Sure. My first musical thing is, I played in a group called Black Republicans back in the early 80's, an American Punk Rock group of Clifton, Ohio. Greg Dulli, who later formed the Afghan Whigs, was also in that band - I grew up and went to school with him. We played for a couple of years together and I took off from there, went to University, studied for a while, and got a couple of degrees... When I came back, I was doing Speed Metal stuff. I was really into Husker Düe when it came out - I saw them play in 1983 and 1984, towards the end. It totally changed my musical point of view. I was listening to, like teen pop music, things like Duran Duran, Japan, and all that kind of music, and then I saw Husker Düe and I was just blown away. And there were other acts I was into, like the Replacements... I just got heavily into that Minneapolis sound! I went from Husker Düe to Speed Metal, and well, I got caught up in a bunch of really crappy Speed Metal bands (laughing) ? I'm sure a lot of people did. I wanted a hard rock band for a long time, and started getting out of the Speed Metal thing, as I was really burnt out on it - it just didn't hold any interest for me anymore. Around 1993, I got into a band called Dock Ellis, and it was just straight forward, heavy rock n'roll, more blues-based than metal-based. I did that for a couple of years, and had a small deal with Capitol Records, around 1994-95. But by the time we hooked up with that, our heads were getting, like, really overblown... We were young, and just started hating each other, the story of many bands... So, before we could even cash in or get into that experience, the band was over, we couldn't stand each other. There's also this other story about us going to New York and meeting with the head of A&R for Capital, Patrick Clifford. On the way up, we came up with this joke, this concept about this three-record trilogy, about this character called the pink wizard. So we made all these songs in the car about the pink wizard! We got up there and our manager at the time was like, "Go and tell him about that", cause he cracked up when we told him. So we go into his office, and he's listening to our demo getting all cranked up, going: "Yeah this is fucking wicked, man, I love it !". We walked in and our singer said, "We got this concept,", and we started singing: "Pink wizaaaaard", stuff like that (laughs)... And he did not get it! He just sat there straight faced, and after about five minutes of going on about it, we all just kinda started chuckling out loud and brought the joke out, but he wasn't amused. It was like we played a trick on him. And from that moment, the Dock Ellis CD was never heard of again, it immediately went underground. I did get enough money out of that deal to go on and open a recording studio in Cincinnati. And I was like, "I am never gonna get out and do it again." I was just burnt out. I thought I was just gonna run a studio, open up a place where I could have locals come and do some recording and get it out . . . the story of every studio I know, a lot of clichés (laughs)... I ended up spending four and a half / five years just sessionning on stuff, a lot of R&B, and also a lot of Hip Hop : Something like sixty seconds sessions for fifty bucks, sitting around smoking and drinking with them... That was my experience all through the mid-nineties. Then I started getting a craving to put a project together. I just started thinking of all these Hard Rock songs, and writing Hard Rock songs again. I had done Hip Hop and R&B for so long, I thought I was done with that too - It put a really bad taste in my mouth for rap eventually (laughs), because I heard so much of it. And I have no idea where my music went from that experience. I was making the money, and they were sending my samples out, so a lot of my samples may be on a lot of stuff I don't even know about But towards the end of that experience, I had a few Hard Rock songs, and I thought : "I should call all my favourite Hard Rock performers", you know, basically some underground performers I liked a bunch. And so I called this cat from Lexington, named Dave Angstrom, who is in a band called Supafuzz, and I asked him : "Do you wanna come onboard for this project, and play guitar on it ?". Then I started thinking about singers I wanted to use for it, went through a bunch of different ideas, and finally just said : "Well, maybe I'll call John Garcia and see if he's into it." So I called him up, and he was way in, from moment one he was like: "Oh yeah, I'd love to play in Cincinnati and do this". So, with him on board, I had my old friend Steve Earle to play drums on it, as he quit the Afghan Whigs in 1993, and had been doing a lot of session work as well - that was the next piece. I was just gonna do a four-piece thing at that point, and I was just engineering this band from Cincinnati - I had a lot of young punk rock bands coming into the studio, they had a lot of energy. These kids were opening up for this band called Disengage from Cleveland, and they asked me to come and see them. And I was burnt out, by that time I just wanted to go home and crash, but they talked me into it. So I went up and watched their set, and I was getting ready to leave, but decided to stay for two songs of Disengage, just checking them out since the band I had been working with had told me about them... And fuck, dude, they came onstage, and they were great, they did a fantastic performance... I saw this kid, Mike Callahan, playing guitar for them, and I stayed around for the whole show. By the end of the show I was wasted drunk ! I went up to him and I said something like (acting drunk) : "...project... you play on it...". He must have thought I was just fucking whack ! (laughs) But surprisingly he got in contact with me, and he became the fifth member. We started that record back in 1998, we did a few demos for it, and I didn't know what I was gonna do with it at that point - I was still kinda jaded by the whole scene, and I didn't wanna go back into it. But I wanted to have these songs for my personal collection... I made five CDs or copies of that session, and sent one to Los Angeles to a friend out there, one to a guy in Indiana, one to a guy in New York... I think I had just made tapes for the guys who came in (laughs) ! And it was about two weeks later, I opened up my e mail, and had like thirty e mails from management companies and record labels wanted to know more about this project... I was like, "Goddamn, this is really awesome !" It sounded awesome, I knew it was great, but I just didn't know what I was gonna do with it. At that point, things just started exploding. I made contact with some of the record labels to see what they had to offer. There were a few majors in there, and I didn't wanna go back down that path again, because of the thing we did on Capitol with Dock Ellis: back then we ended up doing the record and it never came out, and that whole experience was like: "I did this great stuff and it's never gonna come out. I played their game, and it just didn't work out"... So I went through all these record labels, and everybody was talking about Man's Ruin Records. I thought it sounded great, so I went for that deal, but unfortunately, things worked out with John coming back into town, and getting signed to American Records with his band Unida, a deal he couldn't pass up, of course, even though the Hermano record was great... So he signed that deal, and it turned out that Hermano couldn't be released. American Records decided to put a clause on the contract saying we had to wait nine months after the release of the Unida record. And they heard the record and... I actually have no comment on what they thought. But they were just like : "No, we're not gonna let this compete with the new Unida record, and if you put it out now, you know "

