End2End

Ivo “Spyder” Krizan fell in love with the guitar (at the age of six) at a public pool where Romanies, or Gypsies, used to jam to make money. Nearly four decades later-relaxing between sets during his regular Saturday night gig at grill pub Solid Uncertainty in Prague- Spyder (a childhood moniker) Krizan, as he is known nowadays, conjures up this scene:

“Just picture a six year old kid gaping in amazement at a circus act of three Gypsy guys playing a single guitar. Fero provided a chordal accompaniment on one part of the guitar’s neck, while the remaining two-Joza and Janos-played lightning speed melodies and riffs on the other part of the neck, bending over each other like monkeys. Later Janos showed me the rudiments of playing the guitar. I mean, the guy was kind enough to teach this peat of a white kid.

Early, one morning, I stepped out into a cold wintry day and saw two men carrying the frozen body of a man whose face the frost had bitten blue. A third guy carries a guitar, full of snow and cave d-in a few places. The dead man was Janos. He’d been beaten and left to freeze to death. I had to carry on for him and keep the music going. His legacy remains with me.”

He formed his first band at 10 and in his early teens co-authored and sang on the hit single, “Don’t Become a Nun” with pop group Atlantis. On a tour of Austria in the early 1970s he defected to the West and ended up in Munich as lead guitarists fro the German versions of Jesus Christ Superstar and Hair where he worked with then unknowns, Donna Summer and Chaka Kahn and Melba Moore.

For a high school dropout knowing little English other than rock n’ roll lyrics, “arriving in America felt like landing by parachute, but the chute got all tangled up, so hitting the ground was like an explosion
with all those millions of pieces of your former life spinning outward, getting lost forever. It sound like a cliché, but the only way to communicate was with my guitar.”

A U.S. citizen by the time the Velvet Revolution erupted in 1989, Spyder answered the request of the President Havel for Czech artist around the world to come home and reactivate the music scene in Prague. Back in 1992, Prague’s night scene was very different from today’s. For a musician to do a solo gig in a pub, club or bar was looked upon by many Czechs as little short of begging. Today, nobody lifts an eyebrow when musicians occupy a corner of a café to make music. “It’s not just expats”, says Spyder. “Czechs are embracing it to. “

A sit-down set with Spyder is likely to include Simon and Garfunkel (a zingy Mrs. Robinson), The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix and lots of Lou reed. Krizan originals could be just as enduring such as “One Day, a throbbing ballad of immediate-future longing for an underage girl and “Bomb Scare”, an apocalyptic rocker that brings the horror of Iraq on the world stage down into the unsecure corner pub.

Spyder has a Haight-Ashbury or San Francisco sensitivity that’s lost out a little bit to the New York R&B scene. When I close my eyes, I’m in the West End bar near 116th Street and Broadway. It’s like a flashback, but a good flashback. You can catch his act at the Solid Uncertainty, June 10th from 8-10 pm. Call for reservations.
- The Prague Post by Alan levy

I just received two copies of the drug, erroneously labeled as the CD, End 2 End. It represents a magnificent synthesis of musical, pop and ballad styles, with the pilfering and wafferings of Cat Stevens, Jethro Tull and The Wall.

It is Broadway, low way and highway all rolled into one, glued by memories that must remain primeval and locked into one's limbic system, which can only therefore be accessed through pharmacotherapy or by the chance encounter with a smell from the past recalling that 1970’s San Francisco cafe with its cannabis, coffee chocolate, incense, myrrh and one oh-so full breasted hippie lass oozing in subliminal sexual juices, nipples erect, poking through her hand-sprayed dress.

Dasha, the female backup vocalist (and lead on Forever New) has a voice frequency that for some reason seems to cause an immediate quivering in the lower Antilles. She's simply delicious.

As such, I will be most interested in the ongoing antics of this adventure that can only be described as a sensory experience. On a mass level, I find its immediate appeal with people of exceptional musical IQ or alcohol or drug levels hovering near the toxic range. It is a Fantastic Voyage, a Sputnik into the cosmos of the known and Unknown. Please keep me lucidly informed on the progress of distribution and its habit forming impact upon the masses.

