This Thing Of Ours (2001)
This was the start of it all.
We recorded two songs prior to recording This Thing Of Ours. This album was meant to be our full length demo. The funny thing was, I did not intend to sing in this band. I just wanted to play guitar. I hated singing! We were a three-piece band when we recorded this. Tony Scaglione on drums, Richie Gallen on bass, and yours truly on guitar. Tony did the drum tracks and we didn’t get back to the studio for a year to do any other work on this.
We couldn’t seem to find a singer during that down time, so we decided that I should do the vocals in the meantime and use this as a way to help find someone that could growl like I did. Well, I ended up getting stuck with the job of guitar and vocals because it seemed to mesh perfectly.
I was reluctant to shop around the demo, because we just planned to play some local shows here and there, but we started gaining a little momentum. Ritchie really was the one who encouraged us to start sending it to labels. We were surprised to find a lot of labels had interest.
We sent a copy to Relapse Records as a fluke and though we weren’t quite the right fit for that label, someone gave it to Andy “Thorp” King who worked there. Andy had just started Thorp Records and called me immediately. He shared so much excitement about the album, we went with him. He was hungry just starting out and at that point, we were too. We figured he would want us to go record a new album but he liked the demo just the way it was and we released This Thing Of Ours exactly the way it was.
One of my best buddies, Pete, had the this great picture of his grandfather and a few other relatives so we used it for the record cover. The young guy is Pete’s Uncle Frank who I knew. The picture looked like it came straight out of an old Mafia book so we were glad Pete was cool and let us use it. Jake Brannon of Converge did the covers layout. Nice guy.
When it came to guests, Gary Bennett is a friend of ours and he did a guitar track on “Looking Out Again” when he was in Arizona on tour with his band Kill Your Idols. Dennis Welch sang in a few bands in Phoenix and I always admired him, so I talked him into doing vocals on that same track.
As for Luke Bugs doing guest vocals, at the time he played guitar and sang for a killer local band called Mob 40’s. They had just released their first full length record and when I heard Luke sing on it I made a point to get him on our album. He wasn’t even the main singer but he sounded like a crazy pirate and I was sold. He came down and sang on a track called “AZ Social Club.”
Mob 40’s was a powder keg of maniacs and I knew that when they eventually would explode, I had to be there to scoop up Luke cause he was a great fit in North Side Kings.
