Capital Punishment: Ben Stiller’s forgotten 1980s avant-garde punk band
Ben Stiller has been something of a maverick in Hollywood for decades. He began his career making experimental short comedy films and quit Saturday Night Live after just four episodes to strike out on his own. By the mid-1990s, he was hanging out with the likes of Jack Black, Will Ferrell, and Steve Carrell, earning them the name “Frat Pack”.
Even before Stiller quit SNL and palled around with future comedic royalty, he put himself out there as an artist. Way out there. Speaking with The Guardian in 2018, the multi-hyphenate powerhouse talked about the avant-garde post-punk band that he’d been part of in high school called Capital Punishment and how the band and its one-off album went from dead and buried to a minor revival that somehow had nothing to do with Stiller’s celebrity status.
The music of Capital Punishment is fittingly bizarre for a person who would go on to make both Tropic Thunder and Severance. Unlike those creations, however, it wasn’t particularly crowd-pleasing. Like many experimental artists at the time, the band liked to overlay their music with news reports (usually relating to serial killers). They would also sing in a range of accents, breathe heavily, use copious amounts of reverb, and occasionally startle the listener out of their reverie with an explosion of bagpipe music.
Stiller explained that the music was just an extension of the group’s usual antics. He and his bandmates Kriss Roebling (now a writer), Peter Swann (now a judge in Arizona), and Peter Zusi (a professor of Czech and Slovak literature at University College London) had a strange sense of humour and would often spend their afternoons faking their own murders or staging public floggings.
“We weren’t that into drugs, and maybe that was our alternative,” Roebling told The Guardian. “It was kind of weirdly innocent, as opposed to guys downtown who were getting into real-life trouble.”
“We were 15, 16, 17 years old,” Stiller said. “It’s a totally different way of looking at the world.”
The album, Roadkill, was a perfect reflection of that. It was financed by the family members of the group and was usually met with bemusement. But in 2018, it was brought back to life entirely on its own merits. While sifting through the items in the home of a recently deceased hoarder, Mike Sniper, the owner of the record label Captured Tracks, found a copy of the album and was intrigued by it. The name of the drummer, “B Stiller”, meant nothing to him.
Sniper tracked the band down to see if he could reissue it and revealed that he wasn’t the only one who revered Roadkill. At the time, copies of the album were being sold for upwards of $200 on Discogs. Reluctantly, the band agreed to the reissue and eventually got so fired up about the idea that they reformed to make an EP called This is Capital Punishment. Though they don’t seem to be working on more music for now, Roadkill is now widely available to stream.
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