THE VIPER

Contact the Viper:
ryanjerving@gmail.com
414-302-9228

ABOUT THE VIPER
(click here for His Famous Orchestra)

The Viper was born Ryan Jerving in Sheboygan, Wisconsin on a cold January night in 1968. He began smashing and setting fires to ukuleles on Madison stages in the late 1980s but found one day, like in a Fred and Ginger movie, that mutual hostility had turned to mutual affection.

As the Viper, he began performing in Champaign-Urbana in the mid-1990s and soon gathered around himself a like-minded band of musical contructivists to form His Famous Orchestra, who recorded two volumes of material. He has been active as a solo performer in the twenty-first century in Ankara, Turkey and the Washington, D.C. area. He currently resides in Milwaukee, Wisconsin where he has been lucky enough to strike up a reacquaintance with the Orchestra as of the summer of 2009.

Aside from TV & HFO, Jerving most recently has played cümbüş, banjo uke, jug, and other assorted household implements with Maryland old time, jug, and bluegrass band, the Paint Branch Ramblers.

In Champaign-Urbana, he also played with the Kennett Brothers (a honky tonk outfit in the tradition of the Louvin Brothers), the Corn Likkers (an old time and jug band led by Kenneth Rainey, currently of Chicago’s Tangleweed), the Prairie Mountaineers (a combo that mostly played fiddle tunes for contra dances), the Graduate Employees Organization brass band (in which he played cornet, badly), and the Ancient Jazz Quartet (ok, just one show, but the name couldn’t be wasted).

He is formerly of Madison, Wisconsin rock combos Kissyfish, the Lovebirds, the Beatles, Enzymatic Fly Vomit (a dorm rock splinter project of My Cousin Kenny), and Les Americains. He is even more formerly of the Libertyville, Illinois high school garage band The Generics.