What do I think? ...No comment... (laughs) No comment! I think that the Hermano record is great, you know, my whole opinion on it was: "OK, it doesn't come out until nine months post, it's a great record now, it was a great record then, it's gonna be a great record two years from now". I already got what I've got from it, I know it's a great record, I'm proud of it and I think it's awesome. People need to hear it, and people will hear it. It's just about being patient, and there was a lot of impatience in there, and... I have no comment, I'm stopping right there, because it wasn't a very good situation... I made a great record, and you guys just wanna sit down and hear it, but anyway... I finished that record, finished all the mixes in Cincinnati, and I felt like I was just completely done with that town... Then John Garcia lured me out here to Palm Springs with the romance of the desert... I came out and mastered the record out here, and intended only to be here for a couple of months, I was just gonna master the record there and then I was gonna move on. I didn't know where I was gonna go, but my first stop was gonna be Mexico: "I'm gonna go to Mexico, forget about music, get out there and find a nice Mexican woman, settle down and farm or something, just forget about all that shit". Then I started directing a program for children. It wasn't that I couldn't leave the children I was working with, it was that I was offered a huge raise to stay for the summer, cause the summers in the desert are "hefty." It's just so hot that there were people who offered me money to stay here and work for their kids. I had a few debts I needed to pay off anyway, and I didn't know about the summer... Everybody was saying: "It's gonna get hot here", but I didn't know HOW hot ! (laughs) I ended up staying until that summer, and other crazy things happened. I started writing music, in the insanity of the heat, and these new latin beats I was hearing, this new culture I was infused in, which is very Mexican and very latin... I was getting all these influences, and my life got really crazy again at that point, so I wrote this batch of songs, and I didn't know what I was gonna do with them at that point either ! I had all these acoustic songs written and I was doing jam sessions out here - which is also pretty common in the desert, as during the summer people will just go indoors with the air-conditioning, cause they can't go outside to play music. So I was doing some jamming with all those different people, Mario Lalli sometimes, Mike Riley quite a bit, Sean Landetta - the percussionist for the Orquesta - and also Alfredo Hernandez... We would just have spontaneous jam sessions, like : "Let's get together and let's play tonight". I wasn't approaching them with my music at that time; I had this batch of songs, but I was just kinda getting the feel for what it was like to play with Alfredo, and we were hooking up really well, bass and drums-wise, the percussion section was really hooking in... In October I finally decided to approach a few record labels, and basically said: " I wrote this new material, I can probably put together a pretty good band, and we can record it for you, and you can put it out !". I started getting hits after that, and eventually had eight different indie labels interested in helping out with the project. It was just a matter of, once again, weeding through the ones with the best deal, the ones that really could step up to the plate, and provide me with the finances. You tell them you got this project, that you got this material, and putting together a band is one thing, and they are all ready to talk. Then you say: "this is how much money I need to do this project, I did the Hermano record for this much money, I can probably bring this one in for a little bit less, cause everybody is in town. But this is what I need". And as soon as I put that figure out there, from the eight, that went down to three. And of those three only one really stayed interested in everything - I did some demos out of my pocket here, for the initial stuff, and I sent that out, and one really stayed interested