By Sabrina Stone October 2025

Jenn O. Cide

All interviews take preparation, but when you’re about to sit down in a coffee shop with a sound technician who is also a belly dancer, a fire breather, an emcee, a freak show agent, a monitor engineer, a tour manager, an underwater archeologist, and over a foot taller than you—in flats—you kinda just have to research what you can and allow the journey to go wherever it wants. Jenn and I originally met at Holy Diver, where she was mixing a WAR BUNNIES show. She quickly became our requested engineer, but she’s hard to pin down as she also does sound at Santos Bar, Gasa Gasa, The Broadside, and tours with her many creative endeavors.

It’s really nice working with an engineer who’s also a performer. I think you’ve anticipated any requests I’ve had before I’ve ever been able to ask.
Sound engineers, lighting techs, we’re acting as an interface. I’m a translator. You come up to me and go, “My bass needs more balls,” and I know I need to tighten up the low end and give it a little more punch.

I love that we both automatically cup the air when we request, “more balls.”
You have to! As a monitor engineer, everything is done with hand movements because the guy on the other side of the stage is trying to tell you [whispers] “More balls!” and you have to understand what he’s asking from a distance, over all the sound. Teams need to communicate well for a production to come together. So many times, I have been a performer and the emcee but I helped produce the event and I’m technically the director and have had to, while being on the microphone, direct the sound guy as I’m introducing the first group of midget¹ jugglers that are coming onstage. There’s often 500 million things going on all at once in my head. It’s Pee-wee’s Playhouse on acid in there.

I can see when I’m in production mode, on stage, performing, when I’m supposed to be doing this very heavy bodily thing and you can see that I’m still thinking too hard about the production rather than being in my body. That’s why I can understand that sometimes it’s impossible to come out of the physical realm into the technical one. It’s hard not to disassociate on stage, especially with pressure. I did huge shit with Mötley Crüe and there were, like, maybe eight minutes in all of those shows that I remember.

OK, we’re not moving on without that story.
Mötley Crüe was doing the first ever rock’n’roll residency in Vegas and they’ve always been known for having crazy freak show performances and wild shows, and this was in a 6,000 seat venue, which for Mötley Crüe is a super intimate venue, so they were going to bring in their L.A. talent provider, but a friend of mine who used to work with them in pyro said, “What are you talking about? We have somebody in Vegas. We have all those freaks! You need to talk to Jenn O. Cide.” So I organized all of it. We had a midget Mötley Crüe with tiny instruments, I emceed the acts, found all of the aerialists, all the talent performers, at a certain point I came out as a satanic priest and married Vince Neil to one of the dancers and had the Bible light on fire. At another point, I was standing on stage with massive pyro, to the point where my tape was laid out on the floor, my foot slipped, and I almost blew myself up. There was so much pyro onstage and I was firebreathing with a mohawk of flames, a fire belt, and fire fingers. The one moment that registers, in all of that, was noticing that my toe was over the line and I barely caught myself in time.

We’ll get back to discussing board engineering after you tell me everything there is to know about this event.
I did seven different acts in that show. I would pop up and screw with VIPs and then show up in another place, in another costume throwing things at people, then I’d come on and be the priest. I was running full speed and I’m 6’3’’, so when I run, shit’s happening. It’s like a train coming at you. I also had to make sure that all of my performers had what they needed, so they could do their dangerous chain aerial performances without a net, over the audience. I barely have footage because I was so busy every moment. We put together an incredible show in a very short period of time—it was hectic. We got a metal sphere that hung from the ceiling and I was planning on fire eating inside of it. I was gonna fire breathe and light the edges of it and they had these big, metal upside down crosses that I was supposed to light but we didn’t get a single rehearsal in, so day of show, we’re running through as much as we can, doing a makeshift tech rehearsal (we didn’t even get to walk it) so, essentially, during the show, I barely get into the sphere, my fire fans had not been properly tied off, my hands are super oily, and as I’m trying to get out of the big metal globe, I get stuck, and as I’m trying to hand my pyro fans up to the tech guys, they slip and fall and Mick Mars is directly underneath me and the moment before it would have hit him, he turns slightly and instead, it hit the floor. I almost killed Mick Mars because we didn’t have a tech rehearsal.

