Andrew Loefke | Musician / Psychonaut
05.04.25
Dawn Cochran: Hi. Thank you for doing this interview. I don't really know who you are, so why don't you introduce yourself?
Andrew Loefke: Sure. My name is Andrew Loefke. I'm a musician in the Western, NY area. I've been playing since I was about 12 years old. I currently play in six bands. I do studio work. I ran house sound at Mohawk for a very long time. Toured all over North America. Put out all sorts of records. Done all sorts of weird wild, cool stuff that people said “You can't do that” and like, I basically said “Really? Watch me.”
DC: Six bands right now???
AL: Six, yeah.
DC: How do you have the time for six bands?
AL: So it sounds crazier than it is. The one original band is called Chloroform. The only long-term members have been me, the guitar player, and our percussionist. There's no songs, there's no written music. We just come together with different drummers, and different sets of musicians, and sometimes people just show up cold at a show and ask if they can be on stage with us. We just play whatever comes out of our hands, our instruments. So there's no rehearsals. It's a very laid back approach to playing. And sometimes it's kind of space rock, and sometimes it's kind of dancey. It depends on the room, depends on the music we've been listening to. So that one almost doesn't count. Then there's a couple other ones, where I've either been playing with the other players off and on for 25-30 years. Or it's music that I've known since I was a little kid. There's a rockabilly psychobilly group I play with out in Rochester; The Tombstone Hands. A bunch of original music, but then a bunch of it is guitar slinger stuff, like Dick Dale, and Link Wray, and stuff that I've been hearing since before I could walk. You know, from other musicians, and my family. And just being around it my whole life. Some of the stuff is very, very easy to do. But then on the other side of that, there’s a new original band that me and a few other guys have put together. We haven't even played out with it yet. But the music is extremely intricate. We've got five original songs. We just started working out the sixth one. It's two guitar players. It's a drummer. It's a bass. It's a singer. And it's taken a lot of work. And a lot of discipline to get this music together. So it's kind of across the board and I stay very busy. The band that I play in that that makes money and allows me to do the other things is a Motörhead tribute act called Iron Fist. And again, it's music that I grew up with. It still takes a lot of work to do it, but it's a little easier to do when you're playing someone else's music and you're just creating a space for people to have some nostalgic enjoyment there. And even though it's a tribute act, like me and the guys in the group, we're very sincere about the music, but we're not overly serious. We don't get this deep attitude about it. It's just we do it because we love what the music was and that whole thing with it. It's not a, it's not something put on like like sometimes happens in that world. So.
DC: So what instruments do you play or instrument, or do you sing? Like what are you in these bands? Cause you had you mentioned percussion and you mentioned guitarist. So are you a bassist?
AL: I am the bass player in virtually everything I play in. I sing in a bunch of the things. (If you can call it singing.) And I don't write as much as I used to, but I do a little of arrangement. Figuring out which song goes where in the original music, you know? You take this riff or this theme, and how do you get to the next one? I kind of fell into that role by accident a bunch of years ago, and in another very complex music group doing a progressive, almost heavy metal stuff, but it sounded like Marconi Music from the Spaghetti Westerns. So it's it's a lot of multi-disciplines that all kind of come together in this weird thing that I've been doing musically for decades now.
DC: Yeah, I feel like you've just mentioned like 5, 6, 7 different genres in the past five minutes.
AL: Sure, sure. Alright. And then to make it even dumber. Every year, every other year or so, a group of performers will put together -- when Mohawk was still open, every year Mohawk hosted a Halloween party. And it'd be bands playing sets of other music. So when I started working there, we got involved with that almost every year, and we did Blue Cheer one year. Another year, we put together the Spinal Tap show. And we we did the Spinal Tap set. We even had three drummers. We had a little Stonehenge that came down from the ceiling. We've played. We get Hawkwind one year and we had Pam Swarts and Paul Burton as part of the band for that. So we try to do weird things. People scratch their heads when we talk about “Oh yeah. This is our stupid idea this year.” Like “Really? That? That's what you're doing?” But we also reach out to other musicians from other disciplines and other things that they do, and try to bring them in and include them. None of the guys I play with are clicky, or elitist in anything we do. We're just so invested in performance and having the connection with other musicians and with the people that come out to consume what we're doing. If they're dancing, and if they're smiling from ear to ear or tapping their feet. For a long time with The Chloroform group, we were playing a lot of non-traditional performances. We did the Mercedes-Benz Industry party one year. We used to play fashion shows, where not only would the band be in some some fashion pieces, whether it was clothing or jewelry or whatever, but we would also be part of this multi-discipline performance with models and DJ's and all sorts of crazy stuff. So it's always been about what's the weirdc ool thing we can do. That's not to say we don't just love playing on a stage, just performing, but if we can make a challenge out of it, or find a challenging thing where we kind of scratch our heads and go “How’s this gonna work?” I love that kind of thing.
DC: So I'm going to take you back to a far away time. Long, long ago or whatever that Star Wars phrase is, because it's uh May 4th. You said you started playing music when you were 12. So do you have musicians in your family? Did you just randomly decide ‘You know what? I'm gonna start playing bass.’ Like, how did this all evolve to where you are now?
AL: Both sides of my family are very musical. My mother's side of the family for the most part is related to either church, or family gatherings. At least that's what I was raised to believe. When I got to a certain age, I found out that my great uncle was a piano player. It was still related to church things, but he was a professional piano player through churches in the Deep South. When he was a young man, he left Western, NY, and moved to Alabama. And his father, my great grandfather, was a professional musician. Starting sometime around 17 or so up, until a week before he got married. And outside of the Sunday family get together where people would play the piano and sing sometimes, I never knew any of that until I got to be an adult. It was kind of a dirty little secret in that part of my family. My dad's side, my father has been in and out of band his whole life. He is still involved in the music. He's more in Bluegrass and Americana stuff now, and he's out in the Midwest. But his father? He was kind of a country superstar. The Buffalo Music Hall of Fame, a couple of years ago, did a focus on his material that he had put out. He had a number one in 1954 called “CB Baby.” CB Trucker Music was a thing in the 70’s, but my grandfather had tracked one of the first songs in that category 20 years before. He was in a band called the Southern Comforts, and he played pedal steel. And when I was a real little kid, I remember being over at his house and he would set up his instrument and he'd turn everything up loud and he had these great big giant amplifiers, and I would just sit there in front of them, totally, enraptured in the volume, and in the things he was doing and I would always say to him, “I want to do this. I want to do this.” When I was really little, he would just kind of smile and laugh about it. And when I got to be about, I don't know, 14 or 15 and I had started playing out a little bit. He had said, “You know, this is not a great thing to do. You know this is not a good decision to make. But if this is what you're here to do, you can't do anything else.” And that's only stuck with me, and what it's meant to me has changed over the years. And there's been times where I was on the road and have been in the back of the van for six weeks. And it's like, man, he wasn't lying when he said this was a terrible life. That and then other times, you're on a stage and you're in front of almost every face in the audience and you're just really in the moment. Your playing is great and your stage presentation is great. And there's just this this extra elevation. Those were the moments where I understood that. You can't do anything else. So I come from long lines of musicians on both sides of my family and it's connected to different things. Like I said, with my mother's family, a lot of it is related to church stuff. And it sounds a little cliche in some ways. But like you know, Sunday dinners at my great grandmother's house when I was little and the family still all got together. Eventually, somebody sat down at the piano and, you know, within a couple of minutes, we'll go from gospel hymnals from however far back to Jerry Lee Lewis to us. If my uncle Dennis was in town, he he was sitting down at the piano before anything else happened. And he'd start playing like Jimmy Swaggart spiritual. Kind of stuff that he was doing on TV in the in the 70s and 80s. And then he'd get into this boogie woogie junkhouse jazz kind of stuff. And then it'd be Jerry Lee, and then it'd be Elvis tunes and it just... That's how I grew up with my family, we were still getting together before people started to die off. And you know, properties were sold, and stuff like that.
