Let's see, the gig keeps getting pushed out, almost like that recurring nightmare where the door at the end of the long hallway keeps getting farther away the faster you are running towards it. Fortunately it's not quite that dramatic. Who knows, maybe we will get something going in the spring time when the buds are coming on the trees, ready to pop into a burst of green. Then again, maybe not. We don't really care because it hasn't been the primary focus for this band. We like to play and record together and that keeps us together as a band and as friends.

We are very close to having everything ready for our next CD release, RumDum Daddy. It looks like we're on target for Halloween. It seems appropriate since the content is based largely on a bunch of traitorous murderers who's only goal is world domination and money domination. What party guys eh?!?!!?

The tunes sound pretty good. It's a shorter album than most of our others ones, it's only about 60 minutes instead of 70 or 74 like the others but we can live with that.

Rock and roll is somewhat timeless. It is clearly demonstrated by the bands who have stood up to the test of time. There are many of them like the Stones, Beatles, Aerosmith, Mountain, Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, ELP, the Faces and the list goes on. When you hook into the channel of rock and roll you connect up to a timeless stream of consciousness, right out of the most visceral part of the collective unconscious I might add. And that is what I think makes that shit so in the present and meaningful years after it was done. There is a lot of music that is cast into its time period to be sure. Just look at disco, KC and the Sunshine Band or some of the other hihat swooshin guys that attempted to drive rock and roll away for what ever reason it was.

So, with that in mind it seemed like it made sense to steal ideas from ourselves, from the past, from earlier rocking times. I took the first part of Rat Poison for the Soul from a tune I wrote in 1971 because it kicked then and still kicks now and is pretty fun to play with the verse part that Terry wrote and his seething lyrics. Jeff and I locked into a nice punch for the thing and the whole tune came together nicely for us. And Rumdum Daddy is another example of digging up graves and breathing life into the corpse once again. I wrote that song in 1982. I had a few days of quiet and wrote that one and a five others but this one seemed more of a likely candidate for exhuming than the others did right now. I did write the lyrics recently, obviously and enlisted Terry's help with lyrics on the middle chorus and a kick as lead break to make the thing work. It's fun because Jeff and I get to sit back and lay a good groove down for Terry to blast into it with a nice building lead break that lasts about five minutes. It's good Scare Band lead guitar stuff folks. Terry was in fine form as he often is and Jeff and I weren't far behind with the melt machine.

We tend to get put in a category from time to time, like 70's rock or psychedelic, stoner, blues rock or some similar catchy tags but we are reall just rocking out, playing it out of the same place we've been playing it for a long time. It is cathartic and a nice rush when I have the bass cranked up to the point where I can feel it through my whole being, where I can touch the neck to my amp and get that long sustain feedback happening. Bass feedback is a real buzz and I enjoy that buzz whenever I can cop it. Things tend to get into a nice melting pot when we get into that space and that is typically when we tend to come up with the more memorable jams. Luckily, we have been able to capture almost everything we have played together on some type of media for later use and or mixing and mastering. The early days were the most iffy on that front. Thanks to the mixing mastery of Greg Gasmann, the early recordings sound as good if not better than the new stuff! He had the gift of being able to hear it and mix to it instantly and since everything was live with no opportunity for an overdub or punch in, he had to get it right every time and he mostly did just that.

I guess the way we record is kind of like a live performance without the rehearsal or the crowd. It has all the energy and concentration from the three of us, just missing a couple key details and details they are when we are in the middle of our madness.

Stay tuned, maybe before we get our scooter, electric wheel chairs and oxygen tanks, we will do a gig somewhere there's more than a couple innocent bystanders.