Communiqué: A Quarterly Digital Journal

Vigilantes of Love
discography

To The Roof Of The Sky
May 16, 1998
independent/Meat Market Records

Slow Dark Train
June 3, 1997
Capricorn/Fingerprint

VOL
September 10, 1996
Warner Resound
compilation with 4 new songs

Blister Soul
May 23, 1995
Capricorn/Fingerprint

Welcome to Struggleville
May 16, 1994
Capricorn/Fingerprint

Killing Floor
1992
Fingerprint/Sky

Driving the Nails
1991
Core

Jugular
1990
independent/Fingerprint

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Bill Mallonee: The Communiqué Interview
by david sims1
photographs by ira lippke2

After nine years, eight albums, numerous rave reviews, countless miles on the road, frustration in the sales department, and a costly controversy over a misunderstood song, you might think Bill Mallonee would be low on inspiration. Not so. While he would certainly welcome increased visibility for his band, Vigilantes of Love, Mallonee's muse doesn't seem to be the skittish type. His songs are at their cutting best when written from the ragged edge of life on the road.

The latest album, To the Roof of the Sky, resonates with a hope just barely able to keep despair at bay. But what an exquisite hope. The parched, raw emotion that Mallonee delivers is almost too much to take in one sitting. He has an uncanny ability to take you with him right to the brink, and then he shows you that this vantage point may be the best from which to view grace. The record itself puts nothing between the listener and the band. It's the same edgy mix of Stones/Young/Dylan/Petty that VoL fans have come to expect, but this time with a warm dry intimacy that tempers the themes of coldness and alienation.

VoL's last album, Slow Dark Train, was banned from a major Christian retail chain last year because of "Love Cocoon," Bill's ode to the joys of married love that some felt went beyond the rules of decorum. It was a controversial song and a controversial move by the bookstore chain. Much ink was spilled last year discussing the merits of following Solomon's lead in The Song of Songs. Bill begins a wee-hours interview with Communiqué by putting a capper on the controversy.

Communiqué: I suggest we declare a moratorium on "Love Cocoon."

Mallonee: It's all been said. Everybody who has anything to say about it has said their peace, and anybody that had anything to defend on it has already said their peace...I'm happy with that.

Communiqué: It's all out there.

Mallonee: Yeah, it's all out there. I think people who are just coming to the record and discovering it might wonder about it...There is an interesting little footnote to it--we talked to the woman who did the [promotion on it]. She's an independent, and she works radio singles in the [Contemporary Christian Music] market. She worked on "Double Cure" and was responsible for its success, which was immense for us. She said, "Your label, Capricorn, came to us with "Love Cocoon," and I told them there's no way that I can work this single--it's not gonna work over here. They won't get it." And see, we had told Capricorn that already. We said that they weren't gonna get it--it's like spittin' in the fan. I could defend the song until the cows come home from a Christian perspective, but they won't get it. That's all that counts. Anyway, she said, "I know what I can sell and what I can't sell, but your radio guy at Capricorn really came down heavy on me. He started accusing us of conservatism and being censors and all this...." And I can hear it now--I can hear our Capricorn guy, who's just a real 'new agey' feel-good kind of guy doing that to her. But we never knew about it. I mean, the band never hears about that kind of stuff. We just knew that the single wasn't picking up. The funny thing is, the same family bookstore chain that banished it was already carrying Jugular, which has just as racy a song. But [Love Cocoon] just happened to be a record that was sent up as a single. If it hadn't been a single, it never would have gotten anyone's notice....

On the industry

Communiqué: So are you reveling in your independent status now?

Mallonee: No, more like just treading water, really hard. It takes a lot of work. My wife told me yesterday that we had gotten 20 orders [in the mail]. We got another ten today, and that means she's got to box them up. It's a lot of work. I wonder if there's gonna be a ceiling to it somewhere. We're definitely getting some inquiries from some distributors. We have a secular distributor who's checking it out called Red Eye Records up in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and they're fans of the band. I don't think they have any idea that there's any kind of Christian constituency with the band at all. But they said they had put out a little thing on their website, and all of a sudden they were getting hits all over the place, so that's good. I'm excited that we got some contacts from some big Christian labels in Nashville, but I just don't think that's the way we're going to go. I think at this point we're doing the right thing. I know the independent road is right for us.