DC: That sounds sooooo wholesome.
AL: It's complicated. Like, that's not what it is. It’s great. But the connotations with the religious connections are... less great.
DC: Well, yeah, there is all that. I mean, we could probably go down that path if we want. If you really want to talk about that too, but.
AL: No, that's OK. It's I think most of us understand that, yeah. So that's OK.
DC: I have... I have pretty strong opinions about the religion. But anyway. OK, so now now I'm taking you to age 18/19/20 now... What is happening then?
AL: So. By that age, I've got a band called Children in Heat, and even though everyone calls us punk rock, but we're not really punk rock, and we're not really a metal band. We're... we're four snotty, ignorant young people, playing what would eventually get called Horror Punk.
DC: One of my favorite genres.
AL: This is a really wild story and it's absolutely true. We had put out two records and at the time the Continental was still open. We were a regular fixture there. We were the idiots that they could call on Thursday and say they needed a band for Friday at two in the morning. We'd say “Yeah, absolutely.” And we were doing a lot of BMI stuff, so BMI had our records and eventually our record ended up in Scranton, PA, and from Scranton, PA, it ended up in West Virginia in the hands of TB from Blitzkid, before he started Blitzkid. And one of our songs ended up copying almost word for word, with a slightly different intro. And it ended up on their second record. Years later, I was touring in this thrash band called Liquid Violence. We were playing at the club in Connecticut where that metal band, Great White, had burned up, and this was the first show after they have remodeled, after that horrible tragedy. They used pyrotechnics on small club and. I think like 87 people died.
DC: Oh yeah, I remember.
AL: So we were the first show back at that club and just by dumb luck. It happened to be with Blitzkid. So I put together a little package from the Children in Heat days. I put both records in there, a T-shirt, and a couple compilations from the indie label Rear part of and when I got introduced to TB, I just handed him the thing. And he looked at the record, his face went white. I’m like “Listen, I'm not mad about anything, but just please tell people where you got the song from. You know, it's not about money. It's not about any of that stuff. Just tell them where you got this from.” And that night, our friend bats, we introduced her to TB and the band, and she ended up marrying TB.
DC: Oh wow.
AL: Yeah. So just just weird little stupid connections like that. But at 18/19/20. We were playing Buffalo, all over the place. We were doing runs all across New York, PA, Ohio. A lot of college parties. Like we played one in Oneonta and we rolled up and the vendor opens and smokes pouring out, beer cans fall out, and the guy running it had a fit. Turns out it was a straight edge party that we got booked on.
DC: That's funny.
AL: We were absolutely not straight edge kids. So that was a stupid thing. And then I relocated to Cleveland for a while and that opened up us playing in Cleveland. At that point that we were playing the Agora, the Garage Stop, the 165th Street pub. Which that's gone. The building isn't even there anymore. Ramones used to play there. By the time we were playing there, there were gaping holes in the ceiling and there were animal messes all over on the floor. So you had to watch where you stepped and where you put things down. And I was in Buffalo more often than I was in Cleveland. Even though that's where my apartment was.
DC: What brought you to Cleveland?
AL: I was supposed to go to art school. I was involved in a relationship, and all those things kind of brought that move about, and I wasn't there very long. 2 years, a little over 2 years.
DC: That's a pretty good amount of time though.
AL: Yeah, I ended up not going to school. I had trouble finding a job. I didn't have a network down there. And I I even tried getting work playing... I auditioned to be in a Klezmer band. That was that worked at a Jewish banquet hall. And I knew the music. And I could do the thing, but the the guy looked me up and down. He's like “I can't in good conscious hire you. You look like a dirtbag heavy metal guy. And your amp looks like a dirt bag heavy metal guy and your bass is half burned up. And I can't hire you.” So whatever. And I move back and we're supposed to go on Warped Tour twice and we had internal conflicts and personality issues, and we couldn't get it together.
DC: And which band was this?
AL: This was the Children in Heat. And by that point, we were on all sorts of comps and we are on skate videos, and we found out years later somebody used our song in a video game. It's like we didn't know.
DC: Oh shit!
AL: But we were those kinds of morons. We had no business sense. We just did whatever. Whenever, however, and the money never mattered. And planning never mattered. And you know, in retrospect, I wish we would have been smart enough to have found, at least, some kind of a manager. Not saying we ever would have been rich and famous. But we would have been more productive.
DC: It would have definitely helped you out a little bit, yeah.
AL: Absolutely, absolutely so.
DC: So what year? Uh, what year are we talking about right now? Just so I have a sense of the time/era.
AL: So that would have been around that would have been around 1999-2000, somewhere in there. I turned 20 in ‘99. I know I was back in Buffalo by 2000.
DC: Ah, I turned 11 in ‘99. But I was going to Warped Tour so.
AL: No, that's great. That's great. Warped Tour was excellent. Even after it evolved and changed and a lot of the people that have grown up with it from the LaSalle Park days were starting to shit all over it. It was still a great thing.
DC: Yeah, when it switched to Darien Lake, though, it was completely different.
AL: It changed drastically, yeah.
DC: Everything about LaSalle Park was so... Perfect. I don't know. I I don't know how to explain it. You know, it's a long time ago.
AL: I wasn't at the first year of LaSalle. But I was at all the other ones. And I went to one Darien Lake one, but I never went in. That's when they were still doing shows in the parking lot. I saw Fishbone and a 10x10 tent in the parking lot. We're all passing joints around watching Fishbone play. I think it was third year, maybe? Might have been fourth year but. Like mainstage was Rancid. And then the side stage to the right was Dropkick Murphy's and then the side stage to the left was Rocket from the Crypt, and then it was Rollins Band like that was so so good. All the guys from the Circle Jerks were there, but they didn't play that day. I was over by the skate ramps, I’m standing there watching a buddy skate and I turn around and Keith Haskins standing there with Chuck Biscuits was like a holy shit, you know? It's it was just so cool. And it was so laid back.
DC: Yeah, people do shit on them. But they were really good for bringing a bunch of kids together to, you know, to experience these bands because I don't think anything like that is happening right now. I'm going to change topics. I might start going on a rant. But what do you think the music scene is now compared to what it was? Because I don't think that there's kids playing bands in their garages or their basements. I don't think that the scenes are really existing anymore.
AL: I know that there's still people that are playing in their garage or in their basement. But it seems very different to me. I mean, I just turned 46 about two months.
DC: Oh, happy birthday two months ago!
