It was Monday October 26, 1987.

One thing that I missed in the confusion of my trip to New York (and, frankly, the effort of untangling it all 20 years later) is that I’d gotten a call from Mark and Bill a few weeks earlier.

They wanted to get the band going again.  They’d tried a couple of different bands with a couple of different groups of people over the previous ten months or so.  I’d only seen one or two of their gigs – working nights got in the way of having much of a bar-based social life. 

But as Bill put it, I was the one who wrote the good material, and who had the drive to try to make it.

“True enough“, I’d thought as I’d planned to try to move my life to New York.

But we did plot one big plot, and I figured I’d have time to do it even if one of the job offers from NYC came through quickly; one of their neighbors owned a recording studio.  And he liked our band.  And he’d cut us a break on recording an eight-track demo. Mark and Bill’s sister’s boyfriend’s band, in fact, had just recorded an album there. The price – $15/hour for an 8-track recording studio – was right, presuming we planned everything perfectly.

The three of us got back together, on my free nights in the week or so before I went to NYC, and played some of the songs we’d done back when we were gigging steadily in the bars. 

And damn, it was fun.

We booked time for the coming weekend.