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Megadeth frontman Dave Mustaine is heading to New York City for a night of storytelling. Mustaine will take the stage at the Kaufman Music Center on Tuesday, September 8, at 7:30 p.m. for an in-depth conversation tied to the release of his upcoming memoir, In My Darkest Hour.

Tickets are on sale now, priced at $50 and each bundled with a signed copy of the book.

In My Darkest Hour drops the same day via Grand Central Publishing‘s newly relaunched Da Capo imprint. Mustaine co-wrote the book with author Joe Layden, and it walks through his “gnarly” treatment following a 2019 diagnosis of squamous cell carcinoma at the back of his tongue. The memoir tracks how Mustaine bounced between chemo and radiation sessions and marathon studio time to complete Megadeth‘s sixteenth record, The Sick, The Dying … And The Dead!, released in 2022, while also digging into the mental toll of confronting mortality and how family and faith carried him through it.

During a recent TalkShopLive Q&A (transcribed by Blabbermouth), a fan asked the 64-year-old musician whether beating cancer pushed him toward a more spiritual outlook. Mustaine wasn’t buying the premise, saying: “Nah. I was pretty set spiritually before this all happened, and a lot of the people that have suggested stuff online, a lot of them were really wonderful people. So, it was great to see like-minded people, people that were willing to send positive thoughts and feelings my way. But I have to remember my whole thing — God wanting me to be healed — and that that was it. He said that was gonna happen, and I got healed.”

Asked what kept him showing up to the studio through treatment, Mustaine credited the people around him: “Great bandmates. A really professional co-producer. We had a really great thing working. Unfortunately, we had the drama that was going on in an area of the band that has been resolved,” an apparent nod to former bassist David Ellefson‘s May 2021 departure following the leak of sexually explicit messages and footage, “and we don’t usually bring it up very much just because it’s an ugly chapter, and I don’t think anybody wants to talk about it. So, it was mainly focusing on the music, which was such a great thing to go in and do a musical offering to our fans, and to focus on the music instead of all this just crap with people trying to get drama out of bands that they love.”

Mustaine also singled out drummer Dirk Verbeuren for his support during that stretch: “Yeah. Dirk was great. He was wonderful. [Current Megadeth guitarist] Teemu [Mäntysaari] wasn’t in the picture yet. [Then-Megadeth guitarist] Kiko [Loureiro] was very helpful, but I think he was very uncomfortable, and that he was more or less a little bit afraid of what was gonna happen, because here’s this guy that he just met that he really looks up to, and we’ve become friends, and the next thing you know, I’m looking like I’m gonna die on the outside. So, yeah, Dirk was very supportive, and so was my son and my wife. My daughter was also scared a lot too, so I think everybody dealt with it their own way. And we talk about that in the book. Each one of the people that were part of the book, they were asked to share their experience with everything, and I think it turned out really great to have all those different outlooks towards it.”

On what pushed him to actually write the book, Mustaine said: “I personally adore my fans. I did not want them to get as sad as I saw them get. And I was really happy to be able to say that I was in remission once the doctor told me that in October [of 2019].”

He continued: “You never really know with some of these things that happen in your life, the extent of what the treatment’s gonna entail. I had a lot of hope, and I had a lot of people praying for me, a lot of people sending me positive thoughts and stuff. I had money to get good treatment. I was living in an area where the doctors were fantastic. And not everybody’s gonna have that same opportunity. So, I wanted to make sure that I was available to tell my story and share that story of hope. ‘Cause even if you do have access to all that stuff, you’re still afraid. You don’t know what’s going on. And you’re gonna go put your head into a machine that’s meant to fucking kill you.”

Pressed on whether chemo sessions were as grim as they sound, Mustaine didn’t sugarcoat it: “A lot of it I don’t remember. That was one of the terrible things that comes along with when you do radiation and chemotherapy. It’s called chemo brain, where your brain is, as is your entire body, is being attacked, and your body’s dying. So, it was mentally a complete mindfuck to go into some place and to willingly say, ‘Okay, kill me. Kill me a little more today.’ It was very terrifying.”

The Da Capo name isn’t new to music publishing — it’s a revival of Da Capo Press, which Hachette Book Group picked up through its 2016 acquisition of Perseus Book Group before folding it into Hachette Books in 2018. That imprint was later shut down in 2024 amid restructuring at Hachette.

Mustaine framed the book’s stakes in a statement: “One of the most harrowing experiences of my adult life has been my seven-year journey through cancer treatment and onward into remission. This story is considerably more than just, ‘Go to the doctor, get diagnosed, get treatment and hopefully I live happily ever after.’ This was a journey of me saving myself, staying alive, keeping my family together, and continuing to make music through it all.”

Da Capo executive editor Ben Schafer echoed that sentiment, calling the memoir Mustaine‘s most exposed work yet: “In My Darkest Hour is Dave Mustaine at his most revealing, vulnerable, and true. With lacerating honesty and soulful reflection, he speaks to the universal human experience of facing serious illness and how it changes a person, their family and friends, and one’s relationship with creativity.”

Co-author Joe Layden is a The New York Times journalist who’s worked with Mustaine before, having co-written his 2010 autobiography Mustaine: A Heavy Metal Memoir as well as original Kiss guitarist Ace Frehley‘s No Regrets: A Rock ‘N’ Roll Memoir. Layden‘s other credits include The Last Great Fight, chronicling James “Buster” Douglas‘s stunning tenth-round knockout of Mike Tyson in 1990.

Da Capo‘s official synopsis for the book reads: “From King of Metal Dave Mustaine, a powerful reflection on the harsh truths and raw realizations that can only come from confronting death. Dave Mustaine is no stranger to pain and suffering. He battled demons all his life — including an alcoholic father, addiction, and black magic — and turned fifty-eight believing he’d survived the worst. But in 2019, Mustaine was forced to face the loss of his instantly recognizable voice and the disintegration of his musical talent. Diagnosed with squamous cell carcinoma at the back of his tongue, his entire career — and possibly his life — was about to end. For Mustaine, it was one more opportunity to fight like hell. In My Darkest Hour takes readers from the treatment room to the studio as Mustaine chronicles how his diagnosis inspired him to take up the pen and guitar pick, going from radiation and chemotherapy appointments straight into hours-long recording sessions, resulting in Megadeth‘s sixteenth studio album, The Sick, The Dying…And The Dead! Along the way, Mustaine details how confronting his own mortality brought him closer to his family, taught him how to ask for help, strengthened his faith, and challenged the vulnerability of his art. Filled with perseverance, hope, and the determination to never let the bastards grind you down, In My Darkest Hour is a masterful portrait of a Dave Mustaine that the world has yet to see, and serves as a moving reminder that even our most invincible heroes are human.”