AL: Thank you. Thank you. I understand that I'm disconnected from a lot of things, as far as what's new? What's happening, and that kind of deal. But I think and I've seen this with people that I've either worked on their equipment or got an instrument into their hands, or even taught them? (I haven't taught in a few years now, but.) I think the focus now is more... It's easier to be a young person, and get an instrument, and have a tablet, a laptop, or even a really good cell phone -- And be able to make and produce music. That's better quality than the stuff that I was recording in the pro studio 25, almost 30 years ago. Then it used to be. And I think as good a tool as those kind of things are... I think it's also isolating a lot of people that, 25 or 30 years ago, somebody like me? I never had much money, and I had to really hustle for gear, or find something that was broken and then repair it. (That's that's how I got into repairing amplifiers and whatnot.) But once you have the instrument it you got to a certain point where you could play a handful of songs and then you had to find somebody else to do it with. Whether that was through school, or you read through the back pages of Artvoice back then. I even remember when the Internet was message boards, and you could put a post up on a message board, “Hey, I'm a 15 year old. I play bass. I know these 10 songs and I'm looking to play with other people.” And it didn't matter if the other people were as good as you were, or you were as good as them. It didn't matter if you had these great songs, you know what mattered was you were coming together and you were learning how to play with other people. I think that's diminished, and that's had a huge effect on the way bands that happen now. And I think too, it's made it a little scarier to reach out to other people.
DC: I think that's in general, I don't even know if it's just music anymore. In general, I think that people are so isolated and I don't know if it's just been the past five years with COVID and shit. But it's so different now. Granted, again, it's not like people our age are having house parties. But when's the last time you went to a large gathering that wasn't at a bar? Even like a cookout or like a barbecue or a fire?
AL: Yeah. It's very different. With the Children in Heat band, we started out in my mother's garage. And then eventually, we moved to our singer’s garage. His parents were like these old hippies, and they were pretty lax. So, like we took over their garage and we were throwing parties. We threw a big Halloween party. They usually lasted three days. We did 4th of July. And if it would coincide with graduation, the middle of June. Then if the weather was decent enough, we’d do a New Year's Eve thing. Some years we do more parties, we’d do a birthday party for one of the groups of friends. Stuff like that. But it would be free. We didn't charge anything. Like “This is what time it starts. This is when we're gonna play. We might play again. We might have another band there.” Whatever. But it just be all these kids in one place. Doing the same thing, having this celebration of whatever. And even with our record label, (we were part of a label called RUT records,) the label threw a Christmas party every time another release was done. There'd be a party, and it would be at the studio. The guy who owned the label had this big house. The studio was in the basement. Just outside of Batavia, in Pembroke. Even if it was a band that wasn't local cause like we did releases for. We did live releases for Dropkick Murphy's early on. Lars and the Bastards. We get pre-releases of their stuff. Darkbuster, which is Lenny Lashley, who is part of Streetlight Manifesto now. And it was just all dumb luck. We would meet these people in person at a show where we'd be booked on stuff together and these guys are really cool. We had the conversations back and forth, drink too much beer, smoke too much weed and next thing you know, we're putting out a Darkbuster full length record. Six months later, they're getting signed and they're out on tour with the Showcase Showdowns. Which half of those guys are in Dropkick Murphy's now. The connections with Kevin Lyman from Warped Tour. That's how we ended up with Lars and the Bastards in that. But it all those parties were all these different people from all these different bands or all these different things coming together in one place and celebrating this thing that happened... This collaborative team effort? And I don't see that as much anymore. The collaborations are very different now. I could get a call tomorrow or an e-mail tomorrow, more likely, saying ‘We'd like you to play bass on these four tracks’ and they'd send me the backing tracks. I'll sit down in my dining room. On chart out the song, I'll play the song three or four different ways you know. Whatever their notes are asking for, e-mail it off and I'll get a PayPal payment and that'll be that. I'll probably never meet these people in person. I won't have to go to a studio and interact with an engineer or producer. There won't be a physical copy to put it on the wall or hold my hand. There won't be a live show. There won't be an album release party... It’ll be ‘Here's our links to the bandcamp thing.’ ... There's nothing wrong with that, per say. But like just that..., that's a problem.
DC: And I think it's, I think it's super depressing.
AL: Yeah. Yeah, because it takes the team collaborative community coming together to do this thing that's greater than the sum of its parts. I'm not saying that the things I've been a part of are these life changing super music things, but they're important from the standpoint of it's this community collaborative thing.
DC: And it's an experience that you share with other people.
AL: It means a lot more than plugging into a cell phone. It means a lot more than sitting in my dining room in my underpants. Snacks for record that you know people listen to. Maybe, but. it's not a band. So I don't know. All those things are the reason why my Chloroform band is the way it is. It's that collaborative in the moment thing. You can’t watch it on Facebook. You can't buy the record. There is no record. I mean, there's videos from people who are there in the moment. But if you wants to see it and you want to hear it? And you want to know what it's about. You have to come and be there in the room with us. Oh, and I've had people from when I first started the thing. It was that particular thing came about in 2013. So it will be 12 years ago in July. And I had going. We had booked a whole bunch of stuff through the summer. We're on a couple of big festivals, couple Big St. parties here in the city. And our drummer flaked out. And then the guitar player, he walked away from it. So I was stuck with this schedule really good shows. So I reached out to Brian Flynn, (he plays guitar in almost the most of the things I'm in now.) I said listen, I really need some help and he came out to my place and he's like I can't learn this music, man. We have five days til the first show. I can't learn this stuff. It's too crazy. It's like, "What do you want to do?" So we we both kind of thought about it for a minute and we both said "Let's just do it." And you know, we we grabbed the drummer and talked to our percussionist dude and like, listen. This might not be for very long, but there's this handful of shows can't let them go. So we're just going to get up there and we're gonna noodle around and try to make it bang. And anybody we told that this is what we're going to do, looking for advice or whatever, everyone just kind of looked at us like we're nuts and said 'there's no way. you're just gonna crash and burn. It's going to be a disaster." The first show was Ottofest, down past Springville. I believe this year is the 48th year they've done it in a row now. Huge property out on the side of the hill. So we we went and we set up and we we played like 3 hours of whatever flowed through us and the crowd loved it. It felt good to us and well, it was kind of kooky. So we did that show the next morning, we got up, loaded up, headed back to the city where we were supposed to play a street festival and the drummer, it was his 39th birthday that day... So he couldn't make it out for the thing. One of our other buddies that happened to be a drummer was riding his bicycle by about half hour before we were supposed to play. And we're like "Hey, listen, we got this set coming up. We need a drummer." And he goes "Ohh well, you know, I don't have my drums and blah blah blah." We're like "We just need the drummer. We have everything else." And he agreed. His name is Jeff Peters. He's mostly known as a DJ and and EDM guy. Jeff ended up playing with us for the next, I don't know, five years.
DC: Oh damn.
AL: And that night, the first drummer, Shane, he overdosed and died.
DC: Ohh nooooooo.
AL: He was the first person I knew.
DC: Birthday guy??
AL: Yeah, the birthday guy.
DC: Oh, I'm so sorry.
AL: He was the first person I knew personally in the area that overdosed from fentanyl.