Dr M reporting from Narodni Club
- Gruporevue-by Martin Stransky

HISTORY

The original version of the rock opera Hamlet resulted from a suggestion by musician Martin Kumzak to his friend, Janek Ledecky. Inspired by the idea and challenge, Ledecky, a highly successful pop star in the Czech Republic and a European Grammy winner, wrote the book and music, with the orchestration by Kumzak. This show was an unprecedented success in the Czech Republic, running for three years in Prague and then another three years in Bratislava. For an original work to run this long in a country of only 10 million people is astonishing. The fact that, up until now, there has been no successful opera or musical based on Hamlet is remarkable. Now there is.

The journey from the Czech version to an American one began in 2000, when Beth and Vince Parrillo first saw the show. They were so impressed with the book, music, staging, and fast-paced action that they envisioned the show's adaptation for English-speaking audiences. Vince created an English version of twelve of the songs,not just a translation, but a reworking of the lyrics, all with Janek's approval. A staged concert version of this condensed version of the show was held in New Jersey in 2002 at the Civil War Drill Hall Theatre of the Players Guild of Leonia. George Harvilla then joined the team as co-lyricist to develop lyrics for the remaining songs. Vince then directed a staged reading of the show, with a cast of Broadway veterans (including Jeremy Kushnier, Louise Pitre, Paul Kandell, Ric Ryder, Delisco, John Hickok, and Jennifer Blood) in New York City at the Lambs Theatre in September 2003. Next, director Robert Johanson joined the production team and worked with Ledecky, Kumzak, Harvilla and the Parrillos on adapting the show. He directed his adaptation of the show in a staged reading at the Abingdon Theatre in New York City in April 2004. That cast included Jeremy Kushnier, Jan Maxwell, P.J. Benjamin, Josh Tower, Blake Moses, and Jennifer Blood

After further adaptations, the American version had its world premiere in a showcase production in Prague at the Kalich Theatre in August 2005. Janek stepped from playing Hamlet in the Czech version into the role of Claudius, while Americans Sebastian Arcelus and Cullen Titmas played Hamlet and Laertes, respectively. The rest of the cast was Czech actors and singers, all fluent in English. This production garnered unanimous praise from all critics (newspapers, magazines, radio, TV, Internet) and, at each night's performance, the cast took three curtain calls as enthusiastic audiences gave them standing ovations. Next, the rock opera Hamlet will be offered in the near future to American audiences, who will discover for themselves what has made the show so exciting and - Expats Prague

Discerning Rock Action aficionados know his work well. His fluid lines have held down the bottom on Mick Farren and Jack Lancaster's "The Deathray Tapes" (imagine, if you will, William Burroughs fronting the seventies Miles Davis band), Wayne Kramer's "L.L.M.F." (wherein Bro. Wayne and a rhythm section expand the best tunes from his Epitaph oeuvre into sprawling improvisatory explorations), and the Deviants' "Barbarian Princes" (where Farren and company pull off the same trick for his excellent nineties output).

Bassist Doug Lunn is a musician's musician. His resume includes work with New Age/soundtrack composers Mark Isham and Peter Buffett; fusioneers David Torn, Fire Merchants, and Brand X; ex-Police men Sting and Andy Summers; former Zappa sidemen Mike Keneally and Ed Mann; even Broooce Springsteen (on his "Human Touch" album); the band on TV's short-lived Dennis Miller Show; his wife, singer/dancer/choreographer Vida Vierra; and his own band, Retrophobia. (He says you need to be like Sybil - remember the book about the woman with 64 personalities? - or a character actor to play so many diverse gigs.) Whew!

How in the HELL, then, did he wind up working with Farren's scrappy Deviants and Bro. Wayne's touring band? The answers to that and other questions are in the dialogue below. Doug joined us from his home in Los Angeles. Two weeks before, I'd seen him play an awe-inspiring show with Wayne to a pitifully small audience in Dallas.

