creepy fingers? is that a porn company?

This interview was posted on the OC Weekly music blog to coincide with the print edition hitting the streets with my feature about Dawn of the Shred in it. Brad brought a Creepy Fingers t-shirt with him to the interview and I subsequently cut off the sleeves and turned it into my favorite tank top of the summer.

From Fu Manchu to Creepy Fingers: Brad Davis Talks Boutique Pedals and Crappy eBayers

Courtesy of Creepy Fingers

When the OC stoner rock band Fu Manchu began twenty years ago, the world of effects pedals consisted of a few rusty ones leftover from the 1970s waiting to be stumbled upon at random pawn shops. But today, even that world has become dominated by mass-market brands such as Boss and DigiTech that sell distortion and fuzz just as McDonalds does hamburgers.

Fu Manchu’s bassist Brad Davis, however, is part of a growing number of new pedal builders who are hand-soldering a range of effects products unlike anything the ’90s ever dreamed about. Based out of Davis’ Fullerton garage, his company Creepy Fingers is one of the few locally-based contributors in this growing world of boutique, small-batch music gear–producing knob-filled models with names like Fuzzbud, Sugarboost and Doomidrive.

Long Beach’s specialty music store Dawn of the Shred—the subject of this week’s feature story–is the only brick-and-mortar in Southern California that carries Creepy Fingers, which made sense when we discovered that Davis was the impetus for opening the business in the first place.

Dealing with Brad is the reason I got into this,” Dawn of the Shred owner James Demetra says. “At the time, not a lot of people were doing the types of pedals he makes. So I asked him, ‘If I’m gonna get this pedal, how many do I have to get to become a dealer?'”

We sat down with Davis at Dawn of the Shred while he was dropping off a recent shipment of pedals (which consisted of a Trader Joe’s bag filled with his handmade wares) to talk about his hobby-turned-full-time-whenever-Fu-Manchu-isn’t-on-tour job, the perils of buying transistors on eBay and how his pedals became popular with everyone from Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top to Erykah Badu’s guitarist.

READ THE REST AT OCWEEKLY.COM