DC: Fuck man.
AL: He's also the first person I know that they were able to arrest and prosecute the dealer for murder. That was hard.
DC: Yeah. I guess that's a silver lining that they got the dealer. But still, that's fucked.
AL: That was crazy, yeah.
DC: How long ago was that?
AL: That was. That will be 12 years ago in July.
DC: Damn.
AL: We've been through it. I mentioned earlier that we've had people sit in with us or we've tapped other musicians. Zuri Appleby, who's gone on to play with the Nick Jonas band, Lizzo, and Sinbad's band. She played with us at this show at Nietzsche's. We needed another string player, Quinn had a family tragedy and he wasn't able to come. And we didn't know what was going on. He had called earlier in the day and we scrambled around and and Jeff Peters said "I know someone to call." And he called Zuri. Zuri is a real musician. Her father played in the Rick James Band, her mother is a highly respected music teacher who touched thousands of people's lives. But she came in and she's like, “So what do we do?” And we all kind of laughed, like we're going to call out a key, and we're gonna start playing, and once you find where you want to fit in, we'll make space under what you're doing. She did the show and the next day she left to go to LA to start the Nick Jonas tour.
DC: Wow. Oh wow.
AL: Our percussionist’s brother is involved in the Boston Pops Orchestra. He's sax player. We had him sit in with us at a handful of shows, a couple of years before Covid, and because of his playing background, we were playing like Miles Davis kind of quartet stuff with him. That that was pretty cool. We've had accordion players, we've had guitar players. We've had extra drummers. Mohammed, from Mohammed School of Music. He's played violin and guitar with us. I don't know. It's one of those things that's just like. We don't say no.
DC: Right? And why would you this? It sounds super fun.
AL: It's such a blast. My my only regret with it. I I wish. I wish I could figure out how to monetize it. So it paid for itself. Not that it's all about money, but.
DC: It helps though. I understand. So. You've mostly been in Western New York your entire life. Then it sounds like right?
AL: For the most part.
DC: So what is? What is your favorite? Uh, what's your favorite thing about Buffalo?
AL: It's the support network that's here. Partly that I've enriched over help supporting other people and the reciprocal thing. But also in the talented supportive people that are here, Fred Betschen and GCR studios. I've known Fred for almost 30 years. All the full length records I've been a part of that were my own projects. Freddy either engineered, produced or get both on them. And Fred's one of those people that every project I've known him would be a part of. Whether it was mine or somebody else's. Freddy's always the guy that will absolutely try it the way that you're doing. And then in the kindness, easiest way and most constructive way will give you the critique, and three other ways to try it. And he's also the guy that, he believes in everybody. On our second record I did with with the Children in Heat band, we had struggled through the process. Our interpersonal relationships were were in a pretty low spot at the time. The guy running the studio actually threw us out out of the studio at one point. And tried to reach out to each of us individually. Talked to through stuff. Sat us all down together. Talked us through that. And got us back in in the studio productive. And then at the end of it when he was going to do the final mixes, he said “I'm going to do something else with this. Just forget about it for a couple of weeks.” Fred took the tapes and sent them to Electric Lady in NYC, which had just been retrofitted and brought into the another modern times. He knew the the engineer that had taken it over and we were the first record to go through the new Electric Lady. And it was purely because Fred believed in what we were doing. There's been really great club owners here. And it doesn't necessarily mean that it's always been, you know, the best, right?
DC: Oh yeah, yeah.
AL: People like Rick Platt at Mohawk. Rick was always so good to me and to all the people that I knew. Whether it was a place to play, a place to shoot a video, a place to do a recording. Or even if you needed a place to practice on a real stage because you were going to go out on tour. Rick was always great for that. Nietzsche's was always always really good to so many people. Guys like Mike Mulley, Queen City gallery. Most people know Mike now as just a photographer who sells records. But for 40 something years Mike was doing fanzines. He was doing photographs for bands. He still runs and curates a site called Buffalo Music People. And photographs, he does video. He does unsolicited promotion. It's like “Hey, there's this really great band that I know from New Orleans that's playing here. Here's the video. Here's their pictures. Here's the record. Here's a review on the record.” Mike had a gallery on Allen at College for 25 years. College Street Gallery. If it wasn't for Mike Mulley having College Street gallery guys like Tyler Wescott and the Folkfaces probably never would have made it.
DC: Yeah.
AL: You know, they were playing in there when they were kids, like 14 years old. To me, that's the most important thing about Buffalo. And I've seen similar things other places, but it's never been quite the same as it is here. I toured all over Canada. I toured all over the US, as far West as Dallas and never made it to the West Coast, but, where I do see those similar things is generally in cities like Buffalo... blue collar, traditionally very poor. And where arts and entertainment isn't necessarily a career choice, it's survival. You know, if you don't do it... you're going to be doing self-destructive things.
DC: Yeah.
AL: It's at least that's what I've seen. And I've seen it in North Jersey. I've seen it in Cleveland. I've seen it in Detroit. New York City, when you get out from under the big name places and it's it's the DIY. If we're not supporting each other and we haven't found a place to, to survive... we won't survive. That's where I've seen similar kind of things and it's excellent. Infringement Fest is kind of one of those things that. The way it is in Buffalo now. It's very different from the Infringement that I knew for years. But it's still so important, and it's for those reasons. And with Infringement, whether you're talking the original one in Montreal, where it was theater kids or, you're talking Buffalo, with the multi-discipline things, it's still ultimately about community and creating a space for people that wouldn't get it otherwise. That's so super important to me.
DC: Yeah. Wow. Sorry, uh. It got really. We got really serious, and I got really like, I'm like a little teary eyed right now.
AL: That's OK.
DC: Yeah, I mean it. I think music is one of the most important things in life. If not, the most important thing in life, to be honest with you. I don't know where I would be without it. And just thinking about how... thinking about my dead friends and stuff. But you know, we touched on the fentanyl and wow. OK, well, this was we're almost at 50 minutes, man. That's a good one.
AL: Oh wow.
DC: That's a good chunky interview. Thank you so much for sharing your world with me.
AL: Sure. Thanks for listening.
DC: Are there anything any last words, you have anythingou wanted me to ask you? Anything you want to shout out? Any anything coming up?
AL: May 23rd at the Beachland Ballroom in Cleveland. We're doing a big Motörhead show. This year is the 50th anniversary of the beginning of Motörhead. So, with that being said, me and the guys in that group, we're trying to do a handful of bigger shows. And it's kind of weird... everything in my life has been by dumb luck and right place, right time and being able to recognize all this. This could be a cool thing. And the Beachland Show came out of the wreckage of what was supposed to be North American Space Rock Fest 25. Which sadly is not going to happen this year, and the ashes of a series of shows with one of the with one of the Hawkwind guys and initially we're all kind of bummed out that those things weren't going to happen after all. And then. A couple of opportunities jumped up out those ashes. So, that's the next one. And Cleveland isn't that far. Buffalo to the to the club is about 2 1/2 hours, so.
DC: Yeah. No, not at all. I just watched a band from Cleveland play at Amy's Place last night. They were pretty good.
AL: Very nice.
DC: All right, cool. Thank you so much and have a great day.
AL: You too. Thank you.
