Third Gear Scratch

WARNING! All ye who put your ears toward this episode should know that it is the final installment of Third Gear Scratch, which appropriately features one of my closest friends and bandmates, Mr Chris Metcalf of our band, The Life and Times. But before that Chris had done much wood-shedding with crazy great bands like Stella Link , SImple Lines and Lafayette. The latter one here Lafayette has in f...

Blake Smith and his rock band Figdish from the 90's Chicago scene has never taken things too seriously; never been careerists, and in fact went out of their way to indulge in hijinx and sabotage, despite ending up with 2 hugely influential records and a solid major label record deal. This was the band that came of age with  Varuca Salt, Local H and Smoking Popes with comparisons to Replacements an...

The service industry has always been in actor Vasily Deris ' blood, seeing as how his family owned a group of restaurants in Crown Point IN just south of Chicago. He had been working 12 hours a day in multiple restaurants each for more than a decade but his true calling is on the stage; any and all stages. Since deciding to refocus his existence into the lights he's taken his powerful singing and...

Going back to school to study World Religions just seemed like the right thing to do for Chris Simpson , the hugely talented solo artist operating under Mountain Time and formerly of the bands Mineral and later The Gloria Record . Minerals influence and impact from the late 90's cannot be overstated from their albums the Power of Failing and then EndSerenading , before getting signed to Interscope...

Gerald Dowd is the rare working musician who is actually making his living directly from his drumming gigs with an extremely wide range of musicians, from Eddie Vedder to Mavis Staples to Robbie Fulks to Neko Case to Justin Roberts , not to mention fantastic players that you may not have heard or be aware of. In addition, he's a songwriter of the first order playing a brand of country music that t...

After 13 years of teaching percussion as an adjunct faculty member at a nearby college in upstate New York, Blake Fleming was unceremoniously let go, common with many colleges and shrinking enrollment that is plaguing the academic world. But the loss of this relatively low-paying gig was a blessing of sorts for Blake, a ground breaking drummer who entered the collective conscious with his avant pu...

When the highly respected label The Numero Group approached Brandon Butler , the voice and heart of KC heart throbs Boy's Life , about doing a retrospective of his influential band, his initial thought might've been there's not enough material to reissue, considering they only released 2 full lenths in their short tenure. What he hadn't considered was they were purchasing their entire catalog of 7...

In September of 2020, deep into a pandemic that seemingly had no end in sight, Life and Times bassist Eric Abert made a big decision to move from the place he'd called home for most of a decade, Chicago , and to move back to Collinsville IL outside of St Louis . It wasn't for nothing; in fact it was for a lot of reasons. He and his new bride wanted stability, a house, a solid job, and a child in a...

Guitarist Coley Dennis is the heartbeat of his band Maserati since their inception in very early 00's and continues to be that even when they have to play live and tour without him. It would appear almost like a franchise to the uninitiated until you realize how connected this band is and has been over the years, slowly growing their Athens/ATL fanbase internationally and in the states. Now the sh...

In 2021, in full pandemic tilt, Timothy Showalter aka Strand Of Oaks , released a brilliant  record in the vein of much of his stratospheric catalog called In Heaven (Dead Oceans) but decided not to tour on it, because that's what you didn't do during those heavy days; tour. Instead, he shut it all down. Stopped strumming and humming and stopped checking his emails and all other things that create...

As the frontman, face and heartbeat of his band My Epic , singer/guitarist Aaron Stone started his rock band long before he ever imagined having and wife and now 4 year old child and would never have believed his band would still be making music. in fact they're making music on a killer label, Tooth and Nail Records , with their newest LP Loriella due on June 27th. 2024.  But even as he's grown ol...

U of I in Champaign / Urbana in the 90's was typical of many satelite college towns to big cities with a happening urban center, dive bars and house parties for the indie scene to procreate within. Drummer Steve Lamos ' band American Football was one of the bands within that scene that made a record for Polyvinyl Records , played a few shows then broke up -- except the lore and legend of that spec...

Somewhere in the late 00's, drummer Chris Enriquez felt the familiar and invetible societal pull of many artists to finally "get a real job" after over a decade with his bands On The Might Of Princes , Long Island hardcore/emo heros, and Gracer after Princes disbanded. He left it behind and began working as a brand rep for  PBR at a time when that brand was making a major push to become indie-rock...

