Third Gear Scratch

Jim Suptic and his band The Get Up Kids were too young to play clubs in the 90's KCMO scene, so they went on tour and played houses and all-ages shows across the world, and quickly became place-holders in the Emo Icons category, on tour with and inspiring a litany of bands like Blink 182. Now Jim is part of a non-profit called the Steps of Faith Foundation that raises funds for prosthetics for rec...

The mind of Chunklet Magazine creator Henry Owings is a many tentacled beast, unable to be sated with just one calling or defined by one title. Archivist, author, designer, show promoter, comedian, producer, tour manager; he's lived, curated, celebrated and skewered, chronicled and helped to establish the Athens/ATL region as the bastion of heavy-duty indie rock history it is. His new book PLUS 1...

When Rigs Of Dad started in IG, musician Ross Hurt had no idea he would have 85k followers in a scant few years. He's parlayed that into the excellent R.O.D. podcast and continues his musical journey started with his band Black Clouds in DC into his current project Burial Waves and their new EP Holy Ground ( Dark Operative ). It's a sea change in sound for him and Matt Dowling (Deleted Scenes), Ji...

When Katy Guillen was but a wee lass, her father would bring her around to play her brand of the blues on guitar at open mic jam sessions in KC and the midwest, stoking the fire in her, curating and aiding her evolution from prodigious wunderkind into her current state of songwriting machine and indie-blues stalwart. She prefers writing in collaboration with her amazing trio and sees the reward in...

Return-guest and songwriter Tierney Tough survived and in fact thrived during the Covid era by hunkering down and creating, starting with a series of covers with her angular pop band The Pauses on the Quarantunes EP , which led straight into the creation of her own solo EP, A Farce To Be Reckoned With . It's a personal high-water mark for this bassist and pianist as she reckons with her life in Fl...

To say Xavier Alexander is busy is to miss the point. He's a recovering musician and has reanimated himself as Roaster/Founder/CEO of METRIC COFFEE. He has created a brand of specialty coffees that puts people over profits. METRIC has no board, no investors, and they're blowing the bloody doors off the coffee market in Chicago and beyond. The years creating this brand were filled with endless work...

Chuck Whittington of namelessnumberheadman makes music that is at once analog and digital, acoustic and electronic, whimsical and sad, seemingly mundane and matter-of-factly magical. Their new record Plot the Points is a high water mark for a band of old friends from KC via Oklahoma who've made music for the past 20 years that has kept them sane and garnered rave reviews from the indie cognoscenti...

Buzz Osborne has cultivated and nourished the kingdom over which he and his musical partner of almost 40 years, drummer Dale Crover currently reign with particular care taken to keep the masses of MELVINS fans sated. He and his wife Mackie are the architects of not only the traditional MELVINS releases but also the  hand screen-printed, letter press and limited edition releases that are manna from...

When Mike Sullivan created Russian Circles with his hockey homie and drummer Dave Turnkrantz, it's evolution from larvae to butterfly was almost immediate; the writing was streamlined instantly  and there was an innate and unconscious understanding of what the goal was here: to make themselves happy. They write to scratch the itch that can only be reached through therapy and rocking. We talk life,...

Heidi Phillips found the inspirado the reform her influential band Frogpond after almost 20 years ironically at the celebration of life of her drummer Billy Johnson at the Madrid Theater in 2017, and in the ensuing years has secured a lineup that make her new music even more relevant and powerful than she imagined, with a new LP Time Thief (Black Site)  recorded by Shiner bassist Paul Malinowski t...

Chicago musician slash wizard Mike Lust has just released his long awaited solo debut Demented Wings (Forge Again)  and it's amazing. This episode is an encore redux of our talk on Sept 21st, 2020 plus a recent chat about his new record and even more revelations from his storied past as the brain and namesake of Chicago bands Luster King and Tight Phantomz and as engineer and producer for so many...

Guitarist Max Bernstein and I met in 2007  on tour somewhere  in Iowa in a mostly empty room with his band The Actual, and he had no idea he would be working with the biggest names in the biz as their guitarist and sideman soon after. His audition that landed the Kesha gig soon after we met has parlayed this anomaly into a bona fide career with these pop giants. His life growing up was a atypical...

