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photos of truck via Hell General Facebook; pin via @pleasetouchpottery

Minneapolis' Hell General ice cream truck dispenses metal, not frozen treats

“Last night riding, a black ice cream truck rolled up behind us blaring a mixture of generic ice cream truck tunes and heavy metal. There was no ice cream,” wrote Pleasetouchpottery on Instagram. “But! We did get handed these sweet buttons.” That truck is Minneapolis’ Hell General truck which, with its logo of an ice cream cone with devil horns, has been driving around delivering punishing riffs and absolutely no frozen treats, off and on, for the better part of this decade. “My intentions with the truck have nothing to do with selling ice cream,” writes owner Matt Peterson on the Hell General website. “Rather than indulge brats with over priced cream pops, I mean to deny those looking to buy a cold tasty treat by playing my happy chimes through the streets. And when the children materialize in the streets? I will coast right past them with the sinister look of rejection.”

Minneapolis’ CityPages just a did a feature on Hell General and  Peterson:

Peterson says the idea for this demonic contraption came to him after his own Batman villain-esque experience with an evil ice cream man. When he was 10 years old, Peterson says he flagged down a jangly truck, eager to get a cool, creamy treat, and realized he didn’t have any money in his Ninja Turtle swimming trunks. He promised he’d return with the tender and sprinted back to the house to grab some.

By the time he reached his front porch, the ice cream man was pulling away. He pounded on the porch window to try and get him to stop, only to shatter the glass into a billion pieces and cut the dickens out of his wrist.

“I realized one thing at that moment,” Peterson writes on the Hell General website. “The ice cream man was one sick motherfucker.”

As happens in so many good villain backstories, Peterson became the very thing that haunted and maimed him as a child: an evil ice cream man who did not provide ice cream…

As for the truck’s name, Peterson writes on the Hell General website, “The name Hell General is derived from two meanings; Hell being the location of the original evil ice cream truck, and General after the manufacturer of the truck, AM General.”

Hell General even sports stickers of frozen treats, which on closer inspection are all metal-related, like this one:

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If you’re in the Minneapolis area, keep an eye and ear out for Hell General. Meanwhile you can listen to Hell General’s official playlist — featuring Lamb of God, Gojira, Immortal, 1349, Behemoth, Misery Index, Septicflesh, Slayer and more — here.