It all started last fall when we played a gig opening the show for Alice Cooper (the artist not the band) and Dennis, Joe and I sat backstage and wondered, “if we could play with any living person in the world, who would it be?” After a small discussion we all decided it would be Robby Krieger. He sort of fit in with us great but under-appreciated musicians. Dennis said, “You know Robby. Why don’t you give him a call and ask him to join us?” So the next day I gave Robby a call and left a message on his answering machine, asking him to play some gigs with us. Two weeks went by and I didn’t hear from him. I started getting paranoid, maybe he was offended by my forwardness.  With some trepidation I called him again and apologized for my brashness and asked him to call me back, if for nothing else than to chat. The next evening to my surprise, Robby called and apologized for not getting back to me sooner. He explained that he had a bunch of projects he was working on and that later he would be going back on tour so he would probably not be able to do any gigs with us in 2010 but he would love to do some recording with us. “After that, we can take it from there”.

In reality we weren’t thinking of recording at all because Joe had just put out his first solo album, Jukebox in My Head, which he was still promoting and Dennis had just put out his great DDP album, Bones From the Yard, plus he had a couple other groups he played with who were working on recording projects. But at Robby’s urging we started making a list of songs we could record. At first it was covers of other stuff and I had a couple demos and Dennis had a couple as well. So it was 4 new songs and 10 covers of BOC, Alice Cooper and other artists. As November turned into December we started sending demos to each other of the songs we were thinking of doing. I ended up writing a couple more. Dennis came up with a couple more and Joe came up with three more songs, one written by Robby Krieger, one with lyrics by the late Jim Carroll, and one written by our childhood friend and writer of Dark Boat, from Jukebox in My Head, John Elwood Cook.

By the time we went into the studio on December 27th we had 14 new songs we were going to record and the 10 covers. We booked the studio for 3 days but the first day our engineer had a serious family emergency so we couldn’t record. We had everything ready to go so we ran down the songs a few times and called it an early night. For the two days after that we were like a well oiled machine, recording 7 basics plus some overdubs each day. We decided the 10 covers would have to wait and we would concentrate on the 14 new songs.

We made mp3s of the rough mixes and emailed them to Robby in LA where he recorded his parts and sent them back to me by regular mail on CDs. After 4 months of email, regular mail and overdubbing in our home studios we had 10 songs almost complete. We decided to finish just those 10 songs and save the others for some other use latter the year. In late May we started mixing and we approved the last mix in late July. Joe and I made some mock ups of album cover ideas and then handed that task over to Dennis daughter, Rene Dunaway, and we approved the final cover while on this French tour. The next step is the mastering of the CD and the printing of everything which we will do in September when we get back.