A Family Affair
The title was meant to be “Another Family Affair” but it somehow got messed up and when Jake Bannon finished the layout on this record as well, I just left it.
By the time we started writing this record, Tony Scaglione had moved and we needed a new drummer. We went through a few guys until we got Greg Hall from Sacred Reich to play with us. The funny thing is, the very first song I ever sang when I tried out for a band in 8th grade as a kid was “The American Way” by Sacred Reich. Greg’s band PWR had just broken up and we quickly scooped him up.
Also, Mob 40’s went through some changes and they also broke up. I got to sing a song on their second demo before they called it quits. I asked Luke right away to join NSK as a second guitarist and we started writing a new record together.
Unfortunately, the studio we were recording at closed while we were half way through the album, and we had to move to this horrible and unaffordable huge studio to complete the record.
This really hurt the production value and we were really upset with the final product. We recorded extra material as well during these sessions to use on a split with England’s Stamping Ground for our next release. So both recordings didn’t come out as we had hoped. I always wanted to go re-record this album because the songs ruled it just didn’t sound the way I wanted it to.
The album cover was an old family photo and the little girl at the wedding in the picture is my mother. We wanted it to look like an old Italian songs album and it was perfect. Jake Bannon did this layout as well.
As for guests my buddy, Pete Melucci, who provided the picture for the first album, played and wrote the guitar tracks for “No More Regrets.” Pete played in a NYHC band back in the day called Confusion and he is a sick guitar player. Scott Vogel (Terror and Buried Alive) did a vocal track on “Still Not…The Same.” He sent me the track in the mail from a studio near him and apparently, I placed it in the wrong part of the song! We made it work.
We also had Keith Jackson from a local punk band called The Glass Heroes do a guitar solo or two because he actually knew how to play guitar and we were a bunch of hacks!
A Family Affair was a little different than This Thing of Ours as we started to evolve more as a band. It’s a great album and the start of Luke and I going down a path together as musicians and friends.
