets Big Daddy Roth. I could easily spend hours just looking at everything, but I went there for the music.
The first show I checked out was on Saturday, September 5th, opened by Harry Jerkface, of Black Fag, an LGBTQ+ Black Flag cover band featuring the late Joey Rimicci, and Pizza Wolf. There was a mix of celebratory covers and inspirational originals that were loose, fun and full of audience interaction. A perfect warmup for the night. He puts on a great show worth checking out!
Each night of the residency, Kepi played a different album from his vast catalog. On this particular night, he played Groovie Ghoulies’ classic 1997 album, “Re-Animation Festival.” I think my favorite moment of this evening was Kepi’s rendition of “The Beast of Five Hands” that had the whole crowd rapturously shouting along. This moment immediately set the stage for the month I was in for. I had to ask myself, what made Kepi think of tackling such a big project? Kepi explained to me, “I ended up playing at MySpace last December…and John, the owner, really liked the show and afterwards (said), ‘You know, we have a guest curator every month.’ And I said…semi jokingly, ‘You know, I have 28 albums out. I can do an album a day for a month.’” And that’s that!
My next question was: how long did this take him to prepare? Did he already actively know his entire catalog, or did he revisit them as he went? “I did very little advance preparation just because I’ve been touring so much this year. I thought I would and you never do. Basically, the system is I perform that night’s album, and then as soon as that show is over, I run through the next night’s album to see what I need to work on the day of the show. And then I run through whatever songs I need to that day. Sometimes it’s one or two, sometimes it’s like, five or six.”
The second night I caught was on Sunday, September 13th. Nick Spoon of the Casa Grande, AZ Pop-Punk band Lesser Creatures was the opener, along with his son, Dylan, on drums. On this night, Kepi played the Haints’ 2004 album “Hurt & Alone.” On the song “A Message to Pretty,” Jason Webley used Kepi’s mom’s accordion, and Kepi said it felt like she played on the album. Having started the night with a father/son act and then hearing the stories Kepi told about his parents during his set really gave the evening a sort of synchronicity. Kepi further explained how his mother and father helped shape his positive outlook on life. It is fun to see a little sentimentality come into the hard world of punk rock. Don’t tell anyone, but we are all a bunch of softies.
Saturday, September 19th was a special night because it was Kepi’s birthday. He took the night off from playing and instead showed all his music videos. Kepi and the director, the amazingly talented Andrew Hooper, told stories about the videos and answered questions. I’m even 99% sure I recognized my favorite Oakland bar, The Avenue, in Kepi’s video for “I Bleed Rock ‘N’ Roll.” I also learned that Kepi was in the video for Tom Petty’s “Free Falling.”
We had our first supernatural occurrence while watching the video for Kepi’s song, “I Just Wanted You to Know.” The video is based around a collection of shots from famous film locations, one of which happened to be the same one used in the aforementioned Tom Petty video. At the exact moment the “Free Fallin’” location popped on the screen, a string of bat lights behind the curtain turned on all by itself and put us all on edge. Legitimate haunting? You decide.
Next up was 2014’s “Kepi Goes Country” on September 22nd. Despite the title, it is not actually an album that he plays country music on. Something he pointed out, that may have cost him a couple album sales. Opening this evening was a band called the Femaliens from Las Vegas. They played a rowdy, space-themed set on electric guitar, electric bass and washboard. It was fantastic!
Kepi continued the space theme and played some special requests such as “Evading the Greys,” and “50,000 Spaceships (Watching Over Me).” He then launched into the full “Kepi Goes Country” set. Since this is an album of his popular songs played on acoustic guitar, this show came off as a greatest hits spectacular! We were treated to live renditions of “Let’s Do It Again,” “Carly Simon,” “Are You Passionate?” and a spirited sing-along to “Running with Bigfoot.”
The following night, Friday, September 25th, ended up drawing the largest crowd of the month. Kepi was kind enough to let my band, TA-80, start the night with our loud and raucous acoustic set. We even brought Nick Spoon up to join us on our rendition of the Vindictives’ song, “Alarm Clocks.” We had a wonderful time and hope we get to do it again someday.