The fact that you’re sitting here and alive is just stunning, considering that you’re willing to literally set yourself on fire so people are entertained.
Yeahhhhh. I’ve done dumb shit my entire life. That’s why my business card says “Professional Weirdo.” We’re all weirdos, I just figured out how to make money out of it. What else are we here for? Only the good die young, so I’m going to live to be a ripe old age, for sure. I’ve had 11 back surgeries, so it takes a lot of effort to get stuff done, with as many spinal injuries as I’ve got. I’ve had multiple fusions. I had a morphine pump for 14 years. I used to have two and a half pounds of titanium in my back. I had a spinal cord stimulator that was supposed to interfere with the pain signals in my brain, all kinds of shit. I have doctors, every six months, who stick needles in my neck and my lower back and burn the edges of my nerves off so they don’t send pain signals. It’s giving me some quality of life. I broke my back twice before I could drink a beer legally, just by being in car accidents with shitty drivers. It’s all about trying to find interventional procedures to help me live a normal life but, as my good friend Bizzaro says, “Normal’s just a setting in a dryer.”

There’s nothing but a hard reset from here, but I guess I’m curious, were you a performer or an engineer first?
There was an all-ages venue where I grew up [in Las Vegas], The Huntridge, which was the alternative place where there [was everything from] Latina drag queen contests to death metal shows to ska to poetry slams. It was a very special place. I know how fortunate we were to have that. Still exists. It was built in the ‘40s. To have an actually old thing in Vegas is just insane, ‘cause if it’s more than 20 minutes old, we just blow it up, so that made it doubly awesome.

I started going there when I was 12 and I was like, “I’m coming here every day. How do I get into shows for free?” So I started by passing out fliers but thought: This is kind of dumb; what are those guys backstage doing? That looks cool. So I started pushing boxes, unloading trucks to get in for free, until this guy in one of the bands was flailing himself with a barbed wire whip onstage and asking the audience members to come up and whip him, and I was like, “Yeah, I’ll do that! For sure!” So he had me go stand by the monitor engineer when I was done and after watching that guy for a while I went, “Wait a second, you’re dealing with music, the cool, creative side of it, you’re running all the cool technical stuff (which definitely piqued that part of my nerd brain) and you get to travel doing this and people pay you?!” So I told [the venue] that I was gonna be doing sound there and they laughed and were like, “OK, that’s cute.” And then I just kept showing up every day and by the time I was 14, I was actually mixing monitors.

Did you move to New Orleans for an engineering job?
Not at all. I was hanging out with a friend of mine, at the old One Eyed Jacks. She was bartending, I was having a drink, we were just talking, and the sound guy comes running out saying, “Goddamnit. I wish we had a monitor engineer ‘cause I am so screwed.” My friend goes, “Uhhh, wait a second, Jenn…?” I was just here for two weeks hanging out, but I did monitors that night and because of my history of doing it, my flexibility and everything, from that show onward, I started working at One Eyed Jacks, filling in at Santos, Holy Diver, The Broadside. New Orleans is an amazing place to be a nomad, so the city allowed me to come in and out between other tours, until I moved here. It’s like Vegas, with a soul.

Let’s talk about the sound systems at the places where you work in town.
I love The Broadside. They have an awesome sound system, an awesome production setup, they know what they’re doing with the money they’re putting into it, and they listen to their production people about what needs to be improved. Gasa Gasa did a great job of putting in new sound-dampening stuff and changing the way that the stage is set up, so that when they reopened, there was a massive improvement. They’ve got a lot of sound treatments above and behind the stage, the PA sounds incredible now, and they have a super nice console in there. It’s the Behringer WING, which is definitely the future of where consoles are going. It’s the size of this table, so let’s say less than two feet by two feet by a foot and a half high. You can run front of house and monitors off of it (which you can do off most digital consoles today), but the way that it’s set up is you can actually be mixing monitors on the screen up top and mixing front of house from the bottom, or vice versa, so two different people can be working at the same time. You can have a hundred sets of studio in-ears running with their own individual mixes, but also run front of house simultaneously. It’s infinitely customizable, it’s insane. It’s a little intimidating because there’s so much you can do with it and it’s a little bit of a learning curve, but so worth it.