K: So how was the rest of the tour with Wayne?

D: When I saw you, we were down to the last couple of days. We did Albuquerque, Phoenix, and San Diego after that, then we were home.

K: The new material sounded great. It's just a pity that there weren't more people there to hear it.

D: That's the weird thing. You can't control the audience. It changes so much night after night. Some places we have enormous turnout...I remember it was really light that night. I haven't toured with Wayne since about '98, but I remember in '97, when we went through Dallas on the "Citizen Wayne" tour, we had really low attendance there compared to the rest of the tour, so I don't know if it's not a particularly resonant place there for him. By the nature of his music, in the northeastern urban industrial centers, anywhere from Minneapolis, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, New York, Boston, Philadelphia, New Jersey, there's a kind of recognition and resonance that happens, where people just come out and go, "I KNOW this." In other places, you take your chances.

K: Maybe it's because in some of those places, you might find some older people who saw the MC5, as well as some younger people who know the reputation.

D: We have this split-up audience where you have people who are either 50 years old and saw the MC5 back in the day, or 20 years old and they think MC5 is a deejay! You know, "MC5, I've heard of him."

K: [Laughs] I finally got the "Adult World" record...the merch guy didn't have any; the cardinal sin for all merch guys...and I'm really diggin' it. You play DRUMS on one track!

D: Yeah, I play drums on the title track. That just came about because one of the things that Wayne and I would always do on the tour, back from years ago, at sound check, we would end up flipping around, I would play the drums and he would play bass, and we would just jam at things. So when it came to doing the record, he said, "I want you to do some drum tracks on this."

I've worked as a drummer. I've played drums, I've played keyboards and different things. The nice thing is that I've always made my living as a bass player, so when I play drums, there's a kind of freedom I have. When I play bass, I play like my life depends on it, because it DOES. I've always had to be somewhat responsible as a bass player, because I'm always recording and working, whereas drums are just a pleasure. Drums are RECREATIONAL for me. I can go out and play, I love playing drums, and I don't have anything to prove.

K: Wayne being an occasional bass player himself, how does that work when you play together? Does he come to you with specific expectations for parts?

D: Sometimes he does. When you write alone, you get attached to your stuff as a writer. Often in songs, he'll have specific things that he'll want me to do. He was trying to do the album by himself in a lot of ways, and often he would have already cut a bass track, working at home in his studio. He'd say, "I want you to come in, your thing will sound better, but this is kinda what I want," and he'd have composed sort of a guide track in order to give ideas. It's a split between me coming in there and being able to play the material the way he wants it and at the same time, as in a lot of working situations, I'm hired to change things. I'm hired as a specialist, to bring things to the table that someone else wouldn't think about. So it kinda goes both ways. Also, by the nature of doing a BAND, when we're playing night after night, the innate spontaneous chemistry takes over.

K: Let's talk about that a little. How would you compare the group dynamic of the most recent Wayne Kramer touring band with previous versions you've worked with?

D: First of all, Wayne and I have kind of evolved our way of playing. You have two ways of playing, the way you play innately and then from doing something like this, you develop a way you play TOGETHER. Wayne and I have a SHARED music, we have a way that we're used to making music together where we know how our styles fit together.

For me, the second most pivotal thing in the group is drums, because I play drums also, and the bass-drum thing is a really important linkage. The drum chair has really changed because Wayne's gone through a lot of changes in his drum aesthetic over the years. When I came on, Brock Avery was playing in the band, and Brock's a great player. Brock's a very open, kinetic, energetic, very free-blowing drummer. He has that sort of classic Epitaph rock thing, but then he also plays very free and very opened-up. He's a real high-energy player. I loved playing with Brock. We met on the road! When I did this the last time, I just kind of airdropped onto the tour, replacing Paul Ill, so you get to know someone by spending 30 nights playing with them. Brock did a very loose and reckless kind of playing, somewhere between Tony Williams and Keith Moon! Then after that, Ric Parnell came on, and we had played all during the eighties in a band called Zoo Drive. Did TONS of recording together. Ric and I have done many tours and 30 albums together with different people. He has a great pop sensibility and that English rock thing. His dad is Jack Parnell, who's sort of the Louis Bellson of England...an English big band drummer who's one of the BBC music directors. Ric has a lot of musicality. Ric doesn't have the training, he just has tremendous flair and a really great rock sense. He's more of a classic rock drummer. He has John Bonham and Ginger Baker in there, but also funk and reggae and a lot of other things mixed in.