DC: You're welcome.
AL: Take it easy. Bye bye.
DC: All right, bye.
Andrew Loefke: Sure. My name is Andrew Loefke. I'm a musician in the Western, NY area. I've been playing since I was about 12 years old. I currently play in six bands. I do studio work. I ran house sound at Mohawk for a very long time. Toured all over North America. Put out all sorts of records. Done all sorts of weird wild, cool stuff that people said “You can't do that” and like, I basically said “Really? Watch me.”
DC: Six bands right now???
AL: Six, yeah.
DC: How do you have the time for six bands?
AL: So it sounds crazier than it is. The one original band is called Chloroform. The only long-term members have been me, the guitar player, and our percussionist. There's no songs, there's no written music. We just come together with different drummers, and different sets of musicians, and sometimes people just show up cold at a show and ask if they can be on stage with us. We just play whatever comes out of our hands, our instruments. So there's no rehearsals. It's a very laid back approach to playing. And sometimes it's kind of space rock, and sometimes it's kind of dancey. It depends on the room, depends on the music we've been listening to. So that one almost doesn't count. Then there's a couple other ones, where I've either been playing with the other players off and on for 25-30 years. Or it's music that I've known since I was a little kid. There's a rockabilly psychobilly group I play with out in Rochester; The Tombstone Hands. A bunch of original music, but then a bunch of it is guitar slinger stuff, like Dick Dale, and Link Wray, and stuff that I've been hearing since before I could walk. You know, from other musicians, and my family. And just being around it my whole life. Some of the stuff is very, very easy to do. But then on the other side of that, there’s a new original band that me and a few other guys have put together. We haven't even played out with it yet. But the music is extremely intricate. We've got five original songs. We just started working out the sixth one. It's two guitar players. It's a drummer. It's a bass. It's a singer. And it's taken a lot of work. And a lot of discipline to get this music together. So it's kind of across the board and I stay very busy. The band that I play in that that makes money and allows me to do the other things is a Motörhead tribute act called Iron Fist. And again, it's music that I grew up with. It still takes a lot of work to do it, but it's a little easier to do when you're playing someone else's music and you're just creating a space for people to have some nostalgic enjoyment there. And even though it's a tribute act, like me and the guys in the group, we're very sincere about the music, but we're not overly serious. We don't get this deep attitude about it. It's just we do it because we love what the music was and that whole thing with it. It's not a, it's not something put on like like sometimes happens in that world. So.
DC: So what instruments do you play or instrument, or do you sing? Like what are you in these bands? Cause you had you mentioned percussion and you mentioned guitarist. So are you a bassist?
AL: I am the bass player in virtually everything I play in. I sing in a bunch of the things. (If you can call it singing.) And I don't write as much as I used to, but I do a little of arrangement. Figuring out which song goes where in the original music, you know? You take this riff or this theme, and how do you get to the next one? I kind of fell into that role by accident a bunch of years ago, and in another very complex music group doing a progressive, almost heavy metal stuff, but it sounded like Marconi Music from the Spaghetti Westerns. So it's it's a lot of multi-disciplines that all kind of come together in this weird thing that I've been doing musically for decades now.
DC: Yeah, I feel like you've just mentioned like 5, 6, 7 different genres in the past five minutes.
AL: Sure, sure. Alright. And then to make it even dumber. Every year, every other year or so, a group of performers will put together -- when Mohawk was still open, every year Mohawk hosted a Halloween party. And it'd be bands playing sets of other music. So when I started working there, we got involved with that almost every year, and we did Blue Cheer one year. Another year, we put together the Spinal Tap show. And we we did the Spinal Tap set. We even had three drummers. We had a little Stonehenge that came down from the ceiling. We've played. We get Hawkwind one year and we had Pam Swarts and Paul Burton as part of the band for that. So we try to do weird things. People scratch their heads when we talk about “Oh yeah. This is our stupid idea this year.” Like “Really? That? That's what you're doing?” But we also reach out to other musicians from other disciplines and other things that they do, and try to bring them in and include them. None of the guys I play with are clicky, or elitist in anything we do. We're just so invested in performance and having the connection with other musicians and with the people that come out to consume what we're doing. If they're dancing, and if they're smiling from ear to ear or tapping their feet. For a long time with The Chloroform group, we were playing a lot of non-traditional performances. We did the Mercedes-Benz Industry party one year. We used to play fashion shows, where not only would the band be in some some fashion pieces, whether it was clothing or jewelry or whatever, but we would also be part of this multi-discipline performance with models and DJ's and all sorts of crazy stuff. So it's always been about what's the weirdc ool thing we can do. That's not to say we don't just love playing on a stage, just performing, but if we can make a challenge out of it, or find a challenging thing where we kind of scratch our heads and go “How’s this gonna work?” I love that kind of thing.
DC: So I'm going to take you back to a far away time. Long, long ago or whatever that Star Wars phrase is, because it's uh May 4th. You said you started playing music when you were 12. So do you have musicians in your family? Did you just randomly decide ‘You know what? I'm gonna start playing bass.’ Like, how did this all evolve to where you are now?
AL: Both sides of my family are very musical. My mother's side of the family for the most part is related to either church, or family gatherings. At least that's what I was raised to believe. When I got to a certain age, I found out that my great uncle was a piano player. It was still related to church things, but he was a professional piano player through churches in the Deep South. When he was a young man, he left Western, NY, and moved to Alabama. And his father, my great grandfather, was a professional musician. Starting sometime around 17 or so up, until a week before he got married. And outside of the Sunday family get together where people would play the piano and sing sometimes, I never knew any of that until I got to be an adult. It was kind of a dirty little secret in that part of my family. My dad's side, my father has been in and out of band his whole life. He is still involved in the music. He's more in Bluegrass and Americana stuff now, and he's out in the Midwest. But his father? He was kind of a country superstar. The Buffalo Music Hall of Fame, a couple of years ago, did a focus on his material that he had put out. He had a number one in 1954 called “CB Baby.” CB Trucker Music was a thing in the 70’s, but my grandfather had tracked one of the first songs in that category 20 years before. He was in a band called the Southern Comforts, and he played pedal steel. And when I was a real little kid, I remember being over at his house and he would set up his instrument and he'd turn everything up loud and he had these great big giant amplifiers, and I would just sit there in front of them, totally, enraptured in the volume, and in the things he was doing and I would always say to him, “I want to do this. I want to do this.” When I was really little, he would just kind of smile and laugh about it. And when I got to be about, I don't know, 14 or 15 and I had started playing out a little bit. He had said, “You know, this is not a great thing to do. You know this is not a good decision to make. But if this is what you're here to do, you can't do anything else.” And that's only stuck with me, and what it's meant to me has changed over the years. And there's been times where I was on the road and have been in the back of the van for six weeks. And it's like, man, he wasn't lying when he said this was a terrible life. That and then other times, you're on a stage and you're in front of almost every face in the audience and you're just really in the moment. Your playing is great and your stage presentation is great. And there's just this this extra elevation. Those were the moments where I understood that. You can't do anything else. So I come from long lines of musicians on both sides of my family and it's connected to different things. Like I said, with my mother's family, a lot of it is related to church stuff. And it sounds a little cliche in some ways. But like you know, Sunday dinners at my great grandmother's house when I was little and the family still all got together. Eventually, somebody sat down at the piano and, you know, within a couple of minutes, we'll go from gospel hymnals from however far back to Jerry Lee Lewis to us. If my uncle Dennis was in town, he he was sitting down at the piano before anything else happened. And he'd start playing like Jimmy Swaggart spiritual. Kind of stuff that he was doing on TV in the in the 70s and 80s. And then he'd get into this boogie woogie junkhouse jazz kind of stuff. And then it'd be Jerry Lee, and then it'd be Elvis tunes and it just... That's how I grew up with my family, we were still getting together before people started to die off. And you know, properties were sold, and stuff like that.
