Yeah, we did. That was my new band, American Heartbreak.

How did the show go? I got to see them too.

We're actually label mates with Crash Kelley and the Backyard Babies over at Liquor And Poker. We just did the San Francisco, Hollywood, Long Beach, and San Diego shows with them. Basically just the West coast California base and it was basically due to the label and we're actually friends with Backyard Babies and The Chelsea Smiles. It was a good little run for the band there.

I got to see all those guys. It's very cool to see people still pumping out that kind of music.

Oh, yeah. I don't know if there were any other bands on that out in the other territories that they did but for the four bands that we all played together, we all were all on the same page playing that full throttle, old school rock and roll. The shows actually did really well. All four of them were pretty well packed.

It was pretty packed in Dallas too. I saw them at the Gypsy Tea Room.

I haven't been there in years. Jetboy used to do really well in Dallas.

You guys need to come out.

Yeah, we just signed a deal two weeks ago with Liquor And Poker. We don't have an actual release date for the album but it's going to be early 2006 so right now we're just getting everything together. We've got to get the artwork and the marketing plan and the video and all that stuff. We're going to do that until the year ends and then get ready to have the album out and get on a tour. Tour as long as we can.

Have you guys already recorded the new record?

Yeah, the record's been done for a while actually. We did the record on our own. A good buddy of mine is a pretty well known producer so he gave me a good deal and we just worked really hard on ourselves with doing the pre-production and working on the songs. Once we finished the record, we had no management or anything. I found us a manager and right away the label jumped on us once we sent it to them. Everything just started to fall into place at the beginning of the year. We went over to Europe in January for two weeks doing a tour over there and then when we got back, we showcased for the label. The last five or six months, we've been in the legal thing with the label just getting the contract done. We just finished that about two weeks ago. Get on a roll and get everything going.

That's always fun.

Yeah, I can't wait to get everything else going. We got an old friend of mine, Robert Johnson, to do the artwork and the photography. He did all the old Guns N' Roses stuff and we're going to start seeing what kind of ideas we'll have. Once we pick a single, we'll see what we're going to do for a video.

Tell us a little about the new record.

I don't know if you're familiar with what we've done before with American Heartbreak but we really focused on doing a big rock record. We just wrote as many songs as we could and we just went through each one and just detailed down to the bass lines to the drums to the guitars, lyrics, everything, and just worked on it to make each song as catchy, as rocking, and as perfect as possible. We got down to 13 songs that are going to be on the record and it's just a non-stop rock and roll sing along anthem record. It's just loaded with great melodies and good guitar riffs and it's like Cheap Trick's Dream Police meets Back In Black. It's the best way for me to describe it with a little bit of Joan Jett's I Love Rock And Roll in there with the attitude.

That sounds cool. The last time I talked to you which was eons ago, you were cleaning out your closet and you were putting together Jetboy stuff. I was wondering if you'd done anything since we last talked eons ago. You had saved all of your stuff from the Jetboy days I remember you telling me.

Yeah, actually I did. I put out three releases with that Perris Records and did one release with Cleopatra Records. It was actually kind of chronological of when the stuff was recorded when I put it out. The first one was A Day In The Glamorous Life which was a demo that we did when Jetboy first signed to Elektra Records. That was a 17 or 18 song demo. Some songs that made the album but got reworked a little bit and then the other releases were demos from when we were doing the record and stuff like that from the first and second albums. Then a couple of tracks after we got dropped from MCA and everything was ending. Tom from Perris has helped me out a lot with doing stuff. He put out the first American Heartbreak EP that we did and that really launched us into the band getting on a roll right away. That was a few months after the band actually formed that we put that out. That was the whole thing. He said if I wanted to put out some Jetboy stuff, he'd put out the American Heartbreak as well. It started with that and then as of a couple of months ago, we did the Jetboy reunion. Kind of funny how things end up.

You went to the CD release party for Hollywood Rocks.

