In 1986 cartoonist Tim Johnson of Ocean Side Long Island named his band Bloody Snowmen.

Tim was expelled from Joe Kubert School of Art in Dover NJ after an incident involving the destruction of a room dividing door after many nights of drinking heavily. Tim returned to Long Island early in 1987.



There he met John Giordano in '86. Johnny G was new to Baldwin High School in Long Island. He came from Manasquan, NJ and wore a black pea coat with his head partially shaven. Johnny G. was a teenager at the time and too much for his mother to handle, so he moved in with his father.



Three houses away on the same street in Baldwin, Long Island lived a drummer. John G would hear the drummer as he walked by the house where the Defiores lived. The drummer was the jazz-obsessed John Peter Defiore, a quiet but deep thinker who was on the brink of becoming musically great. He had been a star baseball pitcher on his little league team many years in a row. He was an enthusiastic young boy becoming an introverted man, an artist who would struggle with mental illness.



Johnny Giordano was a budding guitarist, having been the lead singer of a band called the Snots down on the Jersey Shore. He was interested in playing punk style blues. It was natural that the three would get together.



There were two more members to be added. One was a friend named Russell Sackulov. “Russ” was a bass player. He loved little-known hard metal bands and had a very dirty sexually explicit sense of humor.



The band decided to simultaneously leave the homes of their parents and move together into an abandoned bar out on the suburbanized island of Barnum. The island’s namesake was no other than P.T. Barnum for this is where the famous circus ring leader kept his equipment many decades ago.



When Tim was living at art school in New Jersey he was often visited by John Giordano’s cousin, T. J. Kiernan,(AKA T.J.K. Haywood) a visual artist who loved Rock and Roll and wanted to be a part of it. He too wanted to leave his parents' home and joined the Bloody Snowmen at the abandoned bar - “The Barnum House”.



A lot of drug experimentation transpired there in the summer of 87. This was also a big Cicada year. There were millions of them dropping from the trees everywhere, especially onto the flat roof of the old bar. The Bloody Snowmen blasted a blues-based punk rock from their living space, John Defiore even moved his stripped-down jazzy drum kit into the living room with its artfully graffitied walls.



Tim Johnson wasn’t technically a good singer. He was as raw as they come and howled in a passionate lyricism sometimes wobbling in and out of tune in songs like “Car on Fire,” "Children during Bedtime,” and “Burn,” in which Johnson belted “Jack the Ripper’s victim marching through the fog, she’s looking for a way to stop bleeding, soft white flesh of the prostitute bleeding through the night, Jack the Ripper sitting on his Throne.“ Other lyrics captured Tim's youthful spirit as well: "Single frog song in the night. I just want to do something right."



The band’s beginnings all seemed to be pointing in the right direction. However the drug-free T.J.K. was unhappy, he felt he spent too many nights alone in the abandoned bar listening to Velvet Underground records with local crack addicts and decided that living with his parents was actually better.



Enter second guitarist Rob Creedon. A tall local boy with a van and a high school diploma. The guitarist had a fascination with UFO lore and a love for Steely Dan. He had only been playing guitar for about 5 months at the time when he joined the Bloody Snowmen. Rob’s style became mind-warping and trail-blazing, even psychedelically exploratory. His lead guitar alongside Johnny G’s (who was now going under the name John Haze) was more than complimentary to the Jazzy rock-i-fied drums of John D and the competent bass playing of Russ Sackufov. The Snowmen sounded like hell was spewing over with lava, cum, and industrial waste. The music shadowed their suburban youthful Long Island existence, being outcast by their peers, themselves, and eventually each other.



The Snowmen got their hands on some Magic Mushrooms, LSD and Marijuana as often as they could and started booking time at a local recording studio in nearby Rockville Center where a clock sporting the pretty face and teased hairdo of Jon Bon Jovi hung on the wall.



When it came time for live performances, they were few and far between, but the ones they did were classic. In the summer of 1988, the Bloody Snowmen played the Right Track Inn. The man at the sound board was having one hell of a time. Tim Johnson screeched on an old violin. John Haze and Rob Creedon were lost in their own guitar world trying to find their way through the wilderness of their minds back to the stage through pure improvisation.



John Defiore was at his kit playing along to the stream of consciousness that surrounded him. Audience members were on the stage yelling into the microphone: “Your music sucks. Why don’t you cut it out!” One man yelled out, “Yeah, I like that, but then again, I like root canal work!”



Vocalist, cartoonist Tim Johnson published two comic books, “The Bloody Rag” volumes 1 and 2. These poked fun at the band members as well as some of the satirical targets of the late 80’s such as Morton Downy jr. One cartoon in the Bloody Rag 1 depicted the band meeting Tiffany backstage at the grammies. John Haze was dressed as a gorilla, Tim Johnson in a clown suit, they were all holding her down and masturbating on her while John Defiore stood nearby with an afro and a 70's style buttoned-down shirt asking Tiffany, “Do You Dig Trane?” referring to the late great John Coltrane.