in doing something with it... I had originally asked this guy named Harold Chichester - who plays in a band named Howlin' Maggie - to come out and sing on it. He was into it; I sent him material and he was writing stuff for it. But he also played in this project called "Twilight Singers", with Greg Dulli (Afghan Whigs), and Shawn Smith from Satchel / Brad. They had done the project about three years before, but it was just finally coming out, and they were gonna do a tour for it, and his time schedule just wasn't gonna fit in, to what I wanted him to do ! So he just bowed out very gracefully, just like: "There is no way I can do it". So that was in November when I was doing the initial demos, and I thought : " Oh damn, I don't have a singer, who am I gonna get ?". So by that time I thought I'd ask Dave Angstrom (Supafuzz) to sing on it. So I sent stuff to him, and he was way into it, he was gonna do it as well, but then things just messed up in his life as well... He was recording the new Supafuzz record in Atlanta, Georgia, and right in the middle of the session, the whole studio was engulfed in flames, and it took all their equipment out... His life was just chaos... So he bowed out very gracefully as well, and I completely understood... So right then, it was in January, and I no longer had a singer! I came home from work one day, and there I had an e mail from somebody from Meteorcity wanted to know how the project was doing, what was going on. I wrote them, "I don't know who I'm gonna have sing on it, but I've got some great material, and I've got some great demos". I sent them the demos, and the owner of Meteorcity, wrote me back saying: "The material sounds great, let me suggest a few singers, they're on our label, they might be interested in your music". He sent me a list of eight singers. I wrote to all of them, and they were all interested, and they sent me all their records, and I listened to all of them. I then heard Pete Stahl, and I knew nothing about him. I thought he was great from what he sent to me. I heard the Goatsnake stuff first, but I had been hearing that kind of music for a long time - I'd been hearing just the heavy distorted guitar, heavy-blues rock, things like that, for four years, heavily, and I was just really starting to get burnt on it. I heard that and I thought: "Well, his voice is really great, but I don't know if he's gonna want to sing on what I'm about, this time around". And then I flipped the tape over and I heard the Earthlings? and I knew that he was the one for Orquesta del Desierto. He's so versatile, he can do anything. I wrote back to him and I said : "You're the man, do you wanna be on the project ?", and that's where things really started. He said: "Yeah, the music sounds great, I wanna do it, I've got ideas already"... So I just called everybody I've been jamming with and doing demos with, and I said: "It's on, let's do it for real !". We came in here in April, opened up the session, and we've been running it until now, and it's almost finished [June 2001]. The whole vibe of the Orquesta Del Desierto is, I've been doing Hard Rock, and I've been hearing Hard Rock for so long, that I wanted to take those influences, and take those latin influences, and just play them all together, and get something that reminds me of that feeling I get when I look at those mountains out there. Cause that's how the music was written, in the insanity of the heat, and the sand, and I think that's what comes across from the music in all kinds of ways. If you know the desert, if you spent any lengthy amount of time in the desert, and then you hear this material, I think you will immediately connect them, because there is so much Hard Rock, and there is so much of the latin flavour as well. It's amazing how it has all come together, it's just weird... There's been some rocky and up and down times on this project, but it just all came together so nicely, because I think the energy of everybody was in tune. And I don't like to speak in terms of energy, "the spiritual new wave", but I just think our energy matched, and we all worked well together, so...