Yeah, that was amazing. Brian who is the owner of Cleopatra put out the Hollywood Rocks book and him and I keep in touch because we did the Jetboy thing and I know him from the old days. He comes to support American Heartbreak and when we played a show this last March at the Viper Room, he was there and he was telling me about the box set coming out and I had gotten him an alternate version of "Feel The Shake" for it and he just hit me up at the bar after buying a couple of drinks for the guys in the band. He said "what will it take for me to get you guys to be the featured act on the Hollywood Rocks box set release party?" I said "I don't know. We've always talked about it would be fun to do it but I really can't give you an answer." After I got home, I got a couple of emails from his partner Tim and then a few days later I got a phone call from both of them and they were just basically begging me "what will it take to make it happen?" I said I'd call Fern and Mick and I'll see what they say. Between those two guys and myself, we could pull it off even if Sammy and Ron can't do it. I called those guys and they called me back within five minutes and said book it. I went down to L.A. a week before the show and I saw fliers and posters everywhere and we're the big headliner act. We hadn't even rehearsed yet. When I got back, I called Fern and we had Mike and Paul from American Heartbreak on bass and drums because our old drummer from Jetboy doesn't play anymore. Sammy's now in the New York Dolls so he couldn't get away from that. We just started rehearsing and once Mick came to town which was four or five days before the show, everything just clicked. He flew in at 9 o'clock and at 10 o'clock we went into "Feel The Shake" for the first time in 14 years and it was perfect. By the time we did the show, we hit the stage and we fucking slaughtered everybody. It was amazing. It was just the highlight. The place was packed with probably 900 people and I can honestly say pretty much all of them were there to see us. We hadn't played in 14 years.

Did that make you a little bit nervous?

Nah, I was nervous at first until Mick came and started singing. Once that happened, the chemistry just clicked. It made me realize on the magic and the chemistry we have as players. Fern, Mick, and I pretty much started the band and are the core members. You could feel the energy in the room right away. I just knew and I said boy if we have this on stage, this show is going to be on fire. It was. We had Riki Rachtman from MTV and The Cathouse announce us. He's an old buddy of ours. We were seeing a lot of old faces at the show which got the energy level going and by the time we went into the first song, we just had them in the palm of our hands. It was mind blowing. It was everything. At the same time it was emotional, moving, and totally rocking. The whole thing. I think it was a full moon that night I heard.

That's what it was.

I believe it was to tell you the truth.

How did you guys get hit up to contribute a track to the box set?

Just being a part of that whole Hollywood scene. Funny enough, we're one of the only bands in that book and on that box set that is a band that's not actually from L.A. We actually moved to L.A. We're from San Francisco and we ended up moving there after we signed our first record deal in 1986. Most people don't realize it but we kind of got politically screwed up on the business end of the labels and all that but we were the beginning of the next generation of the whole glam movement. It was Poison, Jetboy, and Guns N' Roses. This was back in '83 or '84 when we all started doing gigs together. We all had deals by '85 or '86. Then that's what spun off the next wave which the wave that happened was Faster Pussycat, L.A. Guns, and bands like Warrant started popping up. All these kind of bands weren't around when we all started. Basically the whole box set thing came together because we were a part of that. What became worldly known as this whole what they call hair metal now which was never a term in the old days. I was hanging out with an old friend of mine, Rikki Rockett, a few weeks ago because he was in San Francisco. We were talking about all that. When we all first started playing together and doing shows in '84 or '85, it was glam rock. That's what we called it. Then later on the whole media put this stamp on it, hair metal, and we were like what's hair metal? We're not a metal band, we're a rock band. To this day I see a lot of stuff on VH-1 and our new stuff and it's inaccurate. It's just unbelievable how inaccurate a lot of it is. When you live through that stuff and then you see this stuff hit the media, they really have a lot of the facts wrong. It's kind of interesting.

That's because back then, guys looked good and they had hair. It was nice. It was the kind of hair you would want to run your fingers through and these days guys don't look so good and they don't have any hair.

Yeah, the rappers are the rock stars of today's world. There's whatever you call it, the emo and the rock and the pop punk stuff, there's very few of those bands that actually have an image. Most of them look like they're just a bunch of high school kids.

And some of them look like ex-convicts who just got off death row.

Yeah, there's that too. I think that's just the attraction that some of these kids in today's world think that it's cool to look like that or to look like this guy who was in prison. It's really not that cool to me. I don't see what's cool about that.

I like guys who have hair. I am a hair person.

Yeah, I'm me. I'm from the school of images and the image rock and the whole thing as well. In those days back then, it's the same thing. The bubble burst. The whole whatever you want to call it, the glam hair metal era of the '80s got so big that it became a parody of itself. The bubble burst and here comes Nirvana. It had to happen too because everything became so generic.