It was almost the only thing left as a choice for us. We could either take our toys and go home and never play music again, or we could say, "Well, this is what we do." What's the most affirming thing we could have done at the moment? Well, I had this credit card sitting in my top drawer, and I thought, "You know, my wife and I think these cards are basically straight from hell, and we've never lived on them." But we did the math on it and thought, "If we sell 1,100 copies of this record--and we've got a 10,000 person mailing list--then we win--I mean, it's paid for." So we thought, "Let's put the record on this credit card. We'll pay it down in a year." And that's what we did. Our budget was $10,000, and we made the record. And that was it"that was the most affirming thing we did. It may not pass with Larry Burkett, but it worked for us [laughter].

We've never sold more than 20,000 albums at a time--that was the CCM album (the VoL compilation). The other ones hovered between 14,000 and 17,000. We were explaining that to a guy at Geffen Records, because he was interested in the band. He said, "You know, my job is to take your stuff to the head honchos and demonstrate that it can be at least a gold record." I said, "Well, with all due respect, do you think that if you made a record for a band, and the label gave you no support, and you were just three guys and a cargo van out there doing the best you could do"do you think that 15,000 to 18,000 copies is a big number or a little number?" He said, "Oh, that's a huge number!" And I said, "Well, that's the reality check, and if you can communicate that to your folks, then you could put another zero on that number." We kind of have to do the Loretta Lynn thing, where you're just basically dealing records out of the back of your car, walking into radio stations, saying: "Play mah reccerd."

[The CCM business] is so ad-driven now. You've basically got three components in CCM: pop culture, religion and commerce. And they're all slammed in the same mold. It's a pretty weird looking animal, and you can't tell which one is taking precedence. To a certain extent, it's about taking the faith, the precious Gospel, and trivializing it and then commercializing it and selling it to a particular group of people, which turn out to be 13- to 18-year-olds. Just stop and think about it. With that many cuts out of the pie of integrity, how much could possibly be left?

Communiqué: Does your experience in the industry inform the new songs?

Mallonee: I think we have a very private view of grace. One man's life. Or better, one band's life. That's it in a nutshell. Nothing big and nothing little...I don't know if you've read the liner notes inside [To the Roof of the Sky], but that is a really important part of the record to me, because it talks about how we got to the point where it felt right to make the record and what it was about. The record thematically is about when all those superstructures are revealed to be just illusions, and they're kicked away, what are you left with? The last piece on the record--"God Shows His Face Farther Up the Road"--we could sing that song every night and all of us in that band know what that's about. You know, it's kind of a rallying cry for us.

Communiqué: It sounds like a bookend to "Where my Seed Might Find Purchase."

Mallonee: Yeah, we need to record that one eventually; in fact, that was one of the songs that we considered recording.

On life with the band

Communiqué: I wanted to ask you about the recording environment. What's conducive to recording a VoL album?

Mallonee: We play in this old converted warehouse out in Watkinsville, Georgia, which is about eight miles out of town. The only problem is, there are no restaurants in the area [laughter].... It's hard to find good food, so we have to go back to Athens to eat. We were getting some cool sounds, just from a technical standpoint. We tried to do the '40s and '50s version--you know, Gretsch guitars, hollow bodies through small amps just cranked--a very Neil Young kind of sound. We used a lot of tube mics and tube preamps. We used an old Coles ribbon mic that's probably from the late '40s to do "Farther up the Road" and "This Time Isn't One Of Them." We recorded [them] live. We just set the mic up and played.

Kenny Hutson's been a godsend. He's 22 years old. His dad was a bluegrass picker--played with Bill Monroe and the Bluegrass Boys--so he's got some heritage there. His dad would bring him to these bluegrass circles when he was just 8 or 9 years old with a guitar and a mandolin. They would play in a circle--there would be eight guys or women playing for hours, with people cycling in and out. If you were new at it, or if you were young, you'd sit on the outside of the circle, and eventually they'd let you in to take a solo. That's how he learned to play. He loves Keith Richards and straight-out rock and roll too. He's great, because I've always wanted the band to have a traditional element. It's just hard to find people who can do it all. You can find a guy who plays mandolin or a guy who pays fiddle, but it's hard to find a guy who plays peddle steel, lap steel, guitar, mandolin and dobro. That's just immense.

