First Underground Nuclear Kitchen is the new album from former Deep Purple bassist Glenn Hughes, a daring, innovative musical chameleon who continues to push the envelope as far as it'll go.

Hughes' latest release, his 12th solo record, is due out Oct. 7 in the U.S. on Blistering Records, and if you take the first letters of each word in the title, you can pretty much figure out what the new record is all about. He is definitely out to bring the FUNK and bring it hard, albeit with heavy doses of soul and rock.

Before Hughes arrived on the scene, replacing Roger Glover, Deep Purple was a proto-metal band with strains of progressive-rock ambitions coursing through its veins. He, along with David Coverdale, injected a funk-powered virus into the band's aesthetic that brought energy and vigor to LPs like Burn, Stormbringer and Come Taste The Band (a vastly underrated album). But, for Hughes, his time in Deep Purple blew him off course just a bit.

"Man, you know, when you look at my career, when you go back to my childhood, you know, I was very much influenced by The Beatles; of course, I'm from the north of England," explains Hughes, in a recent interview that will be published in Goldmine in an upcoming issue. "And then I started listening to what was going on in Detroit, Memphis and Stevie Wonder, and Marvin Gaye, and Al Green, Wilson Pickett, Otis Redding, and you throw a little bit of, you know, Beatles influences in there and you get, you know, what I consider to be the Glenn Hughes footprint. Before Deep Purple were around, I was in a band called Trapeze — very sort of popular in America, funk rock. You know, this is the blueprint, the sole print of what we left, and then I became really famous in Deep Purple. So it had taken me a little to the left of where I wanted to be. Deep Purple were a great, traditional, classic-rock band. Now, and all these years later, I want to make music that is really, really the music that is core to my soul, which is soul, funk and rock."

Once digested, that little nugget of information explains a lot about how it is that Hughes can make the claim that the Red Hot Chili Peppers' Chad Smith is "... the greatest drummer in the world... for me, pound for pound." Considering the drummers he's played with over the years, that is a bold statement.

The two met at the NAMM industry event in 2002, and Smith, who has collaborated with Hughes before, lends his amazing drum chops to First Underground Nuclear Kitchen.

"I met Chad at the industry event called the NAMM show in 2002," says Hughes. "We played together at that event. Since that event, we've become best buds, [I'm] godfather to his child, [and] our families are really close... What I want people to know about Chad is that he's a wonderful, wonderful, very funny guy, who I'm addicted to hang with, and play with, and we just get along super, super well. We're the same kind of guy. We like the same things. Like I say, pound for pound, for my music judgement, he's the greatest rock drummer on the planet. And trust me, Peter, I've played with every bloody drummer you can imagine, so no disrespect to anybody else who's listening to this who I've played with — I've played with the greatest rock drummers; Ian Paice, John Bonham, Bernard Purty, Steve Galapin ... everybody, but for me, Chad seems to work for my music, and he's a great guy.

To hear what else Hughes has to say about working with Tony Iommi and Ritchie Blackmore, among other things, visit the multimedia section of www.goldminemag.com to listen to a podcast of our interview with Hughes. To learn more about the man and his music, visit www.glennhughes.com.

Ah, the more things change, the more ... well, you know the rest. Alice Cooper knows that as well as anybody.

Once the scourge of hand-wringing parents and paranoid conservatives, Alice Cooper used to experience attempts to censor his unique brand of horror-rock on a daily basis. Over time, it seemed everybody had calmed down. The shock had worn off. They finally had come to realized what Alice and his gruesome stage shows were all about: entertainment. Nothing more than attempts to throw a little scare into people. They were horror movie scenes come to life on the stage, just harmless fun.

And yet, here we are in 2008, with Cooper promoting his latest album, Along Came A Spider, a concept LP about a serial killer with a spider fetish, and corporate censorship reared its ugly head the night of Sept. 29 on "The Late Late Show With Craig Ferguson"

It seems, from a recent press release, that "Alice was going to re-enact a piece of his video by picking a female victim from the audience to choke with a silk scarf during the band’s live performance of “Vengeance is Mine”. (Both the album version of the song and the video feature ex-Guns ‘n’ Roses guitarist Slash.) What viewers saw was a truncated version of what actually happened. Unfortunately, the “murder” of one of his victims was just too much for CBS-TV’s censors (although Ferguson loved it) and, as such, his request was denied."