Eric Gardner's great because he's kind of cool with both worlds, together. Eric has a lot of training, a lot of finesse. He came up in Boston, he studied with Alan Dawson as a teenager (who was Tony Williams' drum teacher). But he's also a real contemporary pop-rock drummer, a great, really rounded player, and he's exciting. A lot of times, you get people who spend a lot of time on their drumset playing alone. They can play drums, but they don't know how to play songs, and they don't know how to play with people. Eric really knows how to play material, and knows how to link up with people and really play great as a band drummer.

This is, I think, the best band Wayne's ever had. That's the thing you really feel, especially if you have the luxury of going out and playing 30 nights in a row. You just build up that chemistry, where so often when you're in town, people are jumping back and forth between different things, you play a night here and then maybe two weeks later you play somewhere else. On one hand, there's the pressure of the take, when you have one shot to do something in the studio, but then there's the luxury when you have a run that you get to really develop chemistry and develop the way we play collectively. By the time we got to Dallas, you really saw a band that was playing together. I had never played with [Mother Superior guitarist/keyboardist] Jim Wilson before this tour. We just sort of met, "Oops! We're in the band!" So you're just starting from scratch, and going, "What do we have in common? How do we bond? How do we play together?"

K: It was really neat watching Pat Burrows, the original MC5 bass player, standing off to the side of the stage with his jaw dropping, watching what you were doing.

D: He was great. That was the first time I had met him. He's someone whose name I knew...there's sort of a core of Detroit bass players. I had met Michael Davis before, about five years ago in Detroit, but this was the first time I'd met Pat.

K: I was looking at your web page and some of the people you've worked with. How'd you ever make the jump from working with Mark Isham and all these fusion people to playing with Mick Farren and the Deviants?

D: Well, I spent a lot of the eighties working with a lot of English rock musicians. That's just where I drifted. I was living in L.A., and there was a choice between that or doing the generic L.A. studio session guy work, which didn't fit for me. So I just kind of flowed into this English community, with Ric Parnell and the guitar player in Zoo Drive, this guy named John Goodsall.

K: The Brand X fella.

D: Yeah. So we had this band together for years, and backed tons of other English musicians like Michael Des Barres. You flow through a million different bands and projects. So through this community, the Brand X connection, I knew Jack Lancaster - sax player/producer/synthesist.

K: The Blodwyn Pig guy.

D: Yeah. He had been through Blodwyn Pig and then he had done sessions with Brand X, that whole sort of Genesis offshoot scene, during the seventies. Jack moved out here in the eighties and we did some sessions together with Goodsall and with Ric, and he had started to call me on albums he was producing. He did one with Tamiya Lynn, a singer from New Orleans who used to sing with Dr. John and the Stones. I actually played piano and bass on that. So he called me sometime in '94. He was Mick Farren's partner.

"The Deathray Tapes" was the first thing I did with Mick, as far as recording. [Jack] called me and said "We're doing a live recording" and I said, "I'd love to do that." So we put together all the arrangements and kind of talked over things. It was a really loose, free-for-all session. We had a limited budget, we took over this club called the Pink for a night, had an invited audience, assembled the musicians and went, "Look, whatever happens in the next hour is being recorded and goes on the CD." Rather than the luxury of a runner, here we had the pressure of a single take. "This is it, a one-shot deal, it's going to be an event, we're going to document it, it's going to come out." And that was actually the first time I ever played with Wayne, because Kramer came on as a guest soloist. You've probably heard that, the one with "Disgruntled Employee"...

