Beef Humper

Beef Humper was supposed to be a punk band, not an electronic project. In 1998, Daryl Westfall and Wes White (ex-drummer for Nashville's Teen Idols) envisioned the world's first "meat-core" band - essentially a parody of the straight-edge punk movement.

Pro-pollution, pro-vivisection, anti-vegan lyrics would be spat out from the stage by musicians brandishing "O"s instead of "X"s on their hands. The 'joke' seemed - to them at least - even funnier due to the fact that Daryl was himself a vegetarian at the time, a spin on the hypocrisy sometimes found in message-oriented bands whose members didn't live by their own rhetoric.

For better or worse, the idea never got past the "gee-what-if" stage. Daryl insisted that the name itself was too good to go to waste. In 1999, he began releasing rudimentary electronic music on the Internet as "Beef Humper". It was all in fun, and he fully expected to be slagged off or ignored completely. Instead, he began getting fan mail from at home and abroad.

In 2000, several more CDs were released - this time with the assistance of Puerto Rico's DJ Antartica, who was living in Nashville at the time and had become Beef Humper's "Second Beatle". Upon Antartica's return to Puerto Rico, however, the project lost steam. In 2001, a final re-mastered compilation of favorite tracks was issued. Beef Humper was headed for the slaughterhouse.

Or so it would seem. Daryl was still experimenting with sound, dropping a track here and there to friends and fans. Eventually, he realized he had enough material to release a new Beef Humper CD. That CD is now available in downloadable form from Comfort Stand Records.