And there's a cool little story about the way that we got Kenny. He had been a fan of the band since he was 17. He came up to me in downtown Athens literally three days before we were supposed to hit the road to do Cornerstone and go to Europe, and he said, "You need me to be in your band. I know you're looking for somebody, and I'm your guy." He was really bold about the whole thing, and I was like, "Okay, give me your number and I'll call you." He pretty much forced his way into the audition. I don't know if you're familiar with the song "Undertow." It's got a blazing rock and roll solo. We did five songs and said, "This is great, when can you leave?" and he said, "No, the audition isn't over. We're going to play 'Undertow.'" He played it note for note. Drop dead perfect. And I thought, "Well, that was too much." So, he's a gift. And we needed that--we needed that fourth component for three years. Yeah, he's great.

Communiqué: Is it hard to capture the band's intensity in the studio?

Mallonee: It's not in this place, because we've been here so many times. It's like, "Let's just get up and go." And it was a good time for us, too.... We had just come off the road, and every wing and a prayer had been shot down, and we thought, "Well, we're gonna make a record!" And that's kind of where it went.... We did the record in two weeks, and then we did another week's worth of mixdowns. It was cool, because one of the engineers that worked on the record had worked with John Hiatt, who is a really great singer/songwriter. So we had his expertise, and we just kind of trusted our gut on how this thing should sound.

I think the record has some deficits, though I think that one of those is a money thing. There should have been more background vocals. Kenny sings a lot more live. On the tracks, we had three or four songs in which he should have sung backup, but we just didn't have the time or money to put him in there. When it came down to making choices about what to add and what to leave out, [background vocals] just had to go.

Communiqué: Do you consciously try to make the recording process as transparent as possible?

Mallonee: I don't know--that's a good question. Kenny and I have got a bunch of songs that are much more introspective. I would love to make a record that's just Kenny and me, and there are people that want to hear that. A lot of people's first exposure to VoL was Killing Floor, so they see the band as being a hyped-up acoustic thing--you know, a thinking person's acoustic rock. It's that, but it's not just that.

On writing

Communiqué: There's a tendency to put a lot of reflective content in your writing, but there's also an intuitive spontaneity to it. The frame of reference is clear, but it's also organic. It's not self-consciously literate.

Mallonee: For me, that's very much a Neil Young influence. I think he writes some of the most gripping, profound songs, but he's still playing songs like "Out of the Blue and Into the Black," which is clearly a song about the record industry. It's got some incredible lines. Even "Rockin' in the Free World"--I mean that's a brutally honest song, but you can take it on so many levels; it's a very satisfying three-minute song to listen to. But I think it's just totally organic for him. He's a great rocker, and he can turn around and remake "Harvest" with a bunch of Nashville musicians. He has a real tender side. He's a hero.

Communiqué: Can you talk about some of the other writers that have influenced you? I hear a bit of Flannery O'Connor. Obviously, you can't build a narrative the way she did in a four-minute rock tune, but the mood is similar. Is there a Georgia connection there?

Mallonee: It's much less with Flannery. REM locked into that pretty early on. Other artists out there, like Vic Chestnutt, have really captured that Southern vibe; our old mandolin player said that Michael Stipe was a "Kudzu Mystic." I started thinking about it, and you know he didn't even sing any lyrics on the first two REM records. It's just all mumbling and sounds and stuff. But I think that there is some kind of vibe there that people connected with. I'm not even sure quite what it was. I'd like to think that with REM's case it was sort of joie-de-vivre.

Communiqué: What is it about that atmosphere?

Mallonee: To borrow a Flannery O'Connor phrase, the South is a "Christ-haunted place." You see this even in artists who aren't professing Christians--they know something of the church, and they have something of a churchy background. She's right in some sense--people still tend to think in terms of a God who is there, who will call into account, even if they're living lives that are totally in spiritual declension. It's not uncommon to find guys that are playing in ... rock-and-roll bands and drinking like fish every night and yet they were raised in a Southern Baptist, legalistic framework. They can quote you the Gospel all day long. And that's kind of intriguing. Hopefully, they come to reckon with that at some point. That's a dangerous thing, I think, when you've got some kind of knowledge of God, and all of a sudden you're running the other direction. I think there's a danger of suppressing the light to the point where it's withdrawn completely.

For me, as far as the writers, I think Flannery a little bit less, much more Frederick Buechner. He's probably the biggest influence. He's one of these guys who allows for the possibility of miracles and supernatural intervention, but I think for the most part his feeling is that we're sort of plodding along with our feet pretty muddy, and we're trying to find out where God is showing His face. And I don't think he draws a really clean distinction between the between special grace and common grace. I think he sees the whole thing as kind of a tapestry of God reaching out. I don't think he's an universalist, although sometimes he walks up to that door and knocks on it a little bit. But he's really motivated me a lot. "When God seems like he's absent, how do you know He's there?"--he's not afraid to ask that question. "And then if He's there, what does it look like?"