The Bloody Snowmen made their television debut on the 5 minute forum at Queens College. A show that lasted more than 5 minutes and once featured the band making a variety of noise with musical instruments winging it (having not practiced and having now come into the philosophy of not believing in practicing). The Snows sounded horrible! Rounding off the comical effect was T.J.K. wearing purple suede ladies boots and translating the music for the deaf by swirling acrylic paint on to a canvas as the band proudly trashed the college television studio with abandon. Tim with violin in arms crashed into all the musicians present, knocking everyone down and putting a huge dent into the plaster wall behind a curtain.



The “Snows” made their own 8 millimeter home movie as a music video to go along with their 20-minute recording of “The Fall of Man” recorded at the Right Track Inn. The film featured the band trashing the old Barnum house and spray painting the walls and desecrating a buddah garden statue. There was a giant sign in the room there at the Barnum house that was shaped like a Fish, the sign read “Fresh Fish.” It was stolen from a marketplace down the street. Tim used the term “fresh fish” as a cue for the band to signify changes in the music. He would shout out those two words in the middle of songs. The film also exhibited the band members hanging out in the Long Island woods with their girlfriends. Quite frankly, in this reporter's opinion it’s a miracle any of them ever had any girlfriends at all.



The Bloodys also performed at ABC No Rio in 88 with only three members present. The show was called Odd Core Matinee hosted by Wm. Berger of WFMU. It also featured Uncle Wiggly TKF and the Gamma Rays. T.J.K. improvised along with John D and Tim on violin to a room filled with other musicians who were all very supportive. John D played saxophone. He was by nature a drummer, but as a multi-talented instrumentalist, he strived to be more like his idol, John Coltrane.



A videotape of the Odd Core Matinee performance actually exists and will probably be featured on a Bloody Snowmen website along with the 5 Minute forum video and the Film "The Fall Of Man" in the future.



The band did not really make a comprehensible album of songs featuring the strong raw voice and sick, iconoclastic, visionary lyrics of Tim Johnson until John D and Tim started visiting T.J.K.’s apartment in the old suburban town of Madison, NJ circa 1995.



The Bloody Snowmen of Long Island had fallen apart at the seams. Providing there were any seams. Johnny G had moved to Brooklyn and started other bands such as Black Elk and Hazel Motes. Rob became a race horse enthusiast and his friendship with Tim dwindled.



The Bloody Snowmen had a greater sense of focus in New Jersey. They recorded quite a bit with John Defiore using a vacuum cleaner as musical instrument as well as banjo and assorted toys. T.J.K. insisted on playing primarily an acoustic guitar. Local bass player and friend, Brandon Garrison joined in for many of the sessions. He was always in a good mood and brought his own beer.



The Bloody Snowmen now had a fluctuating membership surrounding the song writing duo of Tim Johnson (now using the name Phineous T. Johnson as a tribute to their past in Barnum Island)and T.J.K. Haywood (one of T.J.’s artistic identities, along with the eventual Wooden Thomas). Sometimes friend, Ben Ross played accordion on some raw countrified songs. The Bloody Snowmen were making music on a semi-regular basis with a four-track recorder. They released “Harpy Hotel” in early 97 and accumulated enough quality four-track recordings for a second release: "Zen in the Clowns," but to date the artwork has not been put together.



On Memorial Day, May of the year 2000, John Defiore committed suicide. He had been in and out of mental institutions, and on and off of medication for many years. John D was living with his parents. He was on the front porch reading Edgar Allen Poe and told his father he was going for a walk. John walked to the park behind his parents house and laid himself down in a canal filled with two feet of murky water and started to breathe it in.



Two local teenagers tried to stop him by yelling at him and throwing rocks at him. But the introverted, talented young man who suffered from mental disease only smiled at those teens as he laid down, and finally, after a brief struggle found peace.



Defiore’s illness affected his art in a bad way. Local musician Paul Garalia asked him to play a live show at a church. John D said he’d do it and applied his musical talents to the project. When it came time to go on in front of a live audience, John D paced up and down the aisle and performed very little of the show.



Russ Sackulov said of Defiore that “He was a great musician. He really listened to what was going on around him when he was playing.“ Any nuance that would happen, John would react to it. He was perfect for the Bloody Snowmen. Because of this, he held it all together.



In 2001, John Giordano reunited the Bloody Snowmen at Rubulad, a recording studio in Brooklyn, New York. Rob Creedon showed up as did Russ Sackulov with his bride-to-be. Scott Phrase of the Stormpigs played drums. Giordano was trying to capture some of the best Bloody Snowmen songs, which he felt were never recorded properly.



Unfortunately for him, Tim Johnson was a complete no-show. Johnson married and lives in Luzerne in New York State. Therefore, the reunion was a disaster. T.J.K. Haywood seemed to sum it all up when he sprayed all of the musicians in the room with a fire extinguisher, clearing them out holding their hands to their mouths. It was a complete waste of money.