Not only that but during the '80s, people were having a whole lot of fun and partying and stuff. During the '90s, you had this whole other generation of people who were pissed off at the world for some reason that I don't know of and that's when you got the whole grunge serious movement thing going.

Yeah, it's interesting on how all that happens and works. Through all the grunge, when people were angry and pissed off, is when the country was actually from what most people believe doing well and politically people were happy. When the '80s rock came out, which was more fun at the time and actually more memorable and basically more fun, is when what most people feel in the political world they didn't agree with. The Reagan years. That's when music was great.

When things were more conservative. And now things are totally fucked up.

It's nutty.

It's funny how depending on what kind of political climate you have, when you look at the music...

Isn't it interesting? It's true. That's what is so funny with the whole Seattle scene and then it went into bands like Korn and all that stuff and they were singing songs about being angry at their dads. I sit there and go "what is this generation of people complaining about?" They've got it made with computers and cell phones. They've got their own cars and stuff. When I was that age, I didn't have any of that. I had to walk 20 blocks with a dime in my pocket just to make a phone call. It's kind of disgusting at the same time that people can complain about things when they have no idea on how well they've got it. The '80s to me, that whole rock era was really the last great rock and roll era of true genuine music minus a few bands that happened through the '90s. I'll give bands like Green Day credit and Rancid credit and all those kinds of bands because they were rock and roll basically. Stripped down, they were basically a rock and roll band. They kicked Seattle in the ass and I think they did a good job.

I did an interview with Lizzie Grey of Spiders And Snakes a while back and he was telling me some of the funny assed shit that happened to him when he was in L.A. back in the '80s. You guys moved to L.A. in the '80s so are there any funny memories you have of being down there at that time?

Yeah, I'm sure I can think of loads of stories if I think hard about it. Everything back in those days was just basically having a good time. Everybody was young in their late teens and early 20's and everything that was going on musically, you'd go to these clubs and it was sex, drugs, and rock and roll. It's really what it was and there's definitely a ton of funny stories. Most of them are pretty well known stories. I'm sure if I thought deep enough, some of the parties we had in our apartments and some of the people that used to work for us and the pranks that we pulled, I'm sure there are definitely some good ones in there.

The reason why I ask is what is L.A. like today? Is it anywhere near what it was like back then?

To a degree. When we did this Jetboy show, I have to say that the scene that night was like the '80s and you saw a lot of this new generation of kids today that are in their late teens and early 20's that have the big hair and are into all of those bands from that era plus a generation of new bands today that exist like The Darkness and bands like that. I guess for me it's a hard thing to ask because I lived through all that. It's very different but at the same time, L.A. is very much the same. It's still totally L.A. You go there and you go to the Rainbow and you're going to see somebody in there. You can go to a good show at the Roxy or now if you go to see that band Metal School, you're going to hear all the songs from that time from the Scorpions to Guns N' Roses to Poison to Motley Crue with this band covering it and the whole atmosphere is like the '80s. You go to other clubs and there's definitely the new generation of the rock and roll that is starting to brew in L.A. I think around the world at the same time. We go over to Europe a lot, American Heartbreak, and we've done four European tours and people thrive on that stuff over there. We did some shows in Italy and I couldn't believe the Jetboy fans that were there. They're just hungry for new rock and roll with countries like Sweden having the Backyard Babies and the Hellacopters and Hardcore Superstar and all that kind of stuff. There's definitely a jumpstart of rock and roll overseas. It's a matter of time for it to happen here. It just hasn't happened here yet. The Darkness to me was the closest that came to anything that was actually true rock and roll.

Over there, if they like a certain type of music then they will stick with that. Over here, everyone looks for the next trend.

Yeah, that's what is crazy about it here. Especially with Europe. You could fit all of those countries into America. The U.S. is just a much bigger of a nut to crack with music. It's so media driven. People now with all these reality shows. Everything has become such a fantasy life. Between all that stuff, there is no reality anymore. Three's Company was more of a reality then The Surreal Life.

All of these reality shows are so retarded. I don't understand what people get out of that. Is it that they don't have any imagination?

I don't know. You look in the paper to go see a movie. If there's one every month you want to see, you're lucky. Everything is a remake of something that was a classic 20 or 30 years ago.