Communiqué: He seems to be describing what he sees and just keeping one eye out for when those points of discovery might happen....

Mallonee: He told an interesting story one time--it's in that novel called "Telling Stories" in which he talks a lot about his dad's suicide. I think that his dad committed suicide when he was about nine years old. The book deals with this gap of not knowing who his father was. He remembers the day when he and his brother were watching Saturday morning cartoons. His dad came down, gave him a hug, said goodbye, went down and closed the door to the carport, turned the engine on, and sat in the carport and died of carbon monoxide inhalation. Six months later they moved out of the frozen northeast to the Bahamas. And he said about three months after that, it was as if his dad never existed, because of the great change geographically and the fact that his mom never talked about it. He deals with just that sort of void.

Communiqué: What kind of freedom do you think an artist needs to have to be able to find those moments?

Mallonee: Well, I don't think it hurts to have solitude--I think that's a hard commodity.

Communiqué: I'm thinking of the expectations that Christians tend to have for artists in terms of specific content, specific message, or accessibility....

Mallonee: I think you need to forget who your audience is. I know that sounds selfish, but you can only talk about what grace looks like in your life. You can only talk about the amount of the story that's your story to tell--and no more. I mean, I can write a song and make somebody think I'm a truck driver, but it wouldn't be really believable.

Communiqué: What role does your community play in that dynamic?

Mallonee: For me, with a small house church--it's a small PCA church--they take it at face value that I do what I do. They'll offer comments about what they like, but this church I'm in is so driven by people nurturing their craft and their art, there's no friction there whatsoever....

Communiqué: Do you think it would be possible to do it without that core community?

Mallonee: I think community is bigger than just art. I think people holding each other accountable and loving one another and hoping the best for one another exceeds the bounds of art. Hopefully good art will be a reflection of the experiences that come out of a community in which people are working for one another, loving one another, and learning how to nurture one another. Hopefully those things will show up in the songs at some point. As far as community goes, this is the first band I've been in where being on the road can be nurturing"we all read scripture daily together, we work out, we pray for each other, we discuss books. We've never had that before, so that's a good thing. It's not forced; it just feels pretty normal. And I'm grateful for that--that's a huge gift.

Communiqué: ...And on the road, with the band?

Mallonee: Ah well, the safety net gets pretty thin out there. When the van breaks down, it's your problem--nobody's gonna send you any money. We don't have any guitar techs, and we don't have a road manager or anything like that. You just learn how to do it, be each other's best friend, and go into it realizing that nerves are going to get pretty frayed, some incident is going to come. You've got to figure out how to be each other's buddy as opposed to each other's enemy. I've seen bands split over the smallest issues. The road"you just come to learn to love it. I'm proud of these guys--I feel like we can just roll it up to stage in about 30 minutes and really rock hard and really say something that's spiritually clear and important.

But [writing, performing] is one of those things where you have to not think about who the audience is. For me, I sing the songs to myself every night and that's really as far as it goes. I sing with my eyes closed. I didn't know this until about a year ago, when I started looking at video footage. I don't open my eyes very much when I sing, because I'm singing to myself. If it resonates with other people, that's fine. But if not, I'm still happy with it. It's hard for me to get up and sing a song like "America" from the first record. It's extremely biographical--it's about my dad. That song will move me to tears if I get it on the wrong night and I'm sleep-deprived. I can't always pick out the variable that will cause that reaction. I don't do that song very often live, because it's just too close to home.

Communiqué: An audience may not be used to a pop artist being that close to the tune. It's more comfortable to view artists as ministers or geniuses or whatever.