K: Sure. It kinda reminds me of William Burroughs fronting the seventies Miles Davis band.

D: That's actually a really good description. Somewhere between William Burroughs, Hunter Thompson, and maybe Keith Richard without the guitar. A little Syd Barrett or whatever. So we met, we came in and sort of airdropped into the session. So Wayne came in, and I knew Wayne's work from the MC5, and he and I really hit it off. We played together, we had a blast, and just sort of pointed at each other and said, "We should DO something together." Then we would continue running into each other, but he had his Epitaph deal, he had his band with Paul Ill and Brock, but we'd always cross paths and say, "Some time we're going to do something together." I was always busy doing Isham's stuff, or I played with Andy Summers for a number of years (another English connection).

K: The Police guitarist.

D: I played with Andy from '88 to '92, which was close enough after the Police that he still had sort of a popstar altitude in his career. We played a lot in Europe and Japan and toured around the States. He was doing instrumental music with [drummer] Chad Wackerman from the Zappa band and all these different people. Now he's playing jazz clubs and small venues.

K: You played with Sting, too, didn't you?

D: Actually I played with him with Andy. There's this bootleg recording from the Montreaux Jazz Festival in 1990, when he was in Italy recording "The Soul Cages." Sting would pop up at shows and go, "What's going on?" Andy would invite him up and we'd do encores of Police songs.

K: With you playing bass!

D: Yeah. I was playing fretless and he'd kind of look at it and go, "You play!" He was great. Some of the concerts we did in Europe were broadcast all over, and all these bootleg CDs come out. I was in a CD store at one point looking at something and realized, "Wait a minute...I'M on this! What is this?"

K: "And I didn't get paid!"

D: That's the nature of piracy. I believe in piracy...I believe in capitalism and I also believe in piracy.

K: They're not mutually exclusive. Read the papers!

D: You want the stuff to get out. It's funny. I just thought it was funny, you don't realize how many things are out in the world. How many things you do that you kind of forget about, then all of a sudden it's documented and winds up appearing as a product somewhere.

K: You set foot onstage and you're fair game. So, was the "Barbarian Princes" tour of Japan the next thing you did with Farren?

D: We did a handful of dates in town, but we went to Japan in February '99. We did shows primarily in Tokyo and Osaka. We were there for a week doing shows, so they recorded a few of the nights. What was funny about doing that was the nature of Mick's thing...Mick is an English-language spoken word artist, not a singer per se. He's a storyteller, whatever, in the context of a big, thrashing, dense, dark rock band. And you go to another country like that...even in America, in an English-speaking culture, who KNOWS what the verbal comprehension is in the average punk club? Half the time you go to shows, you can't understand lyrics anyway, when they're in English. You go to Japan and it's really hard to know what people are getting.

K: "Pray lock and loll! Pray lock and loll!"

D: The fun part about touring with Mick was that he would do press interviews all the time, and you'd get to go out and hold court for an hour in front of adoring (if only partially comprehending) Japanese press. They ask cute questions. Because people's language is so idiosyncratic, you never know (if you have a translator) how accurately things are translated. Because with Mick, it's not just facts and information; he's someone who has style, a verbal, journalistic, literary style to his language. Points of reference and things that are felt, there are all kinds of subtexts going on...the things you EXPECT from a writer, and I know that those are often the first things to go in translation. So we had a great time on the tour and recorded the album, which is a pretty raw and rough recording.

K: But the performances are great. Andy [Colquhoun]'s such a great guitar player.

D: That was with Parnell, and for me, it's great playing with Ric because we've played together for such a long time, we just have a certain chemistry. It's always easy because we've been through it a billion times. It was great to go out...a good adventure. I'm always curious what THEY thought. I know what I thought; I wonder what they thought.

K: You made that live album ["LLMF"] with Wayne.