This isn’t Mustaine‘s first trip to the shelves. His 2010 memoir, Mustaine: A Heavy Metal Memoir, cracked No. 15 on The New York Times “Hardcover Nonfiction” list and came out stateside via HarperCollins‘s It Books imprint, with a U.K. edition titled Mustaine: A Life In Metal following that September. A decade later, in September 2020, he released Rust In Peace: The Inside Story Of The Megadeth Masterpiece (previously titled Building The Perfect Beast) through Hachette Books, digging into the making of Megadeth‘s classic 1990 album Rust In Peace.

Mustaine went public with his cancer diagnosis in June 2019, when doctors gave him a 90 percent shot at beating it. He’d go on to complete 51 radiation treatments and nine rounds of chemotherapy, declaring himself cancer-free before returning to the stage in early 2020 — just weeks before the pandemic brought touring to a standstill.

Back in 2014, Mustaine and his family relocated to Tennessee partly to support his daughter Electra‘s singing ambitions. Electra now runs House Of Mustaine, a wine brand built around music and culture.

The post MEGADETH’s DAVE MUSTAINE Heads To NYC For “In My Darkest Hour” Book Event: “I Didn’t Want To Stop Recording In Case It Was My Last Record” appeared first on Sonic Perspectives.

The moment a fighter pushes through the tunnel curtain, something almost always hits before the crowd noise does. A riff. A drum hit. Distorted, aggressive, unmistakably metal. It doesn’t feel like a production choice or a playlist shuffle. It feels inevitable. That collision between heavy music and the violence of the ring isn’t coincidental — it’s the product of a long, deliberate cultural convergence, and tracing it reveals something real about both worlds.

Metal and Fight Culture as a Commercial and Cultural Crossover

Zlatan Vukić has spent the better part of eight years working inside regulated iGaming markets, watching how different sports generate different kinds of fan engagement. His read on the metal-combat sports overlap isn’t about the music itself — it’s about what that music signals.

“The intensity mapping between metal’s sonic character and combat sports isn’t incidental. It reflects a structural overlap in fan values — individual struggle, tribal loyalty, the appetite for high-intensity spectacle. From where I sit, boxing and MMA draw the same analytically engaged, deeply partisan fan who follows cards closely and interacts with the entire ecosystem around the fight.”

From his vantage point tracking Croatia’s sports scene, Vukić observes that fight-night intensity carries over directly into how local fans follow and bet on cards. HRSPORT serves Croatia’s boxing and MMA audience as a wagering hub built around the very fight cards that fill metal-scored arenas — an example, he notes, of how structurally unified that fan base has become.

Why Heavy Music and High-Stakes Competition Belong Together

Heavy metal didn’t wander into combat sports by accident. The genre’s defining characteristics — heavily distorted guitars, aggressive percussion, confrontational vocals — create an atmosphere of raw power that maps almost perfectly onto what a fight environment demands. That’s not a coincidence of taste. It’s a functional fit.

Black Sabbath and their contemporaries established the genre’s core aesthetic in the late 1960s and early 1970s, building a sonic language around heaviness and aggression. What those early records communicated emotionally — danger, dominance, controlled chaos — is precisely what a fighter needs an arena to feel before a bout. Sports psychology broadly recognizes that high-tempo, aggressive music elevates arousal and mental readiness before competition. Fighters and their camps have absorbed that principle and turned walk-out selection into a deliberate preparation tool, not a vanity exercise.

The result is a feedback loop. Metal creates the psychological state the competition demands. The competition gives metal a stage with millions watching.

Walk-Out Anthems as Psychological Opening Moves

In boxing and MMA, the walk-out isn’t ceremony. It’s the first move in the mental contest. A fighter’s music choice signals intent, projects confidence, and is designed to destabilize an opponent before the first exchange happens. That framing turned song selection into serious tactical thinking.

The tradition grew significantly through the 1980s and 1990s as televised boxing became large-scale entertainment. Fighters gained a platform to make musical identity part of their public persona, and the choices that landed hardest were consistently metal. Metallica’s catalog became among the most globally recognized in combat sports contexts, appearing in walk-outs and event presentations across promotions and weight classes. Pantera’s “Walk” embedded itself so deeply in fight-night culture that it functions almost as an unofficial anthem for the genre’s connection to competition — a track whose very title fits the ritual.

The UFC’s rise to mainstream prominence accelerated all of it. Metal-scored walk-outs, arena soundscapes saturated with distortion, and pre-fight hype packages built around heavy music reached pay-per-view audiences of millions. The UFC didn’t invent the convention, but it industrialized it and broadcast it globally.

Pro Wrestling Set the Template That Combat Sports Absorbed

Professional wrestling got there first. Before MMA had the cultural infrastructure to build walk-out traditions into a systematic identity, wrestling had already made a performer’s entrance music central to their character. The song wasn’t background — it was a narrative device, a shorthand for who a wrestler was the moment they stepped through the curtain.

Heavy metal drove that system. Hard rock and metal tracks gave wrestlers the sonic vocabulary their characters required — menace, power, rebellion, unpredictability. The most direct institutional expression of that relationship was Motörhead composing original entrance themes for WWE performers. Triple H’s theme, written and performed by Motörhead, became one of the most recognized pieces of music in professional wrestling history. That wasn’t a licensing arrangement — it was a creative collaboration between the metal world and sports entertainment, a signal that the two cultures shared enough common ground to build something together.

What wrestling established, combat sports absorbed. The logic was identical — use music to define a competitor’s identity, prime the crowd, and create an emotional context for the violence about to happen. Metal supplied the only sound that felt equal to those demands.

The Same Arenas, the Same Tribe

The cultural crossover isn’t just sonic. It’s physical and demographic. Metal fans and combat sports fans occupy the same spaces, respond to the same values, and build identity around the same kind of experience.

Both communities prize individual struggle as central. The fighter alone in the ring, the performer alone on stage — both are figures who face something head-on, with no place to hide, in front of a crowd that has come specifically to watch. Tribal loyalty matters in both worlds. You’re a fan of this fighter, this band, this promotion, with the kind of partisan investment that makes following closely feel like something more than passive entertainment. The appetite for live spectacle — collective, loud, visceral — is the same impulse that fills a concert venue and fills an arena on fight night.

Major boxing and MMA events fill the same buildings that host major metal concerts. The Madison Square Gardens and the O2 Arenas of the world don’t distinguish between the two audiences because they don’t need to. The energy those rooms require is the same energy both cultures generate.

That shared infrastructure reinforced what the music had already started. Metal fans found their way into fight audiences because the emotional architecture was already familiar. Fight fans discovered metal because it was already playing when they arrived.

A Loop That Keeps Feeding Itself

Metal elevated the spectacle of combat sports by giving it a sonic identity equal to its intensity. The spectacle extended metal’s reach into mainstream arenas that the genre’s underground roots never would have accessed alone. And the fans who showed up for one found themselves already home in the other.

This isn’t a relationship built on marketing alignment or demographic targeting. It’s structural. The music, the competition, and the community reinforced each other across decades until the boundaries between them became genuinely hard to find. When the next fighter walks out to a wall of distortion, that’s not a playlist choice. That’s a culture making itself visible.