What’s the version of the board that came before that, where it grew from?
They had the [Behringer] X32, which did a lot of stuff, doing what most consoles had been doing. That was kinda the standard or something that worked like that but now this console allows you to do five times what you used to be able to do. On a single channel, I think you can have 32 different effects, plus plugins, and that’s every single channel. You can have your kickdrum compressed and EQed a certain way to go to the drummer’s in-ears that is compressed and EQed and processed a different way to go to recording tracks, which is also compressed differently for front of house. It’s nothing like what we’re used to working on in venues that size.

What’s the simplest board you work on that still does the trick?
Probably the board at Holy Diver. They’ve got the PreSonus [StudioLive] 16.4.2. It’s 16 channels which, in Holy Diver, you’re often not gonna need more than that. It has four auxiliaries, so you’re able to run four different monitors, which we only have one but we have the extra capability to run extra auxiliaries, for somebody’s in-ears, or something like that. It has on-board EQ and I can compress and gate every channel. It has everything you could possibly need for a venue that size. It totally does the job.

Is there any equipment that’s so sturdy it could survive the apocalypse?
The Shure SM58 [microphone] is the standard for a reason. I’ve seen one fall out of the sound guy’s pocket as he was driving away and get driven over by a truck. We had to use it five minutes later ‘cause it was the last mic that we had, and it worked. There is certain gear that is the standard for a reason and the fact that there hasn’t been a new standard in however many decades shows that they’re worth it, and if you have multiple sound guys telling you, over and over, the same thing, usually they’re onto something.

Photo by Sabrina Stone: Jenn O. Cide at Santos, holding a Shure SM58

What’s the longest you’ve ever been on the road?
Six months. In a van. In 1999, or so. We left from Las Vegas, driving to Phoenix. Our air conditioning went out on the first leg. We didn’t have time to get it fixed until we were in Maine.

That must have smelled incredible.
Oh, it did. It’s still in my mouth. I’m tasting it right now. Toe jam and shame. We would Febreze the van when certain band members left because the grease from their hair was staining the upholstery. Me and one friend still occasionally check in with each other to be like, “Hey, have you ever done anything worse than that?” and we’re both like, “Still no!”

I’ve never interviewed a fire breather before, so, is that a gear-heavy field? I’d imagine safety is a huge concern.
Fire performance is far less gear-dependent. It’s really the skill level of what you have. Juju is a local fire performer friend. She’s incredible and she can do a ton with very little because she’s very skilled. She makes some of her own stuff and I make some of my own props because I just need to know that they’re built right. In a world where you get burnt if things are done wrong, there are a few very reliable ways to do it. One manufacturer that is good quality, smartly built, and reasonably priced is Trick Concepts. They’ve got some beautiful stuff. I called them when I had this idea of a tiered hoop skirt with three hoops of fire and they helped me build it.

You’re a belly dancer but you’re not a fire dancer, right?
I don’t do flow performance. I don’t spin poi. I’m not coordinated like that at all, so I do all the big, scary fire. I have fire whips and fire jump ropes and fire swords, a lot of weaponry. I also do the Fetish and Fantasy [Halloween] Ball every year in Vegas, at that stage where Mötley Crüe was and for one event, I designed all the fire for it and me and a midget came out as a satanic priest and nun, in corpse paint. I had built him an 18-inch strap-on that shot flames, so we were chasing around the anime schoolgirls across the stage, breathing fire, and being metal, so, when I had that idea, I had to ask all my friends who do magic effects and, collectively, we figured out how to build this thing safe enough, so I could put it in front of a fire marshal. Being a professional fire performer means knowing that you will have to get permits. You have to get insurance. You have to have your shit together and understand the regulations so you can show your MSDS [Material Safety Data Sheet] about that chemical and talk through your fire safety issues. I learned really well in Vegas. It’s the hardest city in the country to get fire permits because you have to have the same permit for a Cirque du Soleil show as you do for a punk rock kid eating flames in a dive bar. When my friends and I started learning, we for sure weren’t doing it safely, so I got to learn how not to do it, very quickly. But I was able to make a living as a professional weirdo, because I was working with people who helped me build things so safely that I could put them in front of a fire marshal.

For more info, check out @jennocide13 on Instagram.

Top photo courtesy Jenn. O. Cide: As a member of The Demented Dolls of Sideshow