I would say it's rock, it's pop, it's salsa, it's flamenco, it's an infusion of something that I've never heard before. I think that's gonna be just ear candy to people. It's got a pop sensibility in the fact that the songs aren't like eight minute long opuses, but it also has a rock sensibility since it's not "cheesy pop". It also has influences of latin music, which gives it an entirely new flavour, with the horns, with the acoustic guitars, with all the percussion... I just think it's a fabulous thing... It's my project, can I say that ? (laughs) But I think it's a fabulous, fabulous thing that has come together. But it's just gonna be ear candy to people who were maybe expecting something to come from the desert: you hear these phrases, like "desert rock", or "stoner rock", and they might think that everything from the desert is gonna be slamming hard stuff, and I think that's what they're gonna be expecting ! They're gonna put that CD on, and at first it's gonna hit them, and a lot of those people who were waiting for something like Goatsnake, or the new Che, or Kyuss, are gonna be quite surprised ! And they might be turned off . . . some of them. They might, though, listen to it a second time and be like: "Wow, maybe I'll listen to this again". As far as every music I have ever played, this is the first time I played my music for young people, old people, thirty-something people, boys, girls, men and women, and they all like it. It's the most accessible thing I've ever done...

No, that's a great thing ! Everybody wants people to hear your music, everybody wants lots of people to hear your music ! And there's nothing I'd like to do more than to have lots of people buy that music, so I can make lots more music, and do what I wanna do with my life, which is : play music ! So, that's just the natural progression of things and what you hope for it...

Oh sure. I see a tour coming up, I see maybe another record down the road, but when you try to produce a project like this, and you try to pull people from other bands to give their time to do it, it becomes a production nightmare, in a lot of ways. You gotta have a lot of patience to produce a project like this. Just bringing a band and producing them as a band, that's so much easier, because they're already "there", as a group. But then when you try to produce a project like this, it's like : "Can you make it ? What nights is your band playing ? What is your rehearsal schedule ?" So, you try to pull something like this together, and it just becomes more of a headache, it's not easy. And it was the same thing with Hermano, putting that project together was the same thing. I walked away from that on the verge of tears, it was such a release to say : "Goddamn, after all this time, after all this hard work, this is what I've got and it sounds beautiful", and that's exactly what I'm gonna feel like when I walk away from this. And everybody's into it, everybody wants to play out live with it, we're talking about it...

We recorded all the rhythm tracks at once, but we overdubbed the vocals and the lead parts, and most of the percussion. Because I didn't want the drums to be all over the percussion, which aren't quite as loud, and all the little things that are in there, you wouldn't hear them cause they aren't as loud. I had made four-track recordings of everything, and I just passed all these tapes out, and then we all came in, and the whole band rehearsed a few times, just to have a great party, and to have a great jam. We came in, we played the songs, and in the moment we played those live, it was just like : "Damn, we're really onto something here". It really feels good, and it really sounds great live as well. And I think we all knew, since we started playing together after the first couple of rehearsals of the songs, we all thought : "Wow, this is really really nice, and it's really gonna sound great".

I wanna say that in a perfect world we would have the same musicians. I would have a hard time bringing somebody in that wasn't on the record anyway. I think everybody's contribution was critical and crucial to the sound and the way they play. If the opportunity arose, and it was such a great opportunity, such a fine trip, and somebody couldn't make it, I would imagine that they would say : "Hire somebody else on it, and go do the tour". But how could I do a show without Pete Stahl ? He's the main guy, he's the main voice in the band ! You can't… Maybe we can, maybe we could find somebody and like his voice too, but they wouldn't be singing from their heart...

Well, Hermano will tour, and Orquesta Del Desierto will tour too... But when I came out of Dock Ellis, I did two CDs myself, just under the moniker "Dandy". I sang on everything, and I had session musicians come in and play on most of it. I did those records, and I got really good feedback... But when I hear music, my own music, I just don't hear my voice. I'm a pretty decent singer, but I'm not the best singer, and I'm not the singer I wanna hear. I am not the singer I wanna be on stage with. So I put out those records, and I decided that wasn't the route to go, and I should put people on to do stuff. I like doing the project thing, I like working with different influences. Also, I never settled in one place long enough to really establish something like that. And I think that's part of the motivation or the aspects behind my writing style, cause when I go into a culture, I feel the culture, I feel the things happening around me, and my music becomes a reflection of that. And I think the next place I'll go I'll have another record... I just feel I'm going to the ocean next, so I'll be next to the ocean, I'll feel that presence on me...

Ah, I doubt I'll go that far (laughs). But you never know !...