The post Heavy Metal and Combat Sports Share the Same Pulse appeared first on Loaded Radio.

Their new EP “Funerals” will land in late September.

The post Sicksense’s “A Moment Of Violence” Music Video Is Now Streaming appeared first on Theprp.com.

As a young shoegaze kid flirting with goth at the turn of the century, discovering Projekt Records was an absolute game changer for me. For several years, I worshipped the label and its prolific roster, soaking up each new release by Mira, Audra, Mors Syphilitica, Love Spirals Downwards, Lovesliescrushing, Vidna Obmana, Unto Ashes, and many more. My obsession with the label culminated in a pilgrimage with three online friends to Philadelphia in 2002, where I spent a long summer weekend at the Trocadero in Philadelphia for ProjektFest, the label’s regular showcase. Good times, noodle salad.

For the uninitiated, Projekt began in 1983 as a DIY outlet for ambient/synth artist Sam Rosenthal. A few years later, Rosenthal began collaborating with like-minded musicians under the name Black Tape for a Blue Girl. As the flagship artist on Projekt, Blacktape began to thrive by the mid-1990s, by which point their introspective, Philip Glass-meets-Dead Can Dance sound attracted a devout cult following. Over the course of forty years, Black Tape for a Blue Girl have released thirteen studio records, a handful of EPs, and several compilation-only tracks. Their work continues to innovate and inspire.

In May of this year, Rosenthal released a 40th anniversary expanded reissue of Black Tape for a Blue Girl’s debut LP The Rope across a variety of formats.Released in 1986, The Rope is a strong statement of intent that continues to capture the imagination of listeners around the world. To celebrate the reissue as well as four decades of Black Tape for a Blue Girl and Projekt Records, I had the chance to catch up with Rosenthal to discuss the band’s past, present, and future, the label, and all things in between.

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First there was God, then there was man, then there was Black Tape for a Blue Girl… Let’s talk about the genesis of the band. You were recording ambient/minimal electronic music early on under various names and I’m curious to hear how Blacktape evolved from that work.  

I was making a fanzine in Florida when I was in community college in the early ‘80s. I was writing about the local bands, punk bands, new romantic bands, and whatever else was happening. I went to Radio Shack and got a Moog keyboard and started making my own somewhat formless electronic music. It was the early ’80s, there was no way people could hear most of these bands I was writing about since a lot of them were bedroom projects and not the punk/rock live show side of things, so I formed Projekt in 1983 as an outlet to release a cassette of bands from southern Florida which also featured some of my ambient work.

Then I met Oscar Herrera through his band, The Sleep of Reason, who were compared to Bauhaus. When I heard his voice, I thought he was a great vocalist with a lot of range. I asked if he wanted to sing on a couple of tracks on my Islands cassette (which was reissued last year on vinyl). I went to California for college in February of ’86. I was alone and didn’t know anybody and I started writing my own lyrics. Looking back now, they were very morose and extremely introspective. For perspective, I was listening to a lot of This Mortal Coil and Dead Can Dance and Marc Almond. Those are the three bands you could mash together and consider an early reference point for Blacktape. There was also the instrumental material, Brian Eno side…

I went back to Florida during summer break and asked Oscar to sing on six tracks that would feature on the first Black Tape for a Blue Girl album, The Rope.

It seems like your solo work bled right into The Rope, it seemed like a natural progression in my opinion. With that in mind, I’m curious about why you decided to form the band versus continuing under either your own name or the Projekt Electronic Amerika moniker—was it about creating two separate entities as the music took on a new identity? 

Yeah, I think because it had vocals and the intention was to bring in more people in the band, it made sense to create a band name. Did it make sense to me? It did at the time. As you say, it really is an evolution and progression from Islands, but it was different enough to me because I was writing lyrics now, it seemed more like a band. But then again, it wasn’t, you know, the Alan Parsons Project, it wasn’t about me as the front person, I wasn’t going to be the singer. It seemed like it would be odd to release it under my name, but have Oscar be the singer. With Brian Eno, he sang, so he could have a hundred musicians and collaborators and styles, but he’s still the singer…

So let’s talk about recording The Rope. Can you tell us about some of your processes and techniques along the way? 

So, there was a format Cassette Porta Studio which was an average cassette tape that ran at double speed and used both sides of the tape using all four tracks at once. I recorded in my dorm room with some cheap microphone I had. I had one keyboard with me at college—it was all very primitive. Then I went back to Florida to record vocals with Oscar; we recorded in his living room and did the whole album in two hours in one afternoon. He was already prepared since I sent cassettes of a rough mix of the material with me poorly singing so he could get an idea of what I was thinking as far as song and vocal structure.

Since you were exclusively releasing cassettes at the time, what made you decide to release on vinyl? It was 1986, so I doubt CDs were widely available at the time…

CDs existed, but I certainly didn’t have the money to make them. There was one LP before that, Tanzmusic. For The Rope, I decided to press something like 300 or 500 copies on vinyl, and that was the only way the album existed until I reissued it in 1990 on CD and cassette.

How did you distribute the album at the time? Did you shop for other labels before deciding to develop Projekt into a full-fledged DIY label? 

Well, I had already been doing my cassettes by mail order, which we sent for a review in a magazine and some little ad somewhere and then people would write about them. I don’t remember if The Rope actually got any distribution to be honest. I remember submitting it, and I remember getting rejected by some distributors…

Did they at least listen to it? I swear to God nobody listens to anything anymore… 

Well, that’s right, now they don’t listen. They just go, “is this in a genre we could sell?” Which might arguably be better for the band in a way, you don’t have that first filter. So yeah, I can’t say for sure if the album had much real distribution. If you have the original LP there’s a logo on the back for some company who claimed they were going to help distribution, but then they vanished. They ghosted. They thought they could market us like The Moody Blues. I was like “Uh, no, no you can’t do that…”

Hey, I love The Moody Blues! I’d rather listen to them than a lot of new darkwave, no shame! Though at the time, I could imagine that’s not what you wanted to hear… 

No, it wasn’t, they might as well have said The Doors, you know? It felt so irrelevant to what was going on at the time and what I was trying to do.

Not to die on this hill or anything, but I can see a certain classical/neoclassical thread running through some Blacktape and Moody Blues material. Maybe it’s just me since I love both bands. It’s also very minor, but I sometimes hear the more prog-like folk bands like Strawbs or Pentangle in some of your song structures, but that could just be my brain wanting to find a connection between all these adjacent genres… 

I mean, there were certainly some English folk and prog bands that I liked, and I loved Hero & Heroine by the Strawbs and some of Ghosts, and Dave Cousins’ Two Weeks Last Summer, but I don’t think I was really going for that, at least not intentionally. Unto Ashes certainly fit more into that category.