Before bassist Jeremy Sidener became the owner of the Eighth Street Taproom in Lawrence KS where he worked for 29 years, he was the rock-solid bottom end of legendary Lawrence band Zoom that was influential not just for bands like Shiner but was hailed as a bellwether of musical style after their 2nd full length Helium Octopede was released on Tim/Kerr records. These reverential pronouncements fro...

Quin Kirchner has spent his life growing into where he's arrived currently, which is to say a world-class jazz drummer, composer and now bandleader with The Quin Kirchner Trio, but has been playing with top-flight players and leading groups large and small for the better part of 20 years like Head With Wings, K/V/L and later NOMO, a giant ensemble of largely improvised material which later begat W...

HUM guitarist / singer Matt Talbott is the celebrant for the live taping of the 100th episode of TGS at Fitzgeralds in Berwyn IL and it did not disappoint the sold out crowd who got to know about not only Matts work with HUM but about his bar/venue Loose Cobra, his studio Earth Analog, his solo career doing house shows across the US and how that has changed his life. We also get to hear from him a...

Bassist / Owner of Drugan's Drums Johnny Drugan was raised just how you'd think the son of a professional musician would be raised; surrounded by rock stars like Johnny Winters whose band his dad played bass in, soaking up the rich environment of smokey studios, life-changing guitar solos, and with off-days spent at flea markets learning to haggle and deal, gleaning the true worth of something bef...

BlueMan Captain and Filmmaker Thomas "Boomer" Galassi has mastered the art of living the life he wants to live. He found BlueManGroup after moving to New York and surviving the rounds of soul-sucking auditions designed to tear the actor down and working temp jobs and got introduced to Chris, Matt and Phil, the original three BlueMen who subsequently put him through six months of training before fi...

Punkrocker turned documentary filmmaker Eric Fundingsland first full-length film "Why Am I Doing This?" A Film About Touring is a funny and insightful look into the often undignified world of touring in a rock band that can be sketchy even on the best of days. He talks with rockers like Steve Albini, Tim Midyett, Joe Preston and many more about why they do what they do, and when asked why they con...

Before Alianna Kalaba began playing bass in FACS with Brian Case (Disappears/Ponys/Episode 2 of TGS) she had been and still is Chan Marshall aka Cat Power's drummer for most of a decade playing festivals, touring the world and living the life of a working musician that can only be dreamed of. Now as FACS releases Present Tense (Trouble in Mind) their 4th record in 4 years, she talks about her life...

Producer oddCOUPLE aka Zach Henderson had a revelation that his life is supposed to be about creating music and whatever has to happen will happen and has happened to make this a reality. His work with artists like Chance the Rapper, Jamila Woods and Joey Purp has helped to establish him as a producer to be reckoned with, pulling the best out of those artists to make their visions come to life. No...

Cloakroom bassist Bobby Markos didn't realize his journalism degree from college would split him into his current state of existence as a touring musician half the time and as a racing speedway historian with volumes of knowledge accumulated through years spent with his dad Bob Markos they then turned into MarkosRacingMedia , a collaboration in which they've made 4 full-length documentaries about...

Producer / Engineer / Mixer John Agnello is now a legend after having learned from other legends first-hand like Jimmy Iovine and Shelly Yakus in his years at the RecordPlant as an assistant engineer before launching his own career with bands like The Outfield and The Hooters. That work opened the indie-rock world to John as the go-to guy for bands like Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr, Kurt Vile, Jawbox,...

Spotlights bassist Sarah Quintero delves deep and raps with Allen about, among other things, Liz Cheney, the ups and downs of being in a band with her husband Mario (turns out it's almost all ups), their time as a two-piece band traveling with backing drum tracks and how that helped them hone and shape their live show, the power of playing live, how silly and restrictive genre labels are for bands...

Composer Ian Hultquist quit his band Passion Pit in 2014 when they were at the height of their success, from spots on SNL to headlining Madison Square Garden to pursue his original goal of scoring for film and TV, specifically leaning into documentaries like Ivory Towers, Go For The Gold and First Monday In May and features like My Blind Brother (Nick Kroll/Adam Scott) before his current TV series...

Ken Andrews gives us a lengthy peek at his life making music with his band Failure, making music as a solo artist vs band, producing and mixing as a living, working with household names like Jimmy Eat World, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club and NIN, he details the writing process with Failure and how they use improvisation as a key tool and how to know what to throw away, which turns out to be most of...