DC: That sounds sooooo wholesome.
AL: It's complicated. Like, that's not what it is. It’s great. But the connotations with the religious connections are... less great.
DC: Well, yeah, there is all that. I mean, we could probably go down that path if we want. If you really want to talk about that too, but.
AL: No, that's OK. It's I think most of us understand that, yeah. So that's OK.
DC: I have... I have pretty strong opinions about the religion. But anyway. OK, so now now I'm taking you to age 18/19/20 now... What is happening then?
AL: So. By that age, I've got a band called Children in Heat, and even though everyone calls us punk rock, but we're not really punk rock, and we're not really a metal band. We're... we're four snotty, ignorant young people, playing what would eventually get called Horror Punk.
DC: One of my favorite genres.
AL: This is a really wild story and it's absolutely true. We had put out two records and at the time the Continental was still open. We were a regular fixture there. We were the idiots that they could call on Thursday and say they needed a band for Friday at two in the morning. We'd say “Yeah, absolutely.” And we were doing a lot of BMI stuff, so BMI had our records and eventually our record ended up in Scranton, PA, and from Scranton, PA, it ended up in West Virginia in the hands of TB from Blitzkid, before he started Blitzkid. And one of our songs ended up copying almost word for word, with a slightly different intro. And it ended up on their second record. Years later, I was touring in this thrash band called Liquid Violence. We were playing at the club in Connecticut where that metal band, Great White, had burned up, and this was the first show after they have remodeled, after that horrible tragedy. They used pyrotechnics on small club and. I think like 87 people died.
DC: Oh yeah, I remember.
AL: So we were the first show back at that club and just by dumb luck. It happened to be with Blitzkid. So I put together a little package from the Children in Heat days. I put both records in there, a T-shirt, and a couple compilations from the indie label Rear part of and when I got introduced to TB, I just handed him the thing. And he looked at the record, his face went white. I’m like “Listen, I'm not mad about anything, but just please tell people where you got the song from. You know, it's not about money. It's not about any of that stuff. Just tell them where you got this from.” And that night, our friend bats, we introduced her to TB and the band, and she ended up marrying TB.
DC: Oh wow.
AL: Yeah. So just just weird little stupid connections like that. But at 18/19/20. We were playing Buffalo, all over the place. We were doing runs all across New York, PA, Ohio. A lot of college parties. Like we played one in Oneonta and we rolled up and the vendor opens and smokes pouring out, beer cans fall out, and the guy running it had a fit. Turns out it was a straight edge party that we got booked on.
DC: That's funny.
AL: We were absolutely not straight edge kids. So that was a stupid thing. And then I relocated to Cleveland for a while and that opened up us playing in Cleveland. At that point that we were playing the Agora, the Garage Stop, the 165th Street pub. Which that's gone. The building isn't even there anymore. Ramones used to play there. By the time we were playing there, there were gaping holes in the ceiling and there were animal messes all over on the floor. So you had to watch where you stepped and where you put things down. And I was in Buffalo more often than I was in Cleveland. Even though that's where my apartment was.
DC: What brought you to Cleveland?
AL: I was supposed to go to art school. I was involved in a relationship, and all those things kind of brought that move about, and I wasn't there very long. 2 years, a little over 2 years.
DC: That's a pretty good amount of time though.
AL: Yeah, I ended up not going to school. I had trouble finding a job. I didn't have a network down there. And I I even tried getting work playing... I auditioned to be in a Klezmer band. That was that worked at a Jewish banquet hall. And I knew the music. And I could do the thing, but the the guy looked me up and down. He's like “I can't in good conscious hire you. You look like a dirtbag heavy metal guy. And your amp looks like a dirt bag heavy metal guy and your bass is half burned up. And I can't hire you.” So whatever. And I move back and we're supposed to go on Warped Tour twice and we had internal conflicts and personality issues, and we couldn't get it together.
DC: And which band was this?
AL: This was the Children in Heat. And by that point, we were on all sorts of comps and we are on skate videos, and we found out years later somebody used our song in a video game. It's like we didn't know.
DC: Oh shit!
AL: But we were those kinds of morons. We had no business sense. We just did whatever. Whenever, however, and the money never mattered. And planning never mattered. And you know, in retrospect, I wish we would have been smart enough to have found, at least, some kind of a manager. Not saying we ever would have been rich and famous. But we would have been more productive.
DC: It would have definitely helped you out a little bit, yeah.
AL: Absolutely, absolutely so.
DC: So what year? Uh, what year are we talking about right now? Just so I have a sense of the time/era.
AL: So that would have been around that would have been around 1999-2000, somewhere in there. I turned 20 in ‘99. I know I was back in Buffalo by 2000.
DC: Ah, I turned 11 in ‘99. But I was going to Warped Tour so.
AL: No, that's great. That's great. Warped Tour was excellent. Even after it evolved and changed and a lot of the people that have grown up with it from the LaSalle Park days were starting to shit all over it. It was still a great thing.
DC: Yeah, when it switched to Darien Lake, though, it was completely different.
AL: It changed drastically, yeah.
DC: Everything about LaSalle Park was so... Perfect. I don't know. I I don't know how to explain it. You know, it's a long time ago.
AL: I wasn't at the first year of LaSalle. But I was at all the other ones. And I went to one Darien Lake one, but I never went in. That's when they were still doing shows in the parking lot. I saw Fishbone and a 10x10 tent in the parking lot. We're all passing joints around watching Fishbone play. I think it was third year, maybe? Might have been fourth year but. Like mainstage was Rancid. And then the side stage to the right was Dropkick Murphy's and then the side stage to the left was Rocket from the Crypt, and then it was Rollins Band like that was so so good. All the guys from the Circle Jerks were there, but they didn't play that day. I was over by the skate ramps, I’m standing there watching a buddy skate and I turn around and Keith Haskins standing there with Chuck Biscuits was like a holy shit, you know? It's it was just so cool. And it was so laid back.
DC: Yeah, people do shit on them. But they were really good for bringing a bunch of kids together to, you know, to experience these bands because I don't think anything like that is happening right now. I'm going to change topics. I might start going on a rant. But what do you think the music scene is now compared to what it was? Because I don't think that there's kids playing bands in their garages or their basements. I don't think that the scenes are really existing anymore.
AL: I know that there's still people that are playing in their garage or in their basement. But it seems very different to me. I mean, I just turned 46 about two months.
DC: Oh, happy birthday two months ago!