Though I guess prog could also capture things like Tangerine Dream and some more new age and ambient material, which I do hear at the heart of much of the early Blacktape material. At the time though, it did seem like in a world of goth rock bands, there wasn’t much out there that sounded like Black Tape for a Blue Girl, so I could see how it would be hard for a distributor or reviewer to figure out what to make of you. 

I think if you were aware of 4AD and This Mortal Coil, you could make that connection, but yeah, a lot of reviewers said we sounded like Sisters of Mercy…

No, that’s not even CLOSE!

Not at all, though I guess you could argue that Oscar sounds like some of the English goth vocalists, but that’s the beginning and end of the comparison. Sisters of Mercy are a rock band. “Memory, Uncaring Friend,” the first track on The Rope is a rock song I guess, but the rest of the record isn’t rock at all!

I love that song by the way. It’s one of my early favorites. It’s certainly got guitars, but it has such an unconventional beat and song structure. The guitars are almost thin and textural compared to the synths, while the beat is so prominent and treated…

By “treated” you mean the echo effect because it was recorded in a garage (laughs)! We certainly weren’t able to run everything through an ARP synthesizer like Low, but we tried to capture some sort of DIY version of that. To be honest, looking back at things, I suppose The Rope would have been considered more of a demo. If I didn’t release it on Projekt I imagine a label would have wanted to re-record it after signing us, putting more money or a big producer behind it.

But I like that about the early material, how primitive and DIY it sounds, it’s certainly part of the charm, in my opinion! So, I know you followed up The Rope really quickly… In fact, all the early Blacktape albums were recorded and released in pretty quick succession. Did you have time to refine your process? 

For Mesmerized by the Sirens, my school had an eight track recorder, so I expanded and started recording eight tracks instead of four. It bumped up the ability to not have to smash everything and not pingponging throughout the mix, so I could make things a little more complex. Also, there are some other textures that came into play from other musicians being involved. Walter Holland playing guitar, Sue Kenny Smith, who is the female vocalist on that record… These things added another layer to the recordings that helped us evolve.

You’re right though, The Rope was 1986, Mesmerized was 1987, Ashes in the Brittle Air was 1989, and A Chaos of Desire was 1991, though I recorded it in 1990.

Still a prolific run! It sounds like you did learn quite a bit over a short period of time, picking up collaborators and band members along the way… 

I think those first four records are really a set, a complete idea, and showcases a bit of my learning process there, too. I think A Chaos of Desire, the fourth record, is the most coherent mood of these albums, while Ashes in the Brittle Air has diverse styles. I remember bringing Ashes to a store for consignment, they listened and they asked if it was a various artists album (laughs)!

Chaos brought in Vicki Richards on violin. I think the musicianship really stepped up with her on the record. She’s just so good…

Where did you meet all these wild and wonderful collaborators? 

Well, as I mentioned, I met Oscar in Florida because of his band. Vicki I got in touch with through Slap, a project in Miami that she played with. I had written about Slap and Stephen Nester in my zine a few times and I asked him to put me in touch with her. She had several albums  in the new age and world music field but she was also working with jazz musicians, so I knew she had a diverse playing style. It was a completely different thing for her to record this material, to play so passionately, which fit really well over the ambient stuff.

There’s also a violinist named J’Anna Jacoby who was playing in The Black Watch at the time…

Oh, I remember them! Quite jangly, if I recall…

Yeah! J’Anna also plays on A Chaos of Desire, on some of the more song-like tracks. She’s now playing with Rod Stewart, in his live band!

Wow, really?! The rise of Black Tape for a Blue Girl also intersects with the rise of the Projekt label. What was the first thing you put out on the label that wasn’t your own material? 

The first artist thing that wasn’t a solo record or a Blacktape album was a compilation of Attrition in 1990, which is pretty fitting as I still work quite closely with Martin Bowes, who does the mastering for my music. Projekt also licensed the Peyote record by O Yuki Conjugate pretty early on.

That’s a really special record…

Definitely. Otherwise, I think the first band that debuted on the label was Lycia. Then came Love Spirals Downward, Lovesliescrushing, and Soul Whirling Somewhere, all in quick succession. Three of the first four bands were in Arizona at the time. Projekt was originally thought of as “a southwestern label,” which is interesting since I don’t think there were that many goth bands from that area. It’s strange to me that Phoenix was such a hotspot for goth and ethereal music…

There’s a whole genre I like to call “desert goth” which incorporates a lot of the early Projekt bands, things like Abecedarians and Psi Com, Red Temple Spirits, etc. alongside bands from Independent Project Records like Savage Republic and Autumnfair. There was a certain psychedelia and bleakness that ran through the scene that certainly seems to be a California/Arizona construct, which is interesting since it’s such a sunny place!

Anyway, how did the first Projekt bands find you? Did you put out a call for bands?

Not quite, they were all bands that sent us demos and hadn’t released anything on other labels, so I worked with the bands to develop material into their first album. Lycia and Soul Whirling Somewhere mixed their records at my place in California. I still get demos by email, so it’s a similar idea, but back then a band had to take time to make a tape and mail the tape, they had to put effort into it!

So, was it always your intention to release other artists, or did it just develop naturally? 

I think that once Blacktape started getting some distribution and reviews, it seemed like the infrastructure existed for it. I’d been friends with Martin from Attrition since the very early 1980s when I reviewed some of his music. I figured I’d put something else out into that channel and see what happened.

CDs were so expensive to make back then. The Attrition release eventually paid itself back, I decided to keep putting more things into that channel to see what would happen. The problem with early distribution though was that they weren’t really paying us. In the early 1990s, we had something going with Tower Records where we were owed $30,000, they said they’d pay SOME of that if we sent them Projekt’s new releases—blackmail basically. It was a shady business, I knew they were always going to be shitty, but they knew that I really needed the distribution.

Wow. I mean I guess music industry bullshit like that has never changed, though it seems like they were a little more upfront about it back then! 

We can jump forward to 1997 when Projekt hooked up with Ryko for distribution and they were really professional, not a bunch of scammers ripping off bands left and right. Between having a better distribution company and getting to the age of computers, it was much easier for Projekt as a business. It wasn’t until 1991 that I could actually do Projekt full-time and in those early days we did everything by fax machine and telephone, and I was only able to focus on things here and there as I was also working on computer graphics at the time. I had two lives in those early years.

I know I’m jumping around a bit, when I moved to Chicago in 1996, Projekt grew to thirteen employees. The label was pretty large and was costly, but the Blacktape albums like This Lush Garden Within and Remnants of a Deeper Purity were doing well enough to justify it. Remnants is still the best seller from the band…

Well, with good reason, it seems to be the most accessible in some ways. My mom liked that album! 

Yeah, and it’s interesting because stylistically, it’s not really a goth album…

That might be the secret though, I see it more as a classical record, which is obviously a beloved genre. I’d argue that This Lush Garden Within is the darkest record you’ve done. It’s possibly my favorite, but it’s also not an easy one to jump into as a first timer. But to follow it up with something so… beautiful, was an interesting move. 

