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Music

Day Drinking at Houdini's Grave with Dads

The New Jersey band took us to the burial place of the most famous escape artist of all time and it was kind of creepy.

Photos by Carly Hoskins

In a run-down part of Queens, New York, I’m with the members of Dads—drummer/vocalist John Bradley, guitarist/vocalist Scott Scharinger, and recently added bassist Ryan Azada, plus tour manager/merch maverick and band photographer Carly Hoskins—searching for the grave of Erik (later Ehrich) Weiss. As soon as we’ve parked the van, it starts raining; grey clouds and grey graves litter the landscape of the now-abandoned and somewhat neglected Machpelah Cemetery. No one really knows where to go, what to look for, or what to expect when we find it, trudging along paths that wind through a plethora of plots and wondering just how many people are buried here, how they died, who they were, and where they are now. It’s Azada who spots it first—a hulking mass of granite that, until its restoration in 1996, was the victim of both neglect and vandalism and laid in a terrible state of disrepair.

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For an abandoned cemetery it’s not spooky—OK, not that spooky, especially when it’s lunchtime on a sunny October day and you’ve brought along a couple of bottles of wine—but there is a certain aura and atmosphere that stops you in your tracks when you reach Weiss’ tomb. It’s a mixture of reverence, awe, and creepiness, especially when you see the woman, cast in stone, who’s kneeling and weeping at the exedra that spreads out beneath the bust of Weiss. Both in life and death, Weiss was better known as Harry Houdini, a name he adopted at the age of 17 and which he legally changed in 1913, at the age of 29.

Still the world’s best known escape artist, he died on Halloween in 1926 and was interred at the tomb that, just ten years earlier, he’d had built in memory of his parents. It’s here, in the rain, that we spend the next hour—sitting on the exedra, examining the grave markers of the ten people buried in the plot and taking in the history of what surrounds us, attempting to communicate with the beyond while we wonder if there is actually any beyond to communicate with, Scharinger, Azada, and I sharing the two bottles of wine (the other two don’t drink). The whole time, the woman weeps and Harry watches us. Beneath him, there’s a mosaic of the symbol of the Society Of American Magicians – its vivid red, orange and yellow tiles the only color in the whole scene – and under that, both his surnames are inscribed boldly into the stone, Houdini first and Weiss below it, the rain darkening their names the more it falls.

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“I find it fascinating,” says Bradley, “that this is not his real name. It’s his character name that became him. He wants to be known as Harry Houdini. He wants to be known as somebody completely different that he’s created, that isn’t his real name. And is that supposed to be his mother? Look it up!”

Noisey: So we’ve been here looking around for a bit now. What were your first impressions when you saw this?
Bradley: We’ve done this a couple of times. Whenever we have a little bit of free time and we’re near, for lack of a better word, a celebrity grave, well try to scout it out. And it’s always kind of crazy to think about. It’s almost like you’re meeting them, but it’s weirder. I almost feel like it’s more intense than meeting somebody, because their spirit could be there and I feel like it’s, I don’t know, a scarier version of them. What if they’re mad at you? What if they’re unhappy? What if they don’t like the fact that you’re walking around them? I’m terrified that I’m disrespecting something right now.
Scharinger: I don’t know. Because he’s a performer. It seems like this is what he would want.
Bradley: Do you think so? People watching and viewing it?
Azada: I’m sure he’s into the attention, yeah.

This is his immortality in a way—the fact that we’re all right here now.
Azada: It’s a very elaborate gravesite. I’m sure he’d want to be remembered like this.
Bradley: But not just remembered. I feel like we’re hearing so much of it was for his parents and for his wife and for his family.

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So do you think he’s proving to them that he made it?
Bradley: Yeah! Because the little that I do know, they never felt like he was actually doing the right thing. So this is him being finally able to say, “I did it.” Especially back then, the way we look at what he did, his feat, you couldn’t be like, “I did this thing, posted it on Twitter, and it got me 500 retweets.” He was like, “I went into this market and did a thing with a straight jacket and there were 100 people there.” You never knew how big of a deal it was. I don’t know how they measured stuff like that.

How did he die? He died doing a trick, didn’t he?
Bradley: This is the story I’ve heard, and it could be completely different, but somebody punched him. One of tricks was that he let anybody punch him and no matter what he could take it, and the story that I’ve heard was that he wasn’t set up for it and he was also sick with something else, and he didn’t contract his stomach and wait for it and somebody punched him as hard as they could and he died.
Scharinger: I was just reading about the gravesite and something said that in 2007 one of his distant relatives wanted to exhume his body to see if he was murdered by spiritualists. I don’t know what that’s about.

Speaking of spiritualists—I know that you two, Ryan and Scott, are really into that. Do you truly believe in the spirit world and that kind of stuff?
Scharinger: Oh yeah. Mainly because we have no idea, so why not? [brings out a pendulum with a crystal from around his neck]. Let’s get this going. [dangles it above the two bottles of wine]. Which bottle of wine am I going to drink? And it goes this way, so that’s the bottle of wine I’m going to drink!

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But who’s telling you that?
Scharinger: Who is telling me that?
Azada: It could be Houdini, dude!
Bradley: The scary thing is that it does lean.
Scharinger: Yeah. It’s on my finger and I’m not swinging it at all and it’s coming back here. But I also read somewhere that somebody close to Houdini said he would never communicate from beyond.

But is this just our subconscious making something happen, or is it…?
Bradley: Isn’t that a bigger question for life, too?

Absolutely.
Scharinger: It’s very exciting to think about. Whether I believe it or not, it’s very exciting.
Bradley: I love thinking about it with friends and with daylight. Not the band – actually when there’s daylight. I’m not terrified of the dark, but at nighttime it, freaks me out.

Can you imagine being here at night? It’d be terrifying.
Azada: I would feel very at peace.
Bradley: You two freaks would! Not freaks! But you two would do it. I would freak out. Because I don’t know what I’m walking on top of. Like, when we were walking here, I was like “I’m sorry.” I honestly felt bad about it. Because there are paths, but eventually you’re going to have to walk in and get to somebody’s grave.
Scharinger: But I think because you are conscious of that, you are being respectful.
Azada: But also, life goes on. Things happen around and after death.
Scharinger: Or they’re underground, going. “Ouch! Fuck! Quit walking on me!”
Azada: Or they just reach up and grab you!

So if there is something after death, that means we shouldn’t be scared of death of dying, right?
Scharinger: Maybe. But what if no one remembers you when you’re dead.
Azada: Houdini’s remembered.
Bradley: But is that what we’re more afraid of? Are we more afraid of people caring and giving a shit, or are we more afraid of actually not being alive anymore? I think the former.
Azada: I’m more afraid of where all this energy goes afterwards.
Bradley: I’m more afraid of working on something and no-one ever knowing about it if I die. Whenever we’re working on an album, as soon as we’re done with it I’m like, “OK. If I had to die today, I’d be okay with that.”