“I could only keep a rhythm for thirty seconds,” he says. But the swords were expensive, so they decided to try to make their own.Īround 2005, Joey and Max held what they called the “Giving Up Heavy Metal for Sharp Steel” sale, where Joey sold his Peavey bass and bass amp. Together, the two formed what they called the Drunken Jedi Pirate Circus, which mostly amounted to Joey and Max going at each other with rubber-tipped swords and bamboo sticks while wearing fencing masks and some basic body padding. “Man, we did a lot more drinking back then,” says Joey, drinking. It was at just such a dive, the Flipper bar and casino, back in the year 2000, where he met a like-minded and darkly creative fellow named Maxon “Max” McCarter. But at night he listened to crust-core bands like Neurosis and frequented dive bars. During the course of his 10-year tenure, and without any formal training, he went from an entry-level gig at the paper to a position as a graphic designer, which he followed up with five years at a local print shop. During the day he toiled away at the Missoulian newspaper. When he moved to Missoula in 1996 at 22 years old, he was a sword fighter with no one to sword fight. It was at these SCA events that Joey discovered an interest in rapier fighting. into imaginary kingdoms - as depicted on a faux-medieval map with a fierce-looking sea monster destroying a ship off the coast of Oregon - and holds mock battles in full costume, with sword fights and such. He joined the Society for Creative Anachronism, a deeply nerdy national organization that splits up the U.S. Luckily, that was still mostly in the realm of fantasy. Shortly afterward, he “fell in love with stabbing people” (his words). Joey would pull up fence posts and swing them around in pitched, imaginary backyard battles. Instead, he was transfixed by the massive sword he saw in the hands of a fully-inflated Arnold Schwarzenegger in the 1982 movie Conan the Barbarian. Truth is, even 10-year-old Joey didn’t care about zombies. Their metalworking skills come from training. This despite the fact that the company, in business now for 11 years, with a dedicated following and some 15,000 blades sold, once used the tagline “Accessories for the Apocalypse.”Īlso, “zombie” is right there in the name.ĭan Griffin, Joey Arbour and Josh Eamon make up nearly a third of ZT’s crew. But as far as I can tell, none of the 10 employees of Joey’s Missoula-based company, Zombie Tools, believes in zombies or the zombie apocalypse. And in fine, sturdy, sharp swords and knives. Other things that the crew believe to be true: if you’re going to drink and smoke, your goal should be to do so until you sound like Tom Waits physicists suck, David Bowie was great, Hunter Thompson was the best and that, at more than 1,000 pages, Carl Sandburg’s only novel, Remembrance Rock, is a little tedious. In fact, the group considers Joey’s opinion of the Serbian-American inventor to be manifestly true, along with the contention that Tesla’s rival, Thomas Edison, was kind of a dick. Finally, he blurts an answer:Ībout this there’s no disagreement from any of the five of Joey’s employees sitting around an enormous table stacked high with empty PBR cans and rapidly filling ashtrays. Joey lowers his can of Pabst Blue Ribbon, nestled in a coozie reading “A Fist Full of Fuck Yeah,” to the arm of the second-dirtiest chair in all creation. Why Tesla? “Because he’s fucking awesome!”
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