1997 and 1998 were probably the peak of the music industry, as far as selling records. I’m going to guess over time that the Remnants album sold like 17,000 copies and has been the best seller on the label for some time. But yeah, it’s not really a “goth record” to me. Though I guess if you consider Dead Can Dance goth, then maybe?

Well, if you want to split hairs, I’d say the first two Dead Can Dance albums and the first EP are “goth” for sure, but they moved away from it pretty quickly. Anyway, why do you think Remnants is the best seller? Right place, right time?

Absolutely. I think having Ryko distribution meant Projekt could get the album into Borders and places like that. You can’t really say that anymore…

I guess not. I do see vinyl at Barnes & Noble these days, but it’s usually legacy releases and modern rock/pop artists and every Pearl Jam album in triplicate. Nothing quite as subversive as a Black Tape for a Blue Girl album… Though maybe I haven’t been looking hard enough.

Well, our reissues are available to Barnes & Noble at this point, but it’s just a matter of someone from a particular location ordering one! At the same time, Projekt was putting out Lycia’s Cold and Excelsis: A Dark Noel, both of which did really well, and I think I have the Ryko distribution to thank for that.  If Remnants of Deeper Purity had come out three years earlier, would it have been the right time for it? You know, hard to say!

On a related note, what Blacktape album would you suggest for a first-time listener? 

Man, I don’t know, because it depends on if someone’s wanting something with melody or a traditional song or something more esoteric and ambient. If someone wants something with more traditional songwriting, I’d probably recommend A Chaos of Desire over Remnants of a Deeper Purity.

Well, I know it’s certainly hard to choose a favorite child, so I won’t press further. Speaking of the catalogue though, I know you’ve often re-recorded songs over the years. For example, there are several versions of “Memory, Uncaring Friend” with different vocalists, as well as new updates of “Across a Thousand Blades,” which is kind of “the hit” isn’t it?  I also remember you submitted a 2025 remix of “Within These Walls” for the No Songs Tomorrow box set I put together for Cherry Red. What drives you to revisit the body of work and update it over the years? 

Well, I would say with “Across a Thousand Blades,” it was that I never got the mix right and I tried adding things over the years. The mix I did for the 2020 remastered edition of Ashes in the Brittle Air at the end of the second disc is the one I finally got right, in my opinion.

Across a Thousand remixes! 

Yeah, we didn’t really record any new parts for that one. The electric guitar on the original mix was pretty buried and then in another version it came up maybe too loud and so on. Then we started playing it live in 1996 and I replaced the bass sound since I couldn’t find the original bass sound anymore…

When we started playing with Bret Helm from Audra as our singer, we were interested in capturing the sound of the band as a moment in time. Same when Athan Maroulis became our singer. Overall, there’s probably about 10-12 reworkings of older songs that have ended up on a compilation or as a b-side or something like that. We did “Memory, Uncaring Friend” in 2003 with Bret singing on top of the original track but I also re-recorded it completely in 2009 with Athan. That version had Brian Viglione from Dresden Dolls on drums, and it felt more immediate. I always thought that song could have been tighter, almost like a Gary Numan song…

Overall though, we still want to keep the essence of things. There are artists like Frank Zappa for example, who entirely altered older albums, replacing drums with drum machines, and that’s not really what I’m trying to do with that.

I agree with that. I’m not a fan of the George Lucas “revisionist history” thing. I’m all for alternate mixes, especially if they’re an improvement over the original, but at the same time, the original version should still be available for people who are used to it. Why deny the work exists? There’s permanence to art once it’s released and to pretend that’s not the case is frustrating and confusing, especially in the streaming era. So I like what you’ve done, putting out exclusive mixes on compilations, remixing albums for a bonus disc, and so on. As a collector, this gives me a reason to seek it out and it adds to the discography instead of replacing it. 

Exactly. With the new version of The Rope that’s coming out on 2CD and 2LP, I’m offering both the remastered original mix as well as a new mix I did of the album. The new mix isn’t that drastically different from the old mix. It’s just that the levels are right now that I had time to mix it. Some of the instruments that got buried before are a little louder. It’s like the Steve Wilson mixes that I’ve heard that aren’t really trying to be something new, they’re just trying to make the original sound a little bit clearer.

They’ve done that with a few Bowie mixes, too. There are some complete reworkings or reimaginings of some albums that are great, and there are some so-so mixes, but the new version of Lodger is my preferred, since that was a dicey mix in the first place. However, as I said, I think there’s a certain charm to the early Blacktape records, that youthful abandon and inexperience that actually can elevate things. That said, it’s great you have all the tapes and are able to go back and make things sound the way you really wanted them to. 

I definitely have heard from many people that say The Rope is their favorite album and that’s the mix I did in two hours way back when. So I do have to honor that…

Right, why deny it ever happened, especially since it’s out there on various formats. 

Yeah, and of course, with art, a listener doesn’t perceive mistakes the same way the artist might. Same thing with live performances. Sometimes I’ve come off stage thinking that a song didn’t really work, but then people come up to me and say they loved the show. You have to believe that, even if it’s not what you feel.

I’ve been there more times than I can count. I’m my own worst critic on stage and if I play something even a little differently, not even necessarily a mistake, that sometimes has colored my feelings about the show, for better or for worse. Everyone’s tastes and perceptions are a little different… 

Yeah, I feel like as long as you didn’t get booed off stage, then it was probably a good show (laughs).

Well, speaking of live shows, did you really only start playing live in 1996? 

Yes. I played one show in 1983 or 1984 in Florida and played a few with Walter Holland in 86-87 in California. We had an electronic band called Doppler Shift and we played a couple of shows

And Blacktape’s first show was at the 1996 ProjektFest?

Yes. I was talking with Pat, who I play with in his project Thanatos, about projects that have one person and how difficult it is to tour and deal with clubs every night. So we thought maybe we should do a festival in Chicago, have people come to us rather than make the bands go from city to city. This way, we could hone in our sound. So yeah, Black Tape for a Blue Girl’s first show was ProjektFest in 1996.

Wow, no warm-ups—just right into the fray!

Yeah! I don’t do that now. When we started touring after that, we’d do a smaller show before hitting a major city, making sure that New York City is not the first gig of the tour.

I know people (myself included) who still talk about ProjektFest and how it was such a scene staple. Did you do them every year, or was it sporadic?

We did 1996 and 1997 in Chicago. Those were two nights each. Then in 1998 we did one night in LA, Philly, Chicago, and New York, but they weren’t back to back, there was some gap between them as far as I remember. There were also different lineups in Los Angeles, I think Faith and the Muse and Love Spirals Downwards played on those bills since they were based in California.

As for our live set in ‘96 and ‘97, I relied on Oscar to be the musical director for the band since he had played out so much in his other bands. I wasn’t experienced, so I leaned on him to help get the live band, the Remnants-era band, rehearsed properly. 