Mallonee: I think the whole thing should be de-mystified. I'm lucky"I dealt with cyclical depression when I was a kid. I had this strange notion that I had committed the unpardonable sin, and I spent 10 years digging out of that, going to counselors and everything. Finally, a very wise pastor said, "I'm gonna do a little game here with you. I'm gonna tell you that you're going to hell if you think of a pink elephant." And I said, "I get the joke--I know exactly what you're talking about." And he said, "You haven't committed the unpardonable sin or you wouldn't be sitting in this place." That was 10 years after it had happened, and it was flipping me out. I was getting through college and I kept it quiet; I could function, but it was paralyzing me. I thought, "Well, that's it--I could take my life, because it doesn't matter. If I've committed the unpardonable sin, it doesn't matter if I live 99 years or nine seconds." It's weird how when you get into that mindset all of a sudden it starts making perfect sense. I mention that story just because it scarred me so much. But as I got married, had kids, tried to be a responsible father, a responsible husband, and had the nurture of community, all of a sudden, at 30 years old, I picked up a guitar and started playing music, and these songs just came like crazy. I wrote a hundred songs the first year I ever had a guitar. They weren't all great, but it was like this dam just opened up and they got better and better, so that by the time we got though the first recordings of Jugular and Driving The Nails, I felt like I found my voice, so to speak.

A lot of it came out of that horrifying experience of thinking what it's like potentially to not have God there, or to know that he's there and that he's extremely angry with you. I think non-Christians have that same feeling, they just don't have the vocabulary to describe it. They're dead in trespass and sin, and every point along the way they're engaged in denial of His deity and power. That's what the book of Romans is about. They're working emotional overtime to keep Him at arm's. The Christian has the luxury of being able to tell you what that looks like; we can describe it. Non-Christians experience the same thing. I consciously try to keep the way I write on a non-buzzword plane so that we can connect with a group of people that won't darken the door of a church. We have lots of conversations after shows with grizzled old-sound guys who've been doing this for 25 years [old red neck voice]: "What's all dis Bible stuff in yer songs?" We get a chance to one-on-one 'em, and that's good...

Communiqué: It seems better to wait and earn those moments than to awkwardly foist it on the audience.

Mallonee: I remember a quote from Kerry Livgren--the guy from Kansas who shifted over to the contemporary Christian thing--he said as soon as he realized he had to stand up on stage in front of a microphone and be a minister, he realized real quick he was a much better musician than a minister. He just didn't have the gift for being a preacher. You can say nice spiritual things and nice little pious things, but that's not the same thing as ministering the word of God.

I've witnessed a strange thing at youth events. The kids see it coming"when the bands kind of dinker around getting in tune and the singer usually comes up front and starts the monologue--these kids just get a glazed look on their face, because they have heard it all. There's nothing new, nothing challenging. There are no D. Martin Lloyd Joneses up there, no D.L. Moodys; that's not what's coming off that stage. What's coming off that stage is somehow trivialized. (Not that it's not true.) If I were a kid who was a non-Christian and was brought to something like that, I would have felt set up. I would have felt like you played me dishonest.

Communiqué: If I remember correctly, some of the members of your band had that reaction too when they were confronted with Cornerstone Fest for the first time.

Mallonee: Absolutely.

Communiqué: Can you remove yourself from the difficulty that VoL has had in the last three or four years and still have the quality of content?

Mallonee: That's a good question. I don't know. I tend to think maybe not. Dealing with adversity or suffering in a way that's mature and godly is a great component in songs. I really relate to that in artists' work. Someone mentioned that the other day. They wrote me privately and said, "For all your dissatisfaction with the hand that's been dealt you, I know you're not bitter about it. But think about it this way--you would have never been able to write the last two records if it weren't for all those superficial superstructures."

It's interesting that in the last year of modern rock, it seems like most of the people who have anything to say are women. I mean, even though I don't agree with the worldview of Paula Cole or Sarah McLaughlin or Shawn Colvin, or Tori Amos--let's go to the extreme--they're still people saying stuff about trust and loyalty and relationships--what's lasting, what's significant. They're dealing with spiritual themes in their music. Mostly women. Thank goodness they finally got a voice last year.

Communiqué: You've said in the past that you write well on the road, but you also need your solitude. How does that work on the road with a band?

Mallonee: I keep a journal. Sometimes it's solitude with the CD player blaring. If the guy in the front seat is talking, I just climb in the back seat and start writing. I can tune it out. Actually, this afternoon was really nice because we came in and did this conference, the short seminar, then I had two hours to myself, which was blessed. It's a little hard on the road, but it's always harder at home, because as I get home I'm flippin, into full-time dad and husband, so there's no solitude. I never get any reading done at home [laughs]. My wife has her list of things to get done, like the gutters that need to be cleaned, the yard mowed--by the way, the washer's not working--stuff like that [laughs]..."Hop on that," you know.

On inspiration

Communiqué: What direction is VoL's sound going these days?