Like The Dukes of Hazzard?

Yeah, movies like that. The only reason that people are going to go see the movie is because you have a generation of kids who are into Ashton Cooke or whatever his name is and Jessica Simpson. They want to go see her in short jeans or her daisy dukes. In years to come, that movie is not going to be a classic. The TV series will always be a classic.

Because I remember the original Dukes Of Hazzard.

Hell yeah, I watched that all the time as a kid. All those shows. I prefer watching those shows today than I do any new TV shows because to me, the magic and the chemistry of actors and the way these screen plays are written and the sitcoms are just not the same.

You build guitars.

Yeah, I've been doing that for a little while now. I have always been the crafty one who likes to work. In school I was always into wood shop and drawing and all that kind of art related stuff on top of the music. I've always worked on my own guitars. I had a couple of guitars that I was restoring that I found for pretty cheap and putting them back to the original form to sell them. I've had a business for selling rock and roll related collectibles on EBay since '98. Then I just got into these guitars and I built a couple of clones. They're basically knockoffs of Fender Telecasters from the '50s and '60s. I'll do occasional Stratocasters and stuff but I'm more into Fanatellies and stuff. There are a few people that are out there doing it and Fender started this line called the Relic Line. It's basically that I make them look like they've been played for 30 years and they're replicas from the '50s and '60s. They're all beat up and the metal is aged and all that stuff. Then I got really into it and I sold a couple of them. I thought if I get into this and put a little money into it, I could probably start a business and that's what I did. I'm still getting it going but I've sold 20 or so guitars and everybody is completely happy with it. My buying market is people in their 40's to 50's who grew up on that stuff and they have families and their love and pride and joy is to have a new guitar every seven months. So far it's going good. It's allowing me to make a living at something I can do out of my house and then if I need to go on tour and do what I do with the band which is my true passion, I can do it. It's pretty cool. I was working some crappy jobs for a while during the '90s and I always said to myself that I'm not going to stop doing music but I'm going to definitely stop working these shitty jobs. Right now I'm pretty lucky.

Isn't it kind of hard to go from being in a band to working a regular job?

Yeah, it's tough. I can relate to these TV shows of like the child stars and other bands. In my whole era with Jetboy, I really was one of the youngest ones in that scene whenever we were playing out. When we signed our deal I was 19 or 20 years old. I was right out of high school so for me I went right out of high school playing clubs for a year or two years if that and then signing a huge record and then going on the road and doing records in huge studios and touring with bands like Cheap Trick that I grew up on. By the time I turned 21, our first album was about to come out and by the time all that ended, I was 25 years old. A couple of the other guys in the band were a few years older than me but I was always the business driven one and I'm the one who did a lot of the phone calls and was the day to day person with our manager and all that kind of stuff. The visionary guy I guess that's called. It was a little difficult but luckily enough I didn't really get into drugs or anything like that. I knew the reality of it was I had to get a job and I kept playing music the whole time. I've never stopped being in a band since Jetboy. Mick and I and Fern did this metal band for a short while and then after that I started American Heartbreak and still doing it. Two weeks ago we just signed a pretty fat record deal and I look at it as I got a second chance doing it again.

When are you guys getting your asses out on the road?

It will definitely be next year so I would say probably March or April is what we're talking about the release date. That would be tour time as well. I would say April. Do a spring and summer tour through the winter. I want to push this record as hard as we can. My goal is to get on big tours and not have to tour around with too many club tours. We'll take stuff of course that comes our way but it would be nice to get on something right away with a credible band that is actually going to help us sell a lot of records and get things going.

Any other thoughts or comments?

It's looking good to see rock and roll come back. The good old fashioned rock and roll. What's great is a lot of people from the old days of the '80s rock still want to relive that it seems like.

It was fun.

Yeah, exactly. You can only take so many years of not having fun. I think right now a lot of people get to their 30's and start reliving what they were doing when they were 19 to 25 years old. They find themselves still listening and loving some of this music that they listened to then over what's coming out now. Our goal is to be part of bringing back rock and roll. What it was known for. I don't think it will ever be what it was before but there definitely could be a new generation of it that I know could be very big again.

I'm 38 and I'm still living. I haven't started reliving yet.

Right, I'm the same way. I'm living and I'm reliving. I'm doing it all in one.