It was reminiscent of Alice's 1975 ABC special "Welcome To My Nightmare" starring Vincent Price. Using their own bloody knives, ABC censors to cut out all the violence that had been included in the originally delivered film. What rubbish.

Watch for yourself. See the uncensored version of Cooper's new 3-song video including “Vengeance is Mine” on MySpace.com/AlongCameAVideo as well as YouTube.com/SPV and Imeem.com/AliceCooper starting Wednesday, October 1st.

And while you're at it, go to the multimedia section of www.goldminemag.com to listen to a podcast of our recent interview with Alice Cooper.

There are new podcasts aplenty over in the multimedia section of the Goldmine Web site.

Get the lowdown on Backstage Auctions' upcoming "All Access Rock Auction," being held Oct. 12-19 in interview with David Fishof, the longtime music manager/promoter who is consigning a multitude of rock memorabilia items to the sale.

The auction features more than 300 lots, and Backstage Auctions' Jacques van Gool says, "I think this auction probably has more signed Ringo Starr items than any auction ever had in history." Hear what van Gool has to say about the auction in a separate podcast.

If you're into blues and dig James Taylor and Carole King, give a listen to our interview with Slo-Leak's Danny Kortchmar, the legendary session musician and producer who played on Taylor's Sweet Baby James and King's Tapestry.

'80s thrash-metal freaks, listen up. Metal Church vocalist Ronny Munroe provides an inside look at the band's latest CD, This Present Wasteland, in yet another podcast.

And stay tuned. We've got interviews with legendary guitarists Uli Jon Roth and Gary Moore, and former Deep Purple bassist/vocalist Glenn Hughes coming up.

The year was 1985. I was a senior in high school living out in the country, where our house was surrounded by farms. Isolated from almost all of my classmates, my social life was limited. Dates were few and far between, and my teenage angst needed an outlet.

One sunny, spring day, I was outside doing yard work, listening to the radio, KQRS, a classic-rock station in the Twin Cities. My parents had this old wood cabinet stereo, and it had a very warm sound I remember.

The thing about KQRS back then was that every so often, in between the usual mix of my beloved '70s arena-rock standards and '80s hair-metal blather, the station would sneak in a transmission from the underground, like "Radio Free Europe" by R.E.M. This day, however, it was The Replacements' "Little Mascara," and from that moment, my whole outlook on music changed forever.

It wasn't like anything I'd ever heard before. The guitars were noisy and, not necessarily abrasive, but... let's call them thorny. The singer's voice was a sandpaper-rough caterwaul, most likely the result of some hard living. And the production on the thing was ugly, unprofessional. And that was it!

The whole thing sounded raw and amateurish, but that only made it better, because immediately, you could tell that it was made by people who were living just barely above the poverty line, or possibly below it. They were social outcasts, and I was one of them, even if I didn't live in ultra-hip Minneapolis. They weren't prodigies. They weren't born with silver spoons in their mouths. They were the kids who smoked on the sidewalk before school. They mostly likely had blue-collar dads who drank Pabst Blue Ribbon and barely noticed their sons, or even slapped them around a little.

That wasn't my childhood, thank God. But, in some way, I could relate to it, even though "Little Mascara" was a bitter indictment of a vain, self-centered woman who lost only a "little mascara" in crying about the sad condition of her white-trash existence.

But, what struck me was how edgy it was, how the hooks just sunk their teeth into your neck and how that tugboat of a tempo just pulled the song up out of the muck and onto a higher plane. I had to get my hands on more Replacements. And I found out there was a lot more out there, three independent releases of snarling, trashy punk rock and the occasional heart-on-the-sleeve ballads. But, it was the album that had "Little Mascara" on it that I had to have, so as soon as I saved up enough money and found a record store that had it, I bought Tim, The Replacements' first major-label release.

Tim was the 'Mats' first release on Sire Records, and it was an eye-opener. From the drinker's lament "Here Comes A Regular" to the howling, outsiders' anthem "Bastards Of Young" to that swaying ode to loneliness and fear "Swinging Party," Tim was the full realization of The Replacements' brilliance. Paul Westerberg's clever wordplay was never sharper, and the band that used to get by on just its ragged glory actually gained some sort of focus, obviously helped by the production of one Tommy "Ramone" Erdelyi.