AL: Thank you. Thank you. I understand that I'm disconnected from a lot of things, as far as what's new? What's happening, and that kind of deal. But I think and I've seen this with people that I've either worked on their equipment or got an instrument into their hands, or even taught them? (I haven't taught in a few years now, but.) I think the focus now is more... It's easier to be a young person, and get an instrument, and have a tablet, a laptop, or even a really good cell phone -- And be able to make and produce music. That's better quality than the stuff that I was recording in the pro studio 25, almost 30 years ago. Then it used to be. And I think as good a tool as those kind of things are... I think it's also isolating a lot of people that, 25 or 30 years ago, somebody like me? I never had much money, and I had to really hustle for gear, or find something that was broken and then repair it. (That's that's how I got into repairing amplifiers and whatnot.) But once you have the instrument it you got to a certain point where you could play a handful of songs and then you had to find somebody else to do it with. Whether that was through school, or you read through the back pages of Artvoice back then. I even remember when the Internet was message boards, and you could put a post up on a message board, “Hey, I'm a 15 year old. I play bass. I know these 10 songs and I'm looking to play with other people.” And it didn't matter if the other people were as good as you were, or you were as good as them. It didn't matter if you had these great songs, you know what mattered was you were coming together and you were learning how to play with other people. I think that's diminished, and that's had a huge effect on the way bands that happen now. And I think too, it's made it a little scarier to reach out to other people.
DC: I think that's in general, I don't even know if it's just music anymore. In general, I think that people are so isolated and I don't know if it's just been the past five years with COVID and shit. But it's so different now. Granted, again, it's not like people our age are having house parties. But when's the last time you went to a large gathering that wasn't at a bar? Even like a cookout or like a barbecue or a fire?
AL: Yeah. It's very different. With the Children in Heat band, we started out in my mother's garage. And then eventually, we moved to our singer’s garage. His parents were like these old hippies, and they were pretty lax. So, like we took over their garage and we were throwing parties. We threw a big Halloween party. They usually lasted three days. We did 4th of July. And if it would coincide with graduation, the middle of June. Then if the weather was decent enough, we’d do a New Year's Eve thing. Some years we do more parties, we’d do a birthday party for one of the groups of friends. Stuff like that. But it would be free. We didn't charge anything. Like “This is what time it starts. This is when we're gonna play. We might play again. We might have another band there.” Whatever. But it just be all these kids in one place. Doing the same thing, having this celebration of whatever. And even with our record label, (we were part of a label called RUT records,) the label threw a Christmas party every time another release was done. There'd be a party, and it would be at the studio. The guy who owned the label had this big house. The studio was in the basement. Just outside of Batavia, in Pembroke. Even if it was a band that wasn't local cause like we did releases for. We did live releases for Dropkick Murphy's early on. Lars and the Bastards. We get pre-releases of their stuff. Darkbuster, which is Lenny Lashley, who is part of Streetlight Manifesto now. And it was just all dumb luck. We would meet these people in person at a show where we'd be booked on stuff together and these guys are really cool. We had the conversations back and forth, drink too much beer, smoke too much weed and next thing you know, we're putting out a Darkbuster full length record. Six months later, they're getting signed and they're out on tour with the Showcase Showdowns. Which half of those guys are in Dropkick Murphy's now. The connections with Kevin Lyman from Warped Tour. That's how we ended up with Lars and the Bastards in that. But it all those parties were all these different people from all these different bands or all these different things coming together in one place and celebrating this thing that happened... This collaborative team effort? And I don't see that as much anymore. The collaborations are very different now. I could get a call tomorrow or an e-mail tomorrow, more likely, saying ‘We'd like you to play bass on these four tracks’ and they'd send me the backing tracks. I'll sit down in my dining room. On chart out the song, I'll play the song three or four different ways you know. Whatever their notes are asking for, e-mail it off and I'll get a PayPal payment and that'll be that. I'll probably never meet these people in person. I won't have to go to a studio and interact with an engineer or producer. There won't be a physical copy to put it on the wall or hold my hand. There won't be a live show. There won't be an album release party... It’ll be ‘Here's our links to the bandcamp thing.’ ... There's nothing wrong with that, per say. But like just that..., that's a problem.
DC: And I think it's, I think it's super depressing.
AL: Yeah. Yeah, because it takes the team collaborative community coming together to do this thing that's greater than the sum of its parts. I'm not saying that the things I've been a part of are these life changing super music things, but they're important from the standpoint of it's this community collaborative thing.
DC: And it's an experience that you share with other people.
AL: It means a lot more than plugging into a cell phone. It means a lot more than sitting in my dining room in my underpants. Snacks for record that you know people listen to. Maybe, but. it's not a band. So I don't know. All those things are the reason why my Chloroform band is the way it is. It's that collaborative in the moment thing. You can’t watch it on Facebook. You can't buy the record. There is no record. I mean, there's videos from people who are there in the moment. But if you wants to see it and you want to hear it? And you want to know what it's about. You have to come and be there in the room with us. Oh, and I've had people from when I first started the thing. It was that particular thing came about in 2013. So it will be 12 years ago in July. And I had going. We had booked a whole bunch of stuff through the summer. We're on a couple of big festivals, couple Big St. parties here in the city. And our drummer flaked out. And then the guitar player, he walked away from it. So I was stuck with this schedule really good shows. So I reached out to Brian Flynn, (he plays guitar in almost the most of the things I'm in now.) I said listen, I really need some help and he came out to my place and he's like I can't learn this music, man. We have five days til the first show. I can't learn this stuff. It's too crazy. It's like, "What do you want to do?" So we we both kind of thought about it for a minute and we both said "Let's just do it." And you know, we we grabbed the drummer and talked to our percussionist dude and like, listen. This might not be for very long, but there's this handful of shows can't let them go. So we're just going to get up there and we're gonna noodle around and try to make it bang. And anybody we told that this is what we're going to do, looking for advice or whatever, everyone just kind of looked at us like we're nuts and said 'there's no way. you're just gonna crash and burn. It's going to be a disaster." The first show was Ottofest, down past Springville. I believe this year is the 48th year they've done it in a row now. Huge property out on the side of the hill. So we we went and we set up and we we played like 3 hours of whatever flowed through us and the crowd loved it. It felt good to us and well, it was kind of kooky. So we did that show the next morning, we got up, loaded up, headed back to the city where we were supposed to play a street festival and the drummer, it was his 39th birthday that day... So he couldn't make it out for the thing. One of our other buddies that happened to be a drummer was riding his bicycle by about half hour before we were supposed to play. And we're like "Hey, listen, we got this set coming up. We need a drummer." And he goes "Ohh well, you know, I don't have my drums and blah blah blah." We're like "We just need the drummer. We have everything else." And he agreed. His name is Jeff Peters. He's mostly known as a DJ and and EDM guy. Jeff ended up playing with us for the next, I don't know, five years.
DC: Oh damn.
AL: And that night, the first drummer, Shane, he overdosed and died.
DC: Ohh nooooooo.
AL: He was the first person I knew.
DC: Birthday guy??
AL: Yeah, the birthday guy.
DC: Oh, I'm so sorry.
AL: He was the first person I knew personally in the area that overdosed from fentanyl.
DC: Fuck man.
AL: He's also the first person I know that they were able to arrest and prosecute the dealer for murder. That was hard.