Mallonee: We're going to try to do an acoustic record, maybe just set up with an ADAT and do it in my living room--a more quiet thing that we could do really quick. Now we've got the freedom to do anything we want again. I'm writing 50 or 60 songs a year. I used to go into panic attacks when it was time to make a record. I knew they were only going to put 14 or 15 songs on it. Well, I've got 60 songs, how do you edit that down? But I've never met an artist who didn't say "Oh yeah, if you like that song, you'll love my new stuff." It's the thing you wrote yesterday that you're most emotionally attached to. And that's just the myopic kind of thing with a writer. With Slow Dark Train, we ended up recording 20 or 21 songs, but I couldn't edit them down because I loved them all. The record was almost at the point of becoming a double album--we just didn't have enough time.

Communiqué: What do you listen to for inspiration?

Mallonee: In terms of the modern stuff, musically, a lot of the No Depression bands like Son Volt and Wilco, and they're taking their cues from stuff that was recorded in the '30s and '40s. And I listen to artists like Robert Johnson, and technically everything about the guy is wrong. To this day musicologists cannot figure out the cadences that he used on guitar, because it sounds so strange. It doesn't appear to be able to be tablatured. You can't reproduce it. It seems to be something completely unique. He has this way of "hiccupping" through things and shortening measures. Like he doesn't drop in on the three beat--he may drop it halfway through the three or something. It's just very strange. And you know what? It's not a mistake, because he does it every time. I think it's genius. That's what floats my boat. I'd only hope that VoL could aspire to something like that.

Communiqué: It seems you've adopted quite the dogged "the show must go on" stance...

Mallonee: I told my wife the other day that in some ways, I don't feel like the ride's even started yet. It feels like every record is an abortive attempt with all these high hopes every time. We start out of the blocks and then stumble. It's never been the band's fault. It was the industry, or the superstructure, or just not knowing what to do with it. I can't emphasize this enough: it's an extremely money-driven industry. I know for a fact that when the Wallflowers records start to slip off the charts, they just go hire some budding, young cinematographer for $250,000 and make another beautiful video, so the record jumps back up on the charts a little bit more. That's the way it works. And guess what? The band is recouping all of that.

I've heard it said that you have to have your label spend a lot of money on the record on the front-end so they have to spend on the back-end to make the record successful. Well, boy, that doesn't sound like Biblical stewardship. It just seems like [you should] make a good record for cheap, do the best that you can, get out there on the road, and put it in front of people. That's just blue-collar ethics. That's why I told the guys who are all on board with us that whether there are two people or 20, let's play like there are 20,000--play like it's the last show we're gonna play. Because Lord knows when we climb up on stage after eight hours of driving and three hours of sleep, there are gonna be some problems.

I think we could make it out of the bar circuit and the club circuit. The problem for us right is the reputation of the band. Our lawyer went to CMJ [College Music Journal] last year, and he said, "Everybody in the industry seems to know who you guys are, and generally what comes out is, 'Great songs, great songwriting--when's Capricorn gonna do anything with them?' or 'Why can't they sell records?'" That last statement--"Why can't they sell records?"--once it's on you, you cannot get it off. It's all they hear. If the industry is always about finding the Next Big Thing, well, they're not going to look at us.

Communiqué: "Critics Darling" can become the kiss of death...

Mallonee: Exactly. We thought about changing the name of the band for that very reason. The only reason that we didn't was because, as far as the chain stores go, we've got a name in the computer banks.

Communiqué: Are you planning on taking the Dave Matthews/Edwin McCain route?

Mallonee: Sell them to fans, letting them be the distributors. Right now that's working for us.

Communiqué: In a coarse sense, you're actually making a move toward stewardship...

Mallonee: We're definitely trying to do it the right way and trying to give fans something that we feel is quality--to reward them. Some of these people have been with us a long, long time, since '92. We're really proud, because a lot of bands are here today and gone tomorrow, and we've got eight albums out. That's nothing to be ashamed of. Seven of those are national releases. As far as longevity goes, one of the guys in the band said, "Yeah, the philosophy of the band is like a demolition derby thing: it's never the best looking car, it's just the one that finishes the race."

1. with gracious editing assistance by Karen Knott.

2. Interview photos (June 1998) TCU campus, Ft. Worth, TX
Concert Photos (June 1998) Whisky A Go-Go Club, Hollywood CA
©1998 Ira Lippke. Used by Permission.