On Sept. 23, Rhino reissued deluxe versions of all four of The Replacements' Sire Records releases — Tim, Pleased To Meet Me, Don't Tell A Soul and All Shook Down — with an assortment of outtakes, alternative versions, demos and other unreleased gems. Some critics will tell you that after Pleased To Meet Me, and the departure of guitarist Bob Stinson (his life, riddled with substance abuse, sadly snuffed out at the age of 35), The Replacements lost the shambolic magic that made them the darlings of the underground. I'm not one of them.

Tim and the Jim Dickinson-produced Pleased To Meet Me are undisputed classics. Remnants of the old, rough-and-tumble 'Mats could be found there, although it was clear the band was in transition, becoming a little more... mature — a bad word to be sure among longtime fans.

And that growth resulted in All Shook Down, a magnificent epithet and an underrated send-off that acted as a bridge to Westerberg's acclaimed solo career. As the 'Mats sound took on more of an alt.-country tone, maybe it lost some of its edge, but "One Wink At A Time," "When It Began" and "Nobody" are as infectious as anything the band ever did, and the heartbreaking "Sadly Beautiful" is one of the loveliest songs Westerberg's ever written. And Don't Tell A Soul has a bounty of great songs, too, including the band's highest-charting single "I'll Be You" and the merry-go-'round honky tonk of "Talent Show."

These albums were the soundtrack for my passage into manhood, and they've been with me through the down times, when drinking myself into oblivion seemed like a very good idea. I never saw The Replacements live. Reportedly, they could be magnificent, the very embodiment of what rock 'n' roll should be. They were funny, self-deprecating and they churned out burning rockers that set the house on the fire. And on other nights, they could be so falling-down drunk they'd barely get through a set. I wish I could have experienced either one of those scenarios. Then, I'd have a story to tell. But, as it is, I still have these albums, and hearing them enhanced sonically is a breath of fresh air.

If you ever saw The Replacements in concert, I'd love your stories. Please feel free to respond to this blog and leave them here for all to read.

And to find out more about these releases, and maybe order them, visit www.rhino.com


  

Coming in the next issue of Goldmine is a story on Camper Van Beethoven, the quirky, eccentric uncle of alternative-rock that's, once again, feeling his oats.

Back in the early '80s, when punk got all rigid and conformist, Camper Van Beethoven eschewed the three-chord simplicity, the sheer volume and meat-headed uniformity of the shaved-head syndicate and established its own identity, mixing ska, Tex-Mex, folk (even the Eastern European variety), country and ... well, basically everything their warped imaginations could think of into an impossible-to-categorize form of music.

They were complete originals, blessed with a wry, engaging sense of humor. And though they broke up in the late '80s, they would eventually get back together. This past weekend, Camper and its first cousin, the David Lowery-led Cracker, hosted its annual Campout Night in Pioneertown, Calif., at Pappy & Harriet's Pioneertown Palace.

Camper took the stage Friday with longtime indie faves Built To Spill and Quasi. Saturday was Cracker's night. If you missed out and you live in, or near Chicago, you get a second chance to catch them. November 21-22, CBV will play two shows at The Abby Pub in the Windy City.

Jonathan Segel, the band's utility infielder — a guitarist by trade who wound playing keyboards, violins and mandolin for CVB — was interviewed for the story, and he didn't pull any punches in our conversation. To give you a taste of what to expect in the print story, here are portions of my e-mail interview with Segel that are lying on the cutting room floor:

First off, tell us how (Camper's) silver anniversary show (in June) went. What did the set list consist of?
Jonathan Segel: Looking over the list post-facto it looks like a two-hour reduction of the entire catalog. Like any good Camper set, it manages to flow between songs from all our albums. I thought the show was a real success in many ways: We played well, we played a long time, a lot of people came to see us and we got The Catheads to reunite to open the show, and they were great. We used to play with them alot back in the day, and we're historically connected in many ways.
here it is:
http://www.archive.org/details/CVB2008-06-28.matrix


Popular Songs is a broad survey of the band's eclectic approach to music-making. Listening to it, it's hard not to be struck by how many styles of music Camper Van Beethoven played. Where did that willingness to experiment with so many genres come from, or is experiment not the right word?
JS: Experiment is definitely the right word. One thing that allowed us access to such a diverse palette was Santa Cruz in the 1980s. Besides the normal college punk rock scene of the early '80s, there was a thriving post-'70s hippie scene (duh, it's Santa Cruz), and a whole lot of roots-less American kids searching for their roots — or, if not theirs, then some that sounded cool. So, we get lots of people resurrecting Irish music, Klezmer music, Balkan music. So, as a rock band, we get exposed to all of these people who are actually learning these old tunes, and we copped a few scales... Plus of course the university ethnomusicology classes... and Anthropology classes — being UCSC, we had some pretty amazing and amazingly outsider teachers. And the college radio music scene was changing rapidly in the late '70s and early '80s; huge influxes of odd DIY bands from England, followed by punk and other oddities here in California.

