Courtesy of Adrenaline PR

Greg Weeks, bassist for death metal band The Red Chord, doesn’t like to look good for promo photo shoots. Weeks doesn’t show up clean-shaven. In fact, he prefers to grow a beard similar to Abraham Lincoln only adding a bushy mustache. Don’t let the food-catching facial hair fool you, Weeks isn’t a simple-minded caveman.

He grew up in a suburb of Boston and attended the diverse campus of the University of Massachusetts at Boston, where he played alto and tenor saxophone in the jazz band and earned a bachelor’s degree in music.

Although Weeks didn’t strive to become a career jazz musician, he was on tour with a previous band when he was offered the position of playing bass for The Red Chord, which soon after resulted in Weeks growing a thick mustache.

The formation of his mustache led Weeks to adopt a somewhat perverse alter-ego, G-Reg and The Womb Brooms, in which he displays his rapping skills in a video titled, “Stache Attack.”

“(Zach Roth, former keyboardist for metal band Still Remains), and I were in A Dozen Furies’ RV and I sat down and wrote rhymes about facial hairs,” Weeks said. “(G-Reg and The Womb Brooms is) basically one guy rapping and one guy filming.”

“Stache Attack” or “My Mustache” has been around for just a year, but fans of The Red Chord from overseas have beheld the video.

“We were playing a festival in Europe with Ion Dissonance and at that show I had a fake mustache on me and I decided to put it on,” he said. When I turned around a couple of kids yelled … to me in English accents.”

A handle-bar mustache is only one demonstration of The Red Chord’s wild sense of humor.

The concept for the video of the song “Blue Line Cretin,” Weeks says was based on eating sandwiches, having food fights and a final character – someone who “maybe rode the short bus.”

However, the food frenzy wasn’t funded by the band’s label, Metal Blade Records, so after filming a professional video for the label, The Red Chord decided to pay for the silliness out of pocket.

“We bought a bunch of sandwiches at a gas station and filmed for about three hours,” Weeks said. “Because the sandwiches were like, tuna fish and egg salad, after a while we were gagging – we didn’t eat for a week after that.”

To Weeks’ surprise, the gluttonous version of “Blue Line Cretin” became quite popular.

“The video was played a few times on (MTV’s ‘Headbanger’s Ball’),” he said. “Even at shows kids will have ‘sandwich’ written on their knuckles.”

Weeks says a group of fans from North Carolina, who travel three to four hours to surrounding states to see the band, made shirts that read “Team Sandwich.”

Although goofy antics are to be expected from The Red Chord, one of the most unforgettable pranks the band ever experienced had them at the receiving end at a show in Indiana from San Francisco hardcore band First Blood.

“It was the last day of tour and we were playing at an army reserve right next to a graveyard,” Weeks said. “After we played our set, we came out to our van and the entire thing was covered with flowers from the graveyard – we drove away with them.”

Perhaps graveyard flower pranks will be outdone on The Red Chord’s current tour, “Metal Blade’s 25th Anniversary Tour,” with Cannibal Corpse, The Black Dahlia Murder, Goatwhore and The Absence.

“We’re the middle child (on the tour), so Mom and Dad hate us,” Weeks said, “but I plan on listening to Cannibal Corpse every night – they sing about some crazy s***.”

-The Red Chord along with Cannibal Corpse, The Black Dahlia Murder, Goatwhore and The Absence will play at 7 p.m., Saturday at the House of Blues. Tickets are $22.50 to $25.