The Slow Poisoner (alias Andrew Goldfarb) is a one man surrealistic rock and roll band who hails from San Francisco and has been playing the devil's music to audiences across America since 1996. One foot kicks a drum festooned with sleigh bells while his hands strangle a guitar, and through his crooked teeth emerge stories of rural paranoia and cosmic horror, with tongue in cheek and eyebrow raised. Songs topics include swamp women, creeping fungi, exotic diseases, headless chickens and witches in woods. His sound is rootsy and weird, something akin to a cross between Johnny Cash and Alice Cooper, or a hoedown on mars; influences include Screamin' Jay Hawkins, The Cramps, Edgar Allan Poe, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Jimmie Rodgers, David Bowie, The Gun Club, Elvis Presley and Iggy Pop.
Andrew started out as the leader of a five piece band, which he named "The Slow Poisoners" after a chapter in Charles Mackay's 1854 treatise "Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds" which detailed a murderous fad among 17th century european wives. Over the course of ten years the group slowly became thinner and thinner as the other members drifted off into mystery. Eventually an apparition of an eight-fisted cephalopod (the Rocktopus) instructed Andrew to go it alone, and since 2005 that is what he has done, touring the country repeatedly and playing venues that range from libraries to science fiction conventions, beauty parlors and laundromats.
The Slow Poisoner's latest album, "Lost Hills," is a rock opera that tells a twisted tale of traveling salesmen, phantom hitch-hikers, sinister ministers and malevolent mint juleps. He narrates the story between songs, making for the easiest-to-follow concept album in the history of popular music. Stage performances are theatrical affairs that have been known to involve flying eyeballs, felt puppets, dangling bones, painted signs, fiery fingertips and the occasional hawking of miracle tonics. New for 2013 is a giant monster head that swallows The Slow Poisoner towards the climax of some sets, resulting in him singing from the inside of a monstrous mouth about the sensation of being chewed up by sharp teeth!
Andrew is also an illustrator and author; he draws a comic strip called "Ogner Stump's One Thousand Sorrows" and paints velvet portraits of cryptic mystics and sad hobo clowns. His novels "Hypno-Hog's Moonshine Monster Jamboree" and "Slub Glub in the Weird World of the Weeping Willows" have been published by Eraserhead Press. He can also be followed on Facebook and Twitter.