What amazes me most, in going back and listening to these songs, is how the two ska tracks, "Skinhead Stomp" and "Border Ska," meld ska and traditional elements, like how "Border Ska" takes on a Tex-Mex quality and you hear fiddle in "Skinhead Stomp" and it makes perfect sense. How did slip those traditional qualities into these tracks?  
JS: Well.. if you think of ska as only that backbeat pattern, then a whole lot of polkas and tex mex are actually ska to begin with. The great 60s ska players like Don Drummond used that same beat to play all sorts of styles of music!  And note that Tex-Mex is that way because of the huge influx of Czech and German immigrants to central Texas — they brought the accordion.

Why was Camper Van Beethoven so comfortable playing different genres?
JS: Probably because we didn't think of them as different genres once we incorporated them into the band — just as rock music.

When you joined the band, it seemed to really open up the possibilities of what this band could do. Your playing on "ZZ Top Goes to Egypt" is remarkably inventive. From your perspective, in what ways did having you onboard change what Camper Van Beethoven did?
JS: I guess. I was definitely into trying out any type of playing. I was basically just learning how to play the violin when I started playing with Camper; they already had enough guitars. (I have to say that being a guitarist who is learning violin in a band makes it easier 'cause I could read their fingers and know what chords to play — plus I tried to play chords on the violin. I think having me in the band (~fall of 1983 i think?) changed what the band did only in that the addition of another person's interests broadened the gamut that much more. This band is about the personalities of the players and what they bring to the table as much as what they are able to play.

[Asked because of the CBV classic "Take The Skinheads Bowling] Did you come into contact with skinheads a lot?
JS: I've avoided them pretty much since being drunkenly robbed in Scotland in 1982! Actually for the most part skinheads seemed to anthemize the song and liked it. It certainly isn't a pejorative against skinheads. In fact, the whole skinhead thing is very weird and difficult to trace, especially in California. It takes on so many meanings. There's a great film from 2006 called "This Is England" that takes place in the early '80s and shows how an honest two-tone ska-type skinhead bunch can get sucked into the racist fascist thing. In California, it just seemed weird to me to have a specific mode of dress, especially when everybody dresses the same (um, uniforms? not into them.) It's unknown when we ran into skinheads whether they were straightedge, fascist, violent or just fashionable. I myself shaved my head in 1987. Didn't dress in suspenders, though. Did own Doc Martins... shoes, though, not boots..

With the second album, II & III, were you trying to balance the carefree, fun aspect of Telephone Free Landslide Victory with slightly more focus?
JS: Well, when TFLV came out, we had been a band for a long time already and had a ton of songs. We started recording the second batch in Davis again, but by the end of 1985, we switched to working at Fox Studios in Felton, near Santa Cruz. Tom Fox had basically converted his house into a studio. After a short tour to Texas in fall of '85, [drummer] Anthony [Guess] quit, and rather than going back to having David and Chris Molla switch off on drums like we had before Anthony, we actually got a drummer (Chris Pedersen) and a real lead guitarist (Greg Lisher). So half of that record has these guys on it, and it sounds way different. I managed to get a few more serious tracks on that record, and also David had written a few love songs, so it has a wider range of emotions represented I think.
We stayed at Tom Fox's for the third record and [the EP] Vampire Can Mating Oven also, so the third record is very much manufactured in the studio, which was a very different way of working.

Lovers of country, and really any genre you tried, probably wouldn't have noticed much difference between your songs and artists they were more comfortable with, with the exception of your lyrics. Was that something you strived for on songs like "Sad Lovers' Waltz?"
JS: Hmm... probably more that it was easier to play country music accurately. Or at least old country music; modern country sucked, still sucks for the most part. But the decision to filter the vocals like that in "Sad Lovers' Waltz" was probably to match it more to our ideas of what older country music really sounded like. And adding a few tricks like that made it sound authentic. I mean, lovers of 12th century troubadour music would never fall for "Une Fois" (from the third record) as being genuine, especially as we used a sitar as the rhythm instrument.