Oh there are many... You know I played with Greg Dulli in the past, and he and I have tried to coincide on a number of projects in the sixteen or seventeen years since we last played together, but something always happens in the last minute for one of us, and we just can't play together. I think he is probably one of the most genius lyricists of our time, as far as the emotions that I like to hear rendered in a song. The guy can write unbelievable lyrics. And to have these lyrics with my music one day, that is something that I imagine.

I wrote all the music except for one song, which Mike Riley wrote the music for, and Pete Stahl wrote all the lyrics for everything. I initially wrote lyrics for everything, I had everything ready to go, but my whole concept as well was, if I'm gonna pull a singer in on this, I want him to sing this from his heart. And I don't wanna put something into his mouth. And he just wrote fantastic lyrics anyway...

Well, as a kid I started up playing bass. But about four years into playing bass I was dating a girl who had a sweet Alvarez acoustic, and I just started playing acoustic. And when we broke up I just traded her the stereo for the acoustic. So now I play both bass and acoustic, and then I picked up an electric guitar along the way, and I play a little bit of piano... Really, whatever I get my hands on !

Not at all ! I was one of those kids that would just put the headphones on and play along until I figured out what I was doing ! I bought a few books, played some scales, and from there it was all just hanging out with my cousin who was a drummer, and his friend who was a guitar player ; freaking out in the basement for about two or three hours on the same riff, then get in the car, drive to a park and chill, then come back and play more music, you know...

Oh, I was completely opened up by my experiences there... Our culture here is very young, I mean our European culture in the states, not our native American culture. Coming out of that European American culture, I never had a sense of what was truly old. And to go into the cultures in Europe, you could almost feel the ghosts, you can feel in the atmosphere that there is thousands of years of civilization, as opposed to our new civilization over here. I first came to Paris with all of these dreams of being a novelist, and I pursued that for quite a few years... I came over there with those aspirations. I think I was musically focused. I don't know how Europe opened me up musically, but culturally and dynamically as a person, just to be infused in that culture for a while was fabulous.

I think my musical taste is so eclectic and wide opened. I hate closing my mind on almost anything. I get tired of things, but I think in every genre of music there is something great, and there is something shitty. I love all kinds of music... I've been listening to Cream like crazy lately, but before that it was Sade - I've been a huge fan of hers for ever, I think she's fabulous, absolutely fabulous... But I would listen to anything and everything, and I think I draw influences from all of this.

The Hermano name came about because of the way the band came together and the way all these guys came into the same room after nobody in the project had ever met before, except for Steve Earle and I. We came in, and there was an instant friendship and an instant brotherhood. This sprung from that, and the name is just a natural progression. As far as Orquesta Del Desierto, well I first started thinking of this concept, "an orchestra for the desert", all of the sounds of the desert that I came through, horns, and percussion, and just everything that's on it ! I just wanted it to be a "big" thing, and it just seemed like an easy name... That one just seemed to fit well. Originally we had thought of calling it the "Desert Orchestra", just go with the English name. Then I thought, there are already the "Desert Sessions", there are other things it could be confused with, and this doesn't have anything to do with that. By then we were all calling it "the orchestra" anyway, and I was like : "Well, let's just call it the Spanish version, and go for that !".

I've got some new riffs, but I'm waiting to get to the next town, and get the next influences, and the next environment... I play almost every day, I don't write all the time, sometimes I end up playing the same riff for months ... Writing is something spontaneous, and you never know when it's coming. I'll just be playing, and then it happens, "damn, I like it", and then it becomes megalomania into that riff, I just continue to play it over and over and over, and then that riff would change, and I could add something to it, so it evolves into a song ...

Thinking about the future for both projects is really a difficult question to answer beyond the release dates for the records. Right now, the plan is for Orquesta to hit the shelves on mid-May. As far as touring plans go, Pete has been entirely caught up in touring for the last five or six months it seems. Mario has a new record which I'm sure will take every free minute he has. Mike works his ass off trying to keep up with his AV freelancing and the studio. Alfredo has already moved into his next project which has been going on up in Seattle for the last year or so. Landetta and Country Mark are the only two who probably have a few free hours to spare for even thinking about touring, but those two are always ready for some kind of trouble anyway! I did drop everyone a note a few weeks ago to inform them of the release date and that I would like to do a couple of shows to promote the record this summer, but I still have a few weeks before I need to start coordinating that idea if it is at all possible. And, of course, as you know, I'm trying to enjoy the simple life here in Florida for a while with my wife, Analisa, and my daughter, Carlie for as long as I can . . . or at least until the records are released and life gets crazy again.