D: That was spring of '98, when Parnell had taken over. We had gone to Europe just before that and did some shows. Went to England, went to Greece, which was just amazing. Athens and Saloniki. Actually got an amazing response for that music over there. I've been to Europe so many times with so many people but I'd never been to Greece before. It's not a regular place on that tour loop. So you go there and think, "This is an amazing experience." We had two days off in Athens and our guide, a local archaeologist, took us up to the Acropolis. At the same time, when you go out to do shows, you're taking your chances. Like touring the States, you never know what the response is going to be, and sometimes you're really surprised.

K: I loved the way that band would take the Epitaph material and transform it, stretch it out, make it new.

D: I was saying earlier how often I get hired to come in and change things. We're not just going out there COVERING material, we're not just going out there and trying to play like the way it was on the CD. A band becomes its own organism, its own entity, and it takes on a life of itself without you trying to direct and make anything happen. The music evolves and finds its own natural order. A natural thing emerges without imposing design on it.

So Wayne and I had already been out the year before, and we had developed things, and having Parnell come in, Ric and I had played together for so long that for me it was sort of like "When Worlds Collide." I was able to take two major partnerships that I had really developed and put them together. I was sort of in the fulcrum position where I had logged my time with Wayne and logged my time with Ric and all of a sudden this whole other kind of character came into the music, where it DID sound very different from "The Hard Stuff" or "Dangerous Madness" or "Citizen Wayne."

K: It's been disappointing to see how many of Wayne's fans seem to want to see him keep remaking "The Hard Stuff" and stay in that groove, and he's progressed so much farther than that now.

D: That was Wayne's initial step going, "Okay, I'm back in the game." Wayne had a tough life. He's had hard times, he's had big disappointments. The MC5 was a great experience but a big disappointment, sort of "the one that got away." He was big in the game, then he was out of the game. The hardest thing...it's really not even about winning, it's about staying in the game. And then between that a lot of other things, the loss of friends, I think he needed to pull back for awhile. He needed some distance. And for Wayne, "The Hard Stuff" was his act of going, "I'm going out again under my own name...not as a band project, not Gang War or Air Raid, but going back as Wayne Kramer." Now he's a developing artist with a real autonomous, very individualistic view, and his music has changed. He's not static; he's not living the same year over and over again. He's changing as the climate changes.

K: To me, one of the most interesting facets of his career is his development as a writer. On the first couple of Epitaph records, Mick Farren contributed a lot of lyrics, and on "Citizen Wayne," David Was contributed a lot of the music, but now on "Adult World," Wayne's written everything.

D: It helped him with the process of implementing and recording his ideas, and it's great having something to bounce off, but increasingly, Wayne is his own boy. He doesn't need other people to put words in his mouth. He's out on the campaign trail, putting his stuff out, and that's what you see more and more.

Wayne's an artist at the junction of a lot of different currents. When you listen to Wayne, he's not just a simple three-chord rock artist. He has rock and jazz and blues and things in his playing, but also UNUSUAL rock and UNUSUAL jazz and UNUSUAL blues. It's not just the typical fusion of stuff. From the rock side, you hear that he's really a pre-Hendrix guitar player. He was formed, really, out of Chuck Berry, and out of all the English bands like the Who and the Stones BEFORE Hendrix. He and the MC5 were breaking on the scene at the same time Hendrix was coming out. Not that Wayne wasn't influenced, but he was already formed in his aesthetic and he was already in the game.

K: I've heard comparisons made between "Kick Out the Jams" and "Are You Experienced?" in terms of what was happening with feedback and just pure sound from the guitars.

D: And a lot of those sounds actually came from another side...his jazz influences, out of Sonny Sharrock, Pharaoh Sanders, he's closer to a James "Blood" Ulmer than the typical jazz guitarist. The jazz influence on Wayne was really the free jazz of the sixties...the Albert Aylers, the Archie Shepps, the Pharaoh Sanders, Sun Ra and those people. And he also has this great blues root. He has that real hard-edged Albert Collins...

K: I hear a lot of Buddy Guy in his style.

D: Yeah! That dry, in-your-face, no-nonsense...

K: The drive and the chaos factor there.