At a show in November 1998, we played at an art museum in Philadelphia in the afternoon and Vicki and I stayed behind to do an instrumental set while the rest of the band went to New York to set up. Vicki and I finished the set and took the train since it was a quick train ride between the two cities.

Wow, that was a risky thing to do—so many things that could have gone wrong! 

Yeah, if we missed the train, we’d have been out of luck, but the NYC show was opening for The Creatures at Irving Plaza, so we couldn’t pass it up! We did have a backup plan, the sound guy was going to play my parts along with a backing track if I didn’t make it.

But you did make it! 

Yeah, fortunately! I remember that the Irving Plaza stage isn’t very big and we were very cramped up in the front.

Ah, classic… I’m sure there was a massive drum kit with all kinds of wild percussion up there.

Right, Budgie’s set up. It was very stressful, but now it’s a good story!

So after those first wave of shows, did playing live become a much bigger priority? It seems like the records were more and more spaced out from that point, which would make sense if you were focusing on the live aspect of the band. 

It was 1999 when we started touring more. Before that it was those festival shows really, and it was just a way to promote the band. On tour we’d end up playing goth club nights where there would be fast-paced dancing and then we’d come in and kind of slow things down for a while.

If I look at the numbers, I think we did something like 134 shows total over the course of 10-12 years. It wasn’t continuous, the slowdown of releases was partially due to that, but also because running Projekt took more time, there were a lot of bands on the label, a lot of employees, and then Lisa and I had a baby, so that slowed things down even more, as you might expect.

I’d seen you several times after (not counting that time we played together) but the FIRST time I saw Black Tape for a Blue Girl was at the ProjektFest in Philadelphia in 2002, and Lisa was pregnant with your son. That whole weekend was pretty incredible, I still think of it very fondly. Was that the last year of ProjektFest? 

No, there was one in 2007 that was smaller. It seemed people were past the point of coming to festivals.

Yeah, and I imagine the label roster had grown to a much larger capacity at that point, with bands scattered across the US and beyond. You were also releasing a lot of ambient releases, branching out into shoegaze, and so on. How did your signing process evolve over the years? 

At this point, it was less about demo tapes and more that someone who was already on the label would recommend a band. Though I signed Mira quickly after Regina gave us a demo tape at one of our Florida shows.

Bold!

Yeah, same with Voltaire. We were in the van with nothing else to listen to, so we’d pop in demo tapes. I can’t remember what the last physical demo I got, but now it’s all Soundcloud links and private playlists, not even downloads. I don’t want to deal with files anymore.

I admire what you built with Projekt—it was all a labor of love, and there are so many great bands I wouldn’t have heard if you didn’t spend much of your time cultivating the label. Maybe I’m romanticizing that a bit, but I think you did the right thing, but I dunno, I’m not you and couldn’t say if you’re satisfied with Blacktape’s trajectory… 

Honestly, if my band had had a manager in 1997 after Remnants, they would have said, “Why are you wasting your time promoting those other bands and not working your own band? Your band just sold all these records. Why aren’t you making a new album, man?”

If Lycia had a manager, that manager would have been trying to get them onto a bigger label, right? The band was extremely successful, they’re touring with Type O Negative, they should be on a label where someone can put money behind them. I always thought that it would be GREAT if these bands left the label to move up to somewhere. I always saw Projekt as a starting ground, you know? Metropolis was about signing European bands and bringing them to the US market. I saw Projekt as a place to release great new bands and give them a springboard.

I know that bands like Lovesliescrushing have released material on different labels, but did any of the bands successfully make the jump? It seemed like everyone stuck with Projekt, whether it be a matter of loyalty or convenience. Again, that’s a romantic notion… 

Yeah, it’s all hindsight now, but these bands needed a good manager who played the game knowing what the next steps are and how to get to the point you want to get to, but none of us had managers. For a period, Lycia was full-time touring, but everyone else it was their hobby. It wasn’t their full-time job. Some of the bands wanted to go from working day jobs to having a full-blown music career but it was the in-between part that they weren’t pushing for.

I get it, it’s a lot of hard work and money for just a roll of the dice. 

Yeah, and even with Blacktape, I can look back now and Blacktape should have toured with Oscar, because he was the voice people knew and he was dramatic and charismatic on stage, but he was in Miami and he had a family and he was doing what he needed to do, so, it wasn’t possible.

Well, there’s something to be said about that, then… 

There’s a band I used to know, who I won’t name, and they always were talking about a future where they’re selling 50,000 records. I told them to be realistic, they’re not even selling 3,000. 50,000 is not the next step, you need to take the step to 10,000, little by little. Being a successful band takes a lot of listening to others and nobody really likes that…

So, continuing the Blacktape story, as the band continued, you often worked with different collaborators, like Bret Helm who we mentioned before, Michael Laird from Unto Ashes, and so on. I really adore The Scavenger Bride, which is pretty much the peak of the sound you were going for in the nineties in my opinion, still lush, very dramatic, very literary, all the things I look for in music. Then, shortly after, starting with Halo Star, you changed styles to incorporate more cabaret and steampunk influences. What inspired that shift?

I think every artist has the optimistic belief that they can be like Bowie: that they can do different things and have everyone follow them on the journey, but in retrospect, I don’t think everyone can because not everyone has a wide enough audience base. There’s a lot I really like about 10 Neurotics, but I think listeners weren’t really looking for that.

Well, it’s not like you didn’t hint at that sound a bit on Halo Star, and I know that sound and style was popular, at least in the NYC goth scene at the time. There was something literary and romantic about that, too, so even if it’s not my go-to genre, there’s still times where that sound can hit the spot. Anyway, did the folks you were working with go on the journey with you as well, aside from Athan?

Well, I usually have a song written and then I bring in people to play on it. We did that with The Scavenger Bride, where Michael Laird would come in and add textures, and in other cases, sometimes the percussion would drive the song more, but the real basis of the song would exist before I brought anyone else in. The secret is bringing in interesting musicians who can work within that structure. “Inch Worm” actually was written before Halo Star, but I couldn’t figure out the song until much later. The same is true with “the Turbulence and the Torment” from This Lush Garden Within, which was recorded during A Chaos of Desire.

With 10 Neurotics, I worked with Brian Viglione. I was looking for a drummer, despite not caring much for drummers generally, but the music asked for that. I think drummers do a bit too much and are a bit too busy. My favorite drummer is Steve Jansen from Japan since he doesn’t overplay, he does what’s needed to create the right mood. So, working with Brian, he was a really great musician who understood my musical language and was able to shape the song and not overdo it, unless that was required.

This is weird, but ultimately, how you publicize the record does stick in people’s head for how they perceive the record. I think 10 Neurotics was probably over-publicized in one direction. You know, if the one sheet had been written differently, I think people would have given it more of a shot and perceived it differently. It’s kind of like what you put in the movie trailer  has a lot to do with how people think your movie’s going to be. Sometimes that’s right. Sometimes it’s not.