DC: Yeah. I guess that's a silver lining that they got the dealer. But still, that's fucked.
AL: That was crazy, yeah.
DC: How long ago was that?
AL: That was. That will be 12 years ago in July.
DC: Damn.
AL: We've been through it. I mentioned earlier that we've had people sit in with us or we've tapped other musicians. Zuri Appleby, who's gone on to play with the Nick Jonas band, Lizzo, and Sinbad's band. She played with us at this show at Nietzsche's. We needed another string player, Quinn had a family tragedy and he wasn't able to come. And we didn't know what was going on. He had called earlier in the day and we scrambled around and and Jeff Peters said "I know someone to call." And he called Zuri. Zuri is a real musician. Her father played in the Rick James Band, her mother is a highly respected music teacher who touched thousands of people's lives. But she came in and she's like, “So what do we do?” And we all kind of laughed, like we're going to call out a key, and we're gonna start playing, and once you find where you want to fit in, we'll make space under what you're doing. She did the show and the next day she left to go to LA to start the Nick Jonas tour.
DC: Wow. Oh wow.
AL: Our percussionist’s brother is involved in the Boston Pops Orchestra. He's sax player. We had him sit in with us at a handful of shows, a couple of years before Covid, and because of his playing background, we were playing like Miles Davis kind of quartet stuff with him. That that was pretty cool. We've had accordion players, we've had guitar players. We've had extra drummers. Mohammed, from Mohammed School of Music. He's played violin and guitar with us. I don't know. It's one of those things that's just like. We don't say no.
DC: Right? And why would you this? It sounds super fun.
AL: It's such a blast. My my only regret with it. I I wish. I wish I could figure out how to monetize it. So it paid for itself. Not that it's all about money, but.
DC: It helps though. I understand. So. You've mostly been in Western New York your entire life. Then it sounds like right?
AL: For the most part.
DC: So what is? What is your favorite? Uh, what's your favorite thing about Buffalo?
AL: It's the support network that's here. Partly that I've enriched over help supporting other people and the reciprocal thing. But also in the talented supportive people that are here, Fred Betschen and GCR studios. I've known Fred for almost 30 years. All the full length records I've been a part of that were my own projects. Freddy either engineered, produced or get both on them. And Fred's one of those people that every project I've known him would be a part of. Whether it was mine or somebody else's. Freddy's always the guy that will absolutely try it the way that you're doing. And then in the kindness, easiest way and most constructive way will give you the critique, and three other ways to try it. And he's also the guy that, he believes in everybody. On our second record I did with with the Children in Heat band, we had struggled through the process. Our interpersonal relationships were were in a pretty low spot at the time. The guy running the studio actually threw us out out of the studio at one point. And tried to reach out to each of us individually. Talked to through stuff. Sat us all down together. Talked us through that. And got us back in in the studio productive. And then at the end of it when he was going to do the final mixes, he said “I'm going to do something else with this. Just forget about it for a couple of weeks.” Fred took the tapes and sent them to Electric Lady in NYC, which had just been retrofitted and brought into the another modern times. He knew the the engineer that had taken it over and we were the first record to go through the new Electric Lady. And it was purely because Fred believed in what we were doing. There's been really great club owners here. And it doesn't necessarily mean that it's always been, you know, the best, right?
DC: Oh yeah, yeah.
AL: People like Rick Platt at Mohawk. Rick was always so good to me and to all the people that I knew. Whether it was a place to play, a place to shoot a video, a place to do a recording. Or even if you needed a place to practice on a real stage because you were going to go out on tour. Rick was always great for that. Nietzsche's was always always really good to so many people. Guys like Mike Mulley, Queen City gallery. Most people know Mike now as just a photographer who sells records. But for 40 something years Mike was doing fanzines. He was doing photographs for bands. He still runs and curates a site called Buffalo Music People. And photographs, he does video. He does unsolicited promotion. It's like “Hey, there's this really great band that I know from New Orleans that's playing here. Here's the video. Here's their pictures. Here's the record. Here's a review on the record.” Mike had a gallery on Allen at College for 25 years. College Street Gallery. If it wasn't for Mike Mulley having College Street gallery guys like Tyler Wescott and the Folkfaces probably never would have made it.
DC: Yeah.
AL: You know, they were playing in there when they were kids, like 14 years old. To me, that's the most important thing about Buffalo. And I've seen similar things other places, but it's never been quite the same as it is here. I toured all over Canada. I toured all over the US, as far West as Dallas and never made it to the West Coast, but, where I do see those similar things is generally in cities like Buffalo... blue collar, traditionally very poor. And where arts and entertainment isn't necessarily a career choice, it's survival. You know, if you don't do it... you're going to be doing self-destructive things.
DC: Yeah.
AL: It's at least that's what I've seen. And I've seen it in North Jersey. I've seen it in Cleveland. I've seen it in Detroit. New York City, when you get out from under the big name places and it's it's the DIY. If we're not supporting each other and we haven't found a place to, to survive... we won't survive. That's where I've seen similar kind of things and it's excellent. Infringement Fest is kind of one of those things that. The way it is in Buffalo now. It's very different from the Infringement that I knew for years. But it's still so important, and it's for those reasons. And with Infringement, whether you're talking the original one in Montreal, where it was theater kids or, you're talking Buffalo, with the multi-discipline things, it's still ultimately about community and creating a space for people that wouldn't get it otherwise. That's so super important to me.
DC: Yeah. Wow. Sorry, uh. It got really. We got really serious, and I got really like, I'm like a little teary eyed right now.
AL: That's OK.
DC: Yeah, I mean it. I think music is one of the most important things in life. If not, the most important thing in life, to be honest with you. I don't know where I would be without it. And just thinking about how... thinking about my dead friends and stuff. But you know, we touched on the fentanyl and wow. OK, well, this was we're almost at 50 minutes, man. That's a good one.
AL: Oh wow.
DC: That's a good chunky interview. Thank you so much for sharing your world with me.
AL: Sure. Thanks for listening.
DC: Are there anything any last words, you have anythingou wanted me to ask you? Anything you want to shout out? Any anything coming up?
AL: May 23rd at the Beachland Ballroom in Cleveland. We're doing a big Motörhead show. This year is the 50th anniversary of the beginning of Motörhead. So, with that being said, me and the guys in that group, we're trying to do a handful of bigger shows. And it's kind of weird... everything in my life has been by dumb luck and right place, right time and being able to recognize all this. This could be a cool thing. And the Beachland Show came out of the wreckage of what was supposed to be North American Space Rock Fest 25. Which sadly is not going to happen this year, and the ashes of a series of shows with one of the with one of the Hawkwind guys and initially we're all kind of bummed out that those things weren't going to happen after all. And then. A couple of opportunities jumped up out those ashes. So, that's the next one. And Cleveland isn't that far. Buffalo to the to the club is about 2 1/2 hours, so.
DC: Yeah. No, not at all. I just watched a band from Cleveland play at Amy's Place last night. They were pretty good.
AL: Very nice.
DC: All right, cool. Thank you so much and have a great day.
AL: You too. Thank you.
DC: You're welcome.
AL: Take it easy. Bye bye.
DC: All right, bye.