Country and Eastern European folk merge on "When I Win The Lottery," which has a real noir-ish quality. What made that song particularly effective?
JS: The lyrics I think are the most effective part of that song. By this time in CVB's development, the styles are ingrained, and the music is becoming a fusion of things whether we liked it or not. But David's character writing was becoming really strong. The whole Key Lime Pie record is pretty noir.

Your covers of songs like Sonic Youth's "I Love Her All The Time" and Pink Floyd's "Interstellar Overdrive" are opposites in that the former you change entirely and the latter you stay faithful to. What went into those decisions?
JS: Well, it depends on where we wanted to go with the song, of course. Doing sonic youth as country is a piss take. "Interstellar...," on the other hand is a platform — it's basically a head within which to improvise, like jazz. When you say it's faithful to the original, it's really only faithful in that we play the chord progression at the beginning and the end. We had this song called "Processional," which is very straight in its recorded version (and we played it this way more recently also), but live in the late '80s it basically served the same function as "Interstellar..."; we started it and spaced out in the middle, went into other songs, eventually came back to the head. Sometimes it even sandwiched "Interstellar..." in there as well.
We did actually do "I Love Her All the Time" as a slow and faithful cover once in Nijmegen, Holland in 1987, fueled by Belgian beer.

When the band signed to Virgin, it seemed the group took a serious turn with Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart. Why was that?
JS: Money? I don't know. They needed to sell it? How do you mean serious? For one thing, it was the first time we had an outside producer, and we had big differences within the band over how this manifested itself. Plus, David had been in a long trend of controlling what music CVB did by essentially not working on anybody else's input. Virgin, like any major label, likes to have a central figure to deal with and make decisions so they encouraged this sort of thing. I regret making my feelings known to Mark Williams, our A&R guy at the time, as I could see him calculating as soon as I mentioned the problems...

Creative and personal differences resulted in inner band turmoil that resulted in the band's dissolution in 1989, after Key Lime Pie. What was at the heart of those disputes? Had they been festering long?
JS: A lot of this started over working with Dennis Herring. I still maintain that he's a fraud, a gleaner of other people's ideas who makes arbitrary decisions based on what he thinks will be the "coolest" thing to do at the time (and in a limited perspective — how has the production of Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart held up? I find it incredibly dated.) He wasn't so much a producer as an engineer with veto power.
Note that I got kicked out of the band at the beginning of 1989, after only working on demos for Key Lime Pie. I never heard the record until a couple years later and was floored by it — the songs were the best ever and the production was everything I fought with Dennis for on OBRS (hmm...)
During the touring for OBRS, I wasn't quiet about my feelings. That's not cool in Hollywoodland. In the summer of 1988, before my last tour with CVB all fall, I finished my first solo record "Storytelling," and it came out right as I got kicked out of the band. Not a good record to start a solo career on; prog rock wasn't in then (is it now?). Plus my band were all still in CVB! The irony of the situation for me was that I fled to Indonesia in december of 1988 to clear my head and came to the realization that it didn't matter what we did in CVB, I would always have the time and energy to do my own work if it never was present in CVB, but as soon as I came home, David came over and said he couldn't work with me anymore. Everyone else wanted to keep their jobs and that was it, I go or the band goes. Eventually, of course, a year or so later, the band went. Virgin, as we see, kept their main man.

