Eleazar Cragg on the keyboard. He never uses his Hammond B3 Organ on tour, since it’s quite old and almost impossible to replace. Here, he looks a bit bored because he’s playing Oy Vey, a song he considers rather silly, but the fans love.
He doesn’t always play the keyboard either—at once concert, they and rival band Yom Kippur Holocaust each wanted to play the final set. YKH bribed the promotor to let them get the last spot, but Eleazar had the last laugh: upon learning that the venue had a pipe organ, he convinced the owners to let him play that instead, and in their set’s final song, literally pulled out all the stops and just as literally shook the audience with the organ’s power.
YKH ended up looking anticlimactic.
This was the first Iron Zion comission by LusoSkav. I asked him to portray a 70-year-old organist who played in a heavy metal band. I gave him a species/breed, a few ideas of what he’d wear (pince-nez glasses, a menorah pendant and rather conservative clothing)—and told him to fill in the rest. I really had no idea what old Eleazar Cragg would look like.
Mitchell came up with this, which I considered to be awesome.
Also, he pointed me towards the genres an organ would most likely be found in (I chose power metal). With that, I came up with Iron Zion, a power metal/neoclassical metal/klezmer band. Yes, klezmer, as Eleazar Cragg, his grandson Micah, and Micah’s girlfriend Sarai are Jewish.
From this would arise the whole line-up of Iron Zion.
- 2013 commission from LusoSkav.