The Pizza Underground

History

The Pizza Underground formed in 2012 when Deenah Vollmer, who played percussion on a pizza box, came up with the concept as a joke. She later told The Philadelphia Inquirer that the group discovered almost any word in a song could be swapped out for "slice" or "cheese." Glockenspiel player Phoebe Kreutz explained that they thought the Velvet Underground’s songs were actually about pizza, but the lyrics had to be changed to fit the "standards of their day."

On November 11, 2013, the band recorded a live demo at Macaulay Culkin’s apartment. Later that month, they played a Lou Reed tribute show at Sidewalk Cafe in New York’s East Village. In December, Culkin posted a video of himself eating a cheese pizza on YouTube, which went viral. It was a parody of Andy Warhol eating a Burger King Whopper in Jørgen Leth’s film 66 Scenes from America, and it served to promote the band’s debut.

The group’s first music video came out in January 2014, spoofing Velvet Underground songs like "All Pizza Parties," "Pizza Gal," and "Take a Bite of the Wild Slice." In the video, the band played on a pile of pizza boxes, with walls covered in a pizza-checkered pattern, and members wore pizza slices as masks. That same year, Bitter Melody Records released the demo on yellow, white, and red cassettes. The band also went on an 18-show North American tour called Fresh to Your Door.

In May 2014, during the Dot to Dot Festival at Rock City in Nottingham, England, the audience booed them offstage. One spectator complained that the parody act was making "a mockery of one of the greatest bands of all time." The group stopped playing after 15 minutes, and after fans threw pints of beer at them, frontman Macaulay Culkin shouted, "Why are you throwing those? ...I’d rather drink them!" A second cassette, Live at Chop Suey, was later released by Bitter Melody Records, recorded at the Chop Suey venue in Seattle, Washington. In January 2018, Culkin announced on the WTF with Marc Maron podcast that the Pizza Underground had split up.