One of the tracks is a steampunk-mixed-with-Philip-Glass thing. We also worked with Lucas Lanthier from Cinema Strange. Then there’s a few tracks in the middle where Nicki Jane sings. As you said, with Halo Star, I think that record reflected the sound of us playing in clubs. The songs are a bit more upbeat.

There was a larger gap between those two, and then an even bigger gap between 10 Neurotics and These Fleeting Moments, where it seemed you went back to a more classic sound. What happened during those years? 

I spent time writing Rye in 2012 and then moved to Portland in 2013. I wanted to write another book, but instead I decided to spend time acclimating to Portland. There was an EP called Bike Shop in 2016 that Michael Plaster from Soul Whirling Somewhere sings. These were songs I had written on guitar, I really loved that it was acoustic and a very coherent, but different, feeling. I wish more people had heard it because Soul Whirling Somewhere hadn’t done an album in 18 years or something like that. I wrote lyrics to fit Michael’s personality, almost like he was a character in the story. I crowdfunded that EP and the delays in manufacturing pushed it close to the release of These Fleeting Moments.

That album was intentionally going back more to the Remnants-ish sound. Oscar had retired from music at that point, so he hadn’t sung on anything since As One Aflame Laid Bare By Desire. I asked if he would want to sing on it. He then suggested that Danielle, his daughter, could sing the female vocal parts. It worked out quite well.

I don’t quite know how many people have been in Black Tape for a Blue Girl over the years. It’s got to be in the 40-50 people range, you know, between collaborators and vocalists. With a few exceptions, I generally liked having singers that were exclusively in my band and not guests from another band like This Mortal Coil.

Right, I suppose Athan and Oscar had been in previous bands but those bands had broken up by the time they joined Blacktape. I guess Bret from Audra is the exception to that rule, though Audra took some time off when he was in the band.

Yeah I guess I sort of contradicted myself here. On the most recent album, I had Jon DeRosa who’s band is Aarktica as well as his own solo work. Audra were one of the bands who we met early on because they opened up for us in Austin. Audra had two albums on Projekt and everything worked well on the Blacktape albums Bret sang on; he fit perfectly with the sound. We recorded the vocals for The Scavenger Bride at Steve Roach’s studio, if I remember correctly. Athan lived in Brooklyn, near where I lived, so it made it easy to work with him around that time.

I feel like I saw the band with Bret three times: ProjektFest, a show at Downtime where the Mirror Reveals opened when I just moved to the city, and a show a little later when local friends The Hunt and Martial Canterel played. I think that was at Europa, that old dance club turned venue. I really liked that place, as weird as it was…  

Was that the club in Greenpoint? I have a recording of that show. I’ll have to dig it out and transfer it someday.

Well you’ve been releasing a lot of work-in-progress mixes and live shows as part of the subscriber project, right? Perhaps it’s time to put that one up!

Yeah, true, I did put up a live video of a whole show from 1998 on YouTube and some audio here and there, one from the 2002 festival that I sang, which is relatively rare.

Let’s talk about the last three albums! 

There have been three Blacktape albums that I recorded since moving to Portland in 2013. These Fleeting Moments, To Touch the Milky Way, and The Cleft Serpent. The Cleft Serpent was the first album with only three band members. There are no instrumentals and all the songs feature male vocals. It really was an album that was written for characters: the Cleft Serpent and the Trickster.

I’d known Jon, the vocalist on the album, since New York. He opened for a lot of Projekt bands/shows dating back to when he was 16-17—something like that. We worked on a track together in 2020 that was a reworking of the Aarktica track “Eating Rose Petals.” It was an experiment to see how we’d work together and it went incredibly smoothly. He understands Blacktape since he’s known the band since he was young. I used the same process as always where I recorded the vocal melody and lyrics and sent it to Jon to perform, it’s all predetermined. He was able to record it in a studio in LA without me, which I’d never done before. He gave me four takes so I could pick between the different emotions he’s put into it. For him, some of the lyrics were more dramatic than what he’s used to singing. Once he started thinking about it as a character, rather than as his own authentic feeling, he got into what I was writing for him….

But that’s sort of the Blacktape style, isn’t it? There are always characters. Something like “The Lie Which Refuses to Die” or “Tell Me You’ve Taken Another” are character-driven. It’s great that Jon gets that and is able to bring that to the table and that you still have that structure. 

That was always the plan. When I had seen Oscar’s original band, I knew that I could write a song with that much drama in it because he had the power that Bowie or Freddy Mercury or Marc Almond had. Oscar, or Athan, or Jon could give the songs what I needed to make them work.

Yeah, there’s so much of that kitchen sink drama there, like Scott Walker had as well. 

Right. Marc Almond’s Torment & Toreros and Mother Fist And Her Five Daughters were early touchstones. You know: sad people who fucked up their lives and lost everything yet are blaming others for the things they’ve fucked up. Maybe if someone was writing about their own life, they would walk back certain things or not sound as proud about what they messed up, but if someone else is singing, I feel like we can take that as far as it needs to go. With The Cleft Serpent, I love the cohesiveness of just three people in the band. The songs all feel like one mood.

So what are you working on now? What’s next for Blacktape? I know you’ve been working on some solo material and other projects as well as reissues, but is there any new music in progress?

No, I haven’t been working on anything for Blacktape. I just released an electronic drone album called The Width of Shadows and I’m also working on another drone album in collaboration with Arin, a Projekt artist in Norway. Honestly, the process of recording makes me so annoyed. It’s so tedious. I figure it takes 400 hours to record a Blacktape album because I’m compulsive and strive for perfection that no one can hear. It drives me nuts to be like that. I hope one day I’ll be able to do a Blacktape album in two weeks so I’m not so obsessed about everything.

I did a different project called Nova Cat Purring Sounds where I took my kitty’s purring, and some of it is just purrs and some of it is accompanied by ambient music. I must mention that Nova has passed away since then. But it was so easy to make and very therapeutic. It was pleasant to put together this album in a week or two. With the most recent electronic album, I tried to use the same process and not be so obsessive. It’s interesting, too, because, like I said earlier, there’s something to be said about making mistakes in art. Mistakes can be interpreted by others as passion, and in the end, who’s right? The one who created it, or the one who has a connection to the work once it’s out. released? 

Well that also ties in to the punk/post-punk scene that we all come from. Not that Blacktape is punk by definition, but there’s that DIY spirit that runs through your work. That said, making an ambient record out of cat purrs is pretty punk in a way! I sincerely mean that. 

Well, you know, I started listening to music in 1976 or so, and although I wasn’t listening to punk bands at the time, the whole punk idea to me is definitely in there in the sense that I started a record label to release music, built up a fan base, and didn’t wait for somebody’s permission to do that thing. I have lived the last 30-35 years with Projekt helping people put out their music and there’s a wide variety of releases on the label. There are maybe 650 releases on the label now and it’s pretty great being able to survive in the music industry. So I mean it in the Punk DIY aesthetic, not waiting for permission. Just do it!