What led to the reunion in 2000, and the Tusk remake in 2002?
JS: Several things. In the '90s I started Magnetic (www.magneticmotorworks.com — a label for putting out my stuff and Victor's). I had my own bands, Hieronymus Firebrain and Jack & Jill, where I played guitar and sang, but I also played violin with Victor's bands and in Granfaloon Bus and Dieselhed. David and Johnny Hickman came over to a Dieselhed show once after Cracker played in [San Francisco], and we spoke briefly. I was sort of drunk I think, so I was probably nice. After that encounter I did a lot of soul searching; I had been holding a strong and bitter grudge, as after being kicked out of the band I had never had any success on my own (uh, still, really), and I was blaming David mostly. But it really wasn't his problem; he had no responsibility for my life, so I realized I had to let it go. All this lite-Buddhism happened as I left San Francisco to pursue a failing relationship to LA, and many things happened in the brief three years I lived there.
First, I think was that Cracker was going to do a song on the Clash tribute record Burning London, and in CVB we used to do "White Riot" as a country song, so I flew to Richmond where David's studio is and recorded it with them. it was fun... the next thing was that David put Mark Linkous in touch with me, and I ended up quitting my job at Danetracks doing film sound effects to play for a year and a half with Sparklehorse. During this time, David was producing the Counting Crows in L.A. near my apartment, so I saw him occasionally there. He came to the Sparklehorse show at the Troubadour in L.A., and we did "All Her Favorite Fruit" — which really was the first time I had played a Camper song in 10 years I think (although i think we might have done "Abundance" in Sparklehorse sometimes? [I] can't remember..) And David got Victor to sub on bass in Cracker a few times... we conceived of the "Traveling Apothecary Show" tour wherein Cracker morphed into Camper, and we played some CVB tunes... we started the process of seeing if we could record together by getting Victor and I out to Richmond in December of 1999, where we put together Camper Van Beethoven Is Dead, Long Live Camper Van Beethoven. The next recording test was Tusk. And the next live step was to play as CVB. We did this in New York at the Knitting factory, three nights in 2002. The rehearsals were in NY beforehand; it was truly weird. I remember in the '80s when we would have a break, we came back and would try to play every song on every record; this rehearsal was like that, trying to consciously prevent your mind from remembering how to play the songs and allow your hands to do it. I remember realizing in the rehearsals then that these were the people that I had really learned to play music with despite any other bands I had played with, and it was so comfortable to know that.
At the time my most recent solo record (Scissors and Paper) had been done over the course of playing in Sparklehorse, and I did everything myself pretty much. It took awhile because, as much as anything else, I was intimidated by the Sparklehorse peer group (Radiohead, PJ Harvey!) and their creative output.  But, after that, every time I have recorded a rock record, I play with Victor at least, if not more Camper elements.

For the greatest-hits record, you rerecorded five songs that Virgin wouldn't let you have for the record. Tell us how that came about.
JS: Well, that's simple. We wanted to include tracks from the two Virgin releases, we tried to buy the rights, they wouldn't sell, so we re-recorded them. Difficult for all of us to make them realistic (especially the crappy production of OBRS! Had to find yamaha SPX90s to get that gated snare sound, strangely no ProTools plugins dare to emulate these.) For me the hardest part was doing "All Her Favorite Fruit" and "...Lottery" — I had played on demos way back when, had my own way of playing the songs, had been playing them my way live for eight years, and now I had to learn note for note the Don Lax version that was recorded in 1989. I don't play like that (for one thing he's a real violinist; I'm a guitar player playing violin). It was simultaneously humiliating and humbling. I had to record like 10 takes of each measure to get it somewhat accurate. I felt like I was having to go into the past to lick the boots of my ex-girlfriend's present boyfriend. But we managed to rerecord them really well, thanks to Bruce Kaphan and to Fantasy Studios. and then the Kitchen managed to master the whole disparate collection into a sonicly interesting cohesive whole — the new recordings fit right in and the old ones sound somehow new, almost remixed.

What's next for Camper Van Beethoven?
JS: Well, last summer we talked about making another record, and some of us started setting aside riffs and things for it, but then David went in a different direction and worked on his solo album and a new Cracker album. I made my most recent album Honey, Victor had just made Cock Crows at Sunrise and accidentally went and wrote two more albums that will be out later, Patriarch's Blues (after the death of his father) and McCabe and Mrs. Miller, a duo with Alison Faith Levy. We have all stated that to make another CVB record we want to get together and write it together, but it hasn't occurred yet. I recently started picking at the bits I had from last summer and may make them my own. So the answer is, who knows? We'll make another record sometime.
After New Roman Times came out in fall of 2004, we toured a lot, a lot, a lot, up through last fall. Since then, we played one week at New Years and one week in June for the Fillmore 25th anniversary show; we'll play again later this month (August) and then, of course, our September Camp-Out Festival in Pioneertown by Joshua Tree.
But touring so much in the past few years wasn't so financially great for those of us that don't have income from our other sources, so I suspect that we'll be working our day jobs a lot in the coming years.