We were all treated to a second-round performance of “Re-animation Festival”, this time based on the version Kepi re-recorded with the Copyrights in 2017. Kepi began the night with requests, pleasing everyone with a cover of the Copyrights song, “Four Eyes.” Then it was onto the main event.
It was a capacity crowd, and it became a fully interactive experience when they handed out fortune cookies for “Fortune Teller.” We were all invited to share our fortunes. I decided to take the advice of my fortune and “plan” to be spontaneous tomorrow. At 1:30 am, technically the next day, I sent Kepi a short video of myself performing his song “I Just Wanted You to Know” in my living room as a sort of audition. I blasted the song on my stereo, while I played along on my bass and sang a little harmony part that I came up with. It took me right back to doing multi-track recordings in my bedroom as a teenager with a boombox, karaoke machine, and a stereo.
Monday, September 28th was “Ramones in Love” night. “Ramones in Love” was a 2023 album Kepi released, consisting of creative covers of The Ramones’ sweetest love-songs (no brats were beaten on this night). Sonny DeCarlo of the metal band Spirit Adrift, a fan and friend of Kepi’s, played a few songs with him. This was also the night I got to perform with Kepi. I played my acoustic Ovation Celebrity bass guitar, and it actually worked (more on that later) and sounded incredible. Imagine my thrill when B-Face, of the classic Queers line-up, played my Ovation bass in Kepi’s set that night! For those who may be unfamiliar, B-Face also played in the Groovie Ghoulies, the Mopes and drew the album cover for the classic Lillingtons’ album, “Shit Outta Luck.”
That night, Kepi was also joined by Eric Bianchi, who performed in the original Groovie Ghoulies lineup as well as producing and engineering some of their albums. He’s been a part of the scene for as long as Kepi has and it was fascinating to learn about his contributions to Kepi’s body of work. I especially enjoyed their moody and dramatic Phil Spector-Esque, sound effects heavy version of “7-11.”
Tuesday, September 29th, Kepi, B-Face and Eric Bianchi played 2024’s double-disc retrospective, “40 Years of Kepi & The Groovie Ghoulies.” An epic twenty-eight songs, broken into two sets, spanning both the Groovie Ghoulies and Kepi’s solo career in reverse chronological order. As usual, Kepi was generous with stories about the overall history of his music while also running a tight ship and finishing the sprawling set on time.
If you had been wanting to check out a night with a heavy focus on the music, this would have been the night for you. We all enjoyed the songs, which took on a whole new life with the added bass and electric guitar along with Kepi’s frantic acoustic strumming. It was a howling good time under the full moon, and it felt like a proper close to a fun-filled month.
On the final night, Wednesday, September 30th, we were immediately met with an out-of-this-world set by SP3K! (“Pronounced “Speck” for those who only speak the Earth tongue). Who was this strange visitor in the space helmet who played a Devo-inspired blend of futuristic pop? Kepi explained, “SP3K is a universal entity of love and also a Kepi fan. SP3K loves Kepi music and was waiting to drop their first performance. They chose Phoenix because Phoenix is full of love and Devo fans and that seemed like a good place. SP3K has been waiting a year to do that and there will be more!”
The night was a sort of punk rock hootenanny. I rejoined Kepi for a four-song set of “Deviltown,” “Freaks on Parade,” “Evading the Greys,” and “I Just Wanted You to Know.” I brought my acoustic bass, but I couldn’t make the battery connect and was not able to play it. Instead, I played a beautiful Gibson Thunderbird, courtesy of Nate, from the Pheonix, AZ punk band Fixed Reaction. Nate later joined Kepi for a rousing Chuck Berry cover. Sonny DeCarlo returned for an impressive set of Kepi favorites and a cover of The Ramones’ “Pet Sematary.” The night culminated in an impromptu jam of Devo’s “Girl U Want.”
Harry Jerkface took the stage to play a set of covers by bands Kepi had previously worked with and originals based on an old message board Kepi and Harry used to participate in. It helped shine a light on the fact that everyone in this room was connected. By this point, we were all just a big group of friends who got together and built a terrific night of music out of nothing but the desire to celebrate a sense of community. It all felt so familiar and fun and I’ll be there next year when Kepi comes back for his next residency (knock on wood). In the immortal words of Kepi Ghoulie, “Let's Do It Again!”