I don’t really know when I will make another Blacktape for a Blue Girl record, it’s not on my mind right now, but I am grateful for everything the label has done, all the support people have given me and the bands, and everything I’ve been able to do along the way.

Thanks for talking, it was great catching up! §

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The opening track to her upcoming debut effort “A Fate Worse Than Loneliness”.

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Founded in Brussels in 1998, EMPTINESS is built around the creative core of bassist-vocalist Jérémie Bézier and guitarist Olivier J.L.W. Having started out as a black/death metal band, they moved noticeably away from traditional song structures on the 2012 album Error. Their breakthrough came in 2014 with Nothing But The Whole, which combined dissonant, industrial […]

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A century ago, the most successful gamblers who played the world’s stock markets were beginning to respond to a gut instinct that it was all going to go horribly wrong. The Roaring Twenties had convinced many leading lights of the economy that the financial boom would continue. They created more products, increased prices, kept staff wages low to improve profits, then were amazed when no one bought their stuff because they didn’t have enough money. So as usual it all collapsed spectacularly, and the world became poor and needed a war to fix it.

History books don’t explore many of the individual stories beneath the Great Depression of the early 20th century. Criminal records do. Anyone who waters down the connection between crime and poverty is trying to sell you something. In the US in the 1930s, the problem wasn’t poverty, they said, it was crime. And the solution was Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary. It was described by one diarist as “the great garbage can of San Francisco Bay, into which every federal prison dumped its most rotten apples”.

You weren’t expected to come back from The Rock, as it was nicknamed, an ugly, cruel pile of granite and iron on Alcatraz Island, from which it was impossible to escape – the 36 recorded attempts resulted in recapture, drowning or being shot by guards. When Frankie Miller first cast his eye over Alcatraz in 1975, its three-decade reign of terror had officially been over for 12 years, but the scene had a massive impact on the homesick artist.

“Frankie often said that if he hadn’t got into music, he’d have ended up in prison,” says Miller’s biographer, Davy Arthur. “He grew up in Brigton [the universal pronunciation of the east end Glasgow area of Bridgeton] and he was surrounded by poverty and crime. He once said they demolished the slums and replaced them with skyscrapers, but then the skyscrapers became slums too. By that time they were too busy rebuilding Edinburgh for the tourists.”

Convicted murderer Jimmy Boyle – who later became a writer and artist – is a relative of Miller’s and served time in Glasgow’s Barlinnie prison, another notorious place with its own sense of dark foreboding.

“Frankie knew of the Bar- and some of the people in there,” says Arthur. “He probably visited the place. So when he saw Alcatraz, which he did every day as he crossed the bay when he lived there, it merged with his sense of homesickness.”

Miller was inspired to write The Rock, a song which gave his 1975 album its title. It has all the hallmarks of a classic Miller track – his ‘I can’t believe it’s not black’ voice, his thoughtful lyrics and his melancholy trying to survive alongside his determination. But The Rock is more than that. Listen closely and it’s a gospel-style prayer for everyone who couldn’t find a place in the form of society served up for them.

Arthur suspects it was written quite quickly, perhaps even on the commute across the beautiful bay that frames the ugly island.

“I have a recording from Radio 1 in 1967,” says Arthur, mentioning the basement in his home in Germany that’s become a massive Miller archive. “Before he plays The Rock he says: ‘This is a song about prisoners. This is a song about prisons. It has everything to do with everything.’ Imagine that on Radio 1 in the sixties!”

The album The Rock featured former Wings guitarist Henry McCullough, bassist Chrissy Stewart, drummer Stu Perry and keyboard player Mick Weaver, with contributions from vocalist Jimmy Dewar (Robin Trower, Stone The Crows), the Memphis Horns and the Edwin Hawkins Singers. It’s the only record credited to the Frankie Miller Band – a line-up that didn’t last long, but made some impact while it was around. And not just on stage.

“Henry was taking tequila and mescaline for breakfast in the seventies,” Arthur says of McCullough, who died in 2016. “So he didn’t remember much. He did remember the time he and Frankie got arrested in San Francisco.

To quote McCullough from Arthur’s new book: “I was driving, and I remember coming to this T-junction and turning without thinking, so that I was driving on the wrong side of the road – and the first car we met was the sheriff’s car. The fact I was the driver meant they told Frankie: ‘Right, fuck off!’ So he staggered off into the night.

“They handcuffed me and put me in the back of the car. I had a chunk of black dope on me but I managed to manoeuvre it onto the seat and eat it – it was a fairly decent chunk. They threw me into this cell along with a crowd of Puerto Ricans, Mexicans and a couple of black pimp-types, with me wearing a green velvet jacket and leopardskin shoes.”

McCullough imagined Miller was on the case. But as the drink and dope wore off, and the situation became more real, he didn’t know that Miller had actually forgotten what had happened.

“It went to a third day, and the rest of the band asked Frankie if he’d seen me around. He tried to retrace our steps for a few minutes before he went: ‘Jesus, Henry’s in jail!’” The best part of the story for Arthur is that McCullough wasn’t angry, he was more surprised and indignant that his friend forgot about him.

At this point a fourth jail comes into the story. Some Hells Angels inmates at San Quentin State Prison heard about The Rock, and invited Miller to perform at their place. Concerts for prisoners were not a new thing, of course; but given Miller’s investment in his own narrative it could be a very powerful, and therefore dangerous, experience. Arthur doesn’t think it took him long to make the decision.

During research for 2025’s Long Way Home: The Frankie Miller Story, Arthur discovered that music writer Todd Tolces had gone to San Quentin with the band and photographer David Staugas. In a quirk of fate, both journalists had kept their work associated with the visit, and both responded to Arthur’s opening queries in less than an hour, offering him more than he’d hoped for. It contributed to so strong a narrative that Arthur created a standalone photo book, Incarcerated Ecstasy: The Frankie Miller Band At San Quentin – the title taken from Tolces’s article on the event.

“San Quentin had the biggest death row in America, with a gas chamber and a lethal injection chamber,” the writer says, outlining the tensions within the premises as generated by three rival inmate gangs: the Black Guerillas, the Aryan Brotherhood and the Mexican Mafia. They had strict rules about who could interact, when and why, and if the rules were broken, violence could ensue. Just a few years previously, three guards and two inmates had been killed as Black Guerillas co-founder George Jackson attempted to escape and was shot dead in the process.

“There hadn’t been a concert in San Quentin for a while, because of bad behaviour,” Arthur says. “A lot of people didn’t want it to go ahead.”

Into this tense environment Miller, McCullough and co. endured a grilling entry procedure for the prison performance in August ’75, accompanied by visiting Angels who’d helped arrange it, and