There was a point maybe 10 years ago give or take, in which bandleader, frontman, guitarist, singer songwriter, podcaster and outsized personality Conan Neutron had a reckoning or awakening of sorts in regards to his bands and the dynamic within, which had taken a not-good turn. The Conan Neutron of today reflects on those regrets and missed opportunities and how he turned that into his successful...

Deep into the pandemic, drummer AC Paterra and his musical partner in Zombi , bassist-keyboardist Steve Moore also went deep; deep into the sounds and songs that created who they have become today as a pillar of Relapse Records , a label often associated with noisy artists. However the songs that moved AC and Steve over these covid days were the yachti-rock based sounds of Gerry Rafferty, Paul Dav...

Putting a band together for a younger Tristan Shone 20 years ago was not as easy as he thought it might be, so he used his knowledge of mechanical engineering and sense of tenacious autonomy to create his own instruments that would allow him to make live music on his own; Music without the use of traditional instruments like guitars and drums and backingtracks a single musician might use to fill o...

Singer/songwriter/frontman Tim Kasher has been such a prolic maker of music over the past 25+ years with his bands Cursive and The Good Life and his solo records as his vehicles and conduits of creativity, so busy in fact that he has released a new album almost every year since 2000. Tim traveled from Los Angles to Chicago on Wednesday January 31st 2024 to spill about all of the "hows, why's and w...

Multi-instrumentalist/producer/mixer Jordan Zadorozny created his one man band Blinker the Star in the mid 90's and made a huge splash with his 2nd album August Everywhere with Ken Andrews (Failure) behind the mixer. 28 years and 12 full length albums later JZ has released Animal Math (self-released), a highly enjoyable, forward-leaning and ambitious record that has hints of  Jeff Lynne, Rush and...

Artist and musician Jay Ryan remembers the moment that he began to create the animal-based characters that inhabit his hand-printed concert and event posters that have become ubiquitous in the rock world; he was just out of college at U of I in Champaign and was bogging down and unable to finish a painting because of undiagnosed ADHD, so he began to draw his living room automan, over and over from...

Episode 170 of Third Gear Scratch , in which our hero, Alien Epilepsy waxes and wanes about this year of our Lord, Two Thousand and Twenty Three. It's been a year of triumphs and struggles which has seen AE release his first and only solo record 'Everything' (Spartan) and tour on it, create a new record with his band Shiner , their 6th, tour with his friend Ian Prince and their band Birdhands with...

Being a body-builder and MMA fighter, Eugene S Robinson was a bit of an anomoly as the charismatic front man for the band he founded OXBOW, and before that in Whipping Boy , a more traditional punk rock outfit in the early 80's. It's in his new book, A Walk Across Dirty Waters and Straight Into Murderer's Row: A Memoir (Feral House) that we learn how he navigated these sometimes murky waters with...

In 1993, Rob Zabrecky was certain he'd seen his future and that future was as a rockstar and frontman for local LA rockers Possum Dixon, his band that had just been signed to Interscope Records for a 3 record deal. But life is complicated. Indeed they had, by all accounts, a pretty great career as an "alternative" band with big tours and big producers like Rik Ocasek of The Cars. But like many oth...

This is a pre-pandemic revisit to a previous episode from Aug 9, 2019 in which touring and session guitarist  Greg Suran visited the TGS studios to talk about his globe-trotting experiences playing in his own Chicago-based band Cupcakes and BlueManGroup before joining The B-52's in which he still enjoys frequent gigs. He later joined Sunny Day Real Estate for their last two studio albums and subes...

The 18 year old version of a now grown Tony Higbee would surely be pinching himself for who he shares stages with these days. As a highschool rocker from tiny Monmouth IL, he was a bass player and had evolved into a serviceable chording guitarist in college. It wasn't until he began writing songs in Atlanta with his band Simple Sick Device in the early 2000's that he began to play guitar with more...

When this episode was recorded, the writers and actors strikes were both still going strong with no end in sight, so resident keyboardist for the Jimmy Kimmell Show , Jeff Babko , was able to find time in his normally very busy schedule to rap with me. In fact, the Kimmell show is just a piece of his crowded schedule, which includes being the touring pianist on stage with Steve Martin and Martin S...