Sorry, Dos Equis guy, but Kurt Deimer might be the actual most interesting man in the world.

Perhaps no rocker has had such an unorthodox career as Deimer. He worked for years in the family oil business and founded several coolant companies, putting his rock ‘n’ roll dreams on hold for decades, until a random encounter on the set of a film starring John Travolta and Shania Twain led to an unplanned speaking role —  followed by a whole new second-act career as a horror-movie actor/producer and musician. Since then, he has worked with legendary engineer Chris Lord-Alge, Queensryche’s Geoff Tate, Bon Jovi’s Phil X., Tesla, Drowning Pool, and Sebastian Bach. And now, in his mid-fifties, Deimer releasing his debut double-album, the aptly titled And So It Begins.

“I wanted to call it And So It Begins because I’ve had many different chapters, and this is the latest chapter where I’ve gotten back into what I’d loved to do [that I put on hold when] I was 22,” Deimer tells LPTV, sitting at Licorice Pizza Records, which pressed the album’s vinyl editions. “The opportunities just kept coming, and stuff just kept falling in my lap, that I’m like, ‘Why? Why did this just happen?’ And I look at signs and I’m very intuitive, so yeah, I thought it would just be so appropriate to say.”

Deimer explains that while he played in bands in college, he’d “gotten married at a young age” and ended up working from Chevron, his dad’s employer. He eventually realized he “didn’t want to be in corporate America,” which is he why he started his own company “above my garage with a computer and a dry-erase board and a phone.” But it wasn’t until one of his companies, Starfire, landed a product placement in the sports/action movie Trading Paint that he found his true calling.

“Until that day, I never thought about doing this, really,” Deimer confesses. “I mean, I said to myself when I was young, if I ever could have the means to be able to do it I would. But I didn’t specifically ever think it would come to fruition.”

photo: Ross Halfin

Deimer had negotiated a non-speaking cameo in Trading Paint, but once he was hanging out on the set and started vibing with the actors — Travolta, Twain, and Toby Sebastian —the deep-voiced oil man was suddenly offered a speaking role as a track announcer. “Next thing I know, I’m signing SAG papers in the trailer. … I learned my lines and I’ve got all these people around me, and there’s John Travolta and Toby Sebastian, going through the scene with me. … [Travolta] was helping me with the scene and how he wanted it, just talking to me like I’m another actor, and I’m like, ‘OK, this is really surreal and crazy.’”

Speaking of surreal, a few months later, another Starfire product placement in 2018’s Halloween led to another speaking role for Deimer, when he was “killed by Michael Myers … He just ripped open my jaw. My jaw was hanging down and the teeth came out of my mouth.” This part was a bit more challenging —  or, as Deimer puts it, “a slap in the face” — as it involved Deimer shaving his trademark beard and sitting in the prosthetics makeup chair for hours. “That’s probably why they gave me that role, because they knew I wouldn’t know any better than to sit there,” he chuckles. “I had to wear a blanket over my head the whole day and then just sit in the gas station, waiting to be killed.”

Deimer then did other independent film projects with Alabama producer/actor/director Kevin Wayne, through whom he met musician Ben Trexel, and yet another door opened when Deimer and Trexel started collaborating. “I hadn’t sung in 20-plus years, but I sing different and unique with my deep voice and I just have my own vibe, and you either like it or you don’t,” Deimer says. “So, we cut three tracks and I was really digging it. … And we just went from there, and kept writing and writing and made a demo. And I ended up in L.A. with [the demo] in 2020, to give it a chance. I figured if I wanted to make it, I needed to be tied in somehow to people in the industry.”

Despite his experience as a self-made businessman, Deimer admits he was “screwed over in the music business pretty bad,” which later inspired “Naïve,” one of the tracks on And So It Begins. “There’s a lot of leeches, and I’m a target because they all go, ‘This guy can’t do this! He’s from the oil business!’ I’m kind of an anomaly, and it kind of makes me a target, but I figured it out,” he says. Thankfully, Deimer eventually linked up with a well-connected industry veteran, Andy Gould (Rob Zombie, Guns N’ Roses), who managed him from 2021 to 2023, and that led to a fateful meeting with Lord-Algae (Green Day, Muse, My Chemical Romance).

“[Lord-Algae] said he’d love to mix my demos and he took on the project, and then him and I went out to dinner and we became best friends, and he kind of discovered me on the music side,” Deimer recalls. “I didn’t think it would happen, that he would take me on. … He just dug my vibe, and I really still couldn’t sing then, but we figured out a way to present the music. And Ben wanted to do a cover, ‘Have a Cigar’ by Pink Floyd, and I’m like, ‘How am I going to do that song?’ But Chris said, ‘I’m going to show you how. We’re going to do it with your voice.’ And that’s kind of what launched it all on the fast track.

“And that brought me together with [And So It Begins collaborator] Phil X. I was blessed to have these musicians that are so talented to help craft [the album] into the songs and the visions that I have,” Deimer continues. “If I wasn’t good enough, I would just stop. Or if people didn’t like it, I would just stop. I didn’t have time to build from the ground up, as far as just starting out in little bars and all that. But I had all these people around me that are pretty well-known in the industry, for whatever reason.”

And so it begins, indeed. Deimer’s showbiz career is only really get started. His future plans already include a nearly-completed sophomore album; a tour Steel Panther and Buckcherry; his own horror movie franchise, Hellbilly Hollow, featuring music by Stone Sour/Ministry/Soulfly drummer Roy Mayorga; roles in the horror comedy Scared to Death and drug drama Relapse; and yet another horror film, provocatively titled Pandemic Sex Party, co-produced by Deimer and Gould and starring Deimer as a righteous vigilante serial killer.

But perhaps the upcoming project that matters most to Deimer is a cover of Queensryche’s classic power ballad, “Silent Lucidity,” featuring original Queensryche singer Tate, which will be released as a benefit single for suicide prevention. “I know there’s a lot of people out there that are hurting,” says Deimer, who struggled with his own mental health issues after he “suppressed [his] creative side” for years and “was just kind of lost.” Deimer was once addicted to cocaine, and while he quit all hard drugs by the time he was 20, he was still “self-medicating, and making my anxiety and the fact my brain didn’t make serotonin worse. … I had major anxiety as a kid and I was self-medicating. I was a mess, really, until probably 30 or 31 years old. I didn’t fucking know who I was, or if I’d even live to be 30. It’s been a challenging life, but I figured it all out, overcame it.”

Now that Deimer is about to release his debut album, he looks back on that life and muses, “It’s not easy to do all the things I’ve done. I don’t know if people can really comprehend it. I can’t even really comprehend it. But I just go and I just go and I just go, and I get beat up and they knock me down, but I get back up and I just go. What else am I going to do? … I don’t know what I’d do if I wasn’t working. I’d just probably die, because I just love to work. And now I get to do what I wanted to do, that I sacrificed to do all the other things. And it just came back around full-circle.

“So, never give up,” Deimer offers as his parting words. “Persevere. Follow your dreams. You have to have dreams, and then you have to have a plan on how to accomplish them. And then you have to be able to take the hits without getting down. Just get back up, and get back up. And then, that day will come.”