D: He's very direct. Wayne's a very truthful artist. Very candid, very frank, very truthful, he's in your face and he speaks his mind. Those are the qualities I like best about him. And he's still growing! People have this idea, "Oh, he's an Epitaph artist," so there's a punk-rock association, but Wayne's biggest current influences are from hip-hop, the urban inner city music and that culture. Which makes sense...he grew up in Motown; his influences were James Jamerson and all the Motown hits.

K: That's something about R&B people; they don't listen to 30 year old music, they listen to what's on the street NOW.

D: He listens to what's on the street, and you get the impression that he's not just trying to emulate it and copy it. It's one of those things where it enters your language, not even language as words but maybe as an accent. If you live in Georgia for six months, you'll pick up that accent. You're saying the same thing, but there's a different spin on it. With Wayne, you can hear his playing...it has a real contemporary, post hip-hop kind of spin that's entering his dialect as a player.

K: He's also aware of people like Tom Waits.

D: Yeah. They're similar artists, in ways. I like them both because they're people who are in their own cultural space, where you have to take them on their own terms. Tom Waits is not a part of what's going on in the music scene. He's not a part of a trend, he's not a part of this movement. He's an artist that sits there in the middle of it and IN SPITE OF everything that's going on, he's doing what he's been developing for years and years. I think Wayne falls in the same category, too.

K: You can't really say he's a "proto-punk" or "post-punk" or whatever; the categories are kind of irrelevant to what he's doing.

D: It's fine for other people to say that; that's not what he says about himself. He's just trying to speak his mind and develop a body of work.

K: It kinda blew my mind seeing him plugging his Strat into that little Fender Deville amp. Straight through!

D: It's a nice bitey sound, and that's the part of Wayne that reminds me of Albert Collins or Buddy Guy. It's that stripped-down sound, not "What axe do you have? What new pedals do you have? What rack of gear? What sound processor do you have?" The contemporary sort of pop guitar player's obsession.

K: It's all about fingers on strings.

D: Not that effects aren't great, but it's great that he decided to strip back to where he's not even using a whammy bar. Just out there playing guitar with on, off and volume and that's enough for him to say what he wants to say.

K: Now that you're home from the tour, what's on your plate?

D: I'm back in town kind of plugging into a bunch of things I've been doing. My wife and partner Vida Vierra and I had to put our band on hold for a month, so we're out playing again. She has a CD out. We're kind of going, "What's the next project?" So we're booking things over the next couple of months.

With Wayne, we're going out again. There's talk about going to Europe, possibly October or November. There's talk about going back and doing at least a return to the East Coast before it gets cold. You do a month of shows and it's up and running and you don't want to let this just disperse; how do you keep this going, and how do you take it to the next thing?

With Mick Farren, we just finished another Deviants CD. In fact, we did the last recording sessions the week before I left with Wayne. It's the same lineup with Andy [Colquhoun] and Ric Parnell. A couple of different recording sessions, just going in and doing a lot of loosely structured-but-dense rock tracks with Mick's always-charming dialogue. Its tentative title is "Migrant Gunmen, or Psychosis, a Hangover, and an Adam Faith Song." (Latest title news is Dr Crow. See main Funtopia News page. RD). It's the same core band as "Barbarian Princes," but Jack Lancaster's on it, Johnette Napolitano from Concrete Blonde is doing some additional vocals on a couple of tracks, Michael Simmons did some additional vocals. Andy produced it and it's being put together now.

K: On the Japanese label?

D: I don't even know! I just go in and record these things. We don't talk a lot about business. We don't talk a lot about the music. It's really a chemistry project! You get together and you document what comes out, and put it in some kind of shape. - I-94 Bar magazine

The winner of the Czech national Contest Zlíntalent 96. In cooperation with the Eso Music Production agency she recorded her first album " .....do peřin". She was only 14. Presently she performs with one of the most famous Czech singers - Karel Gott. She is also performing as Ophelia in the stage musical Hamlet and has just been awarded the lead role in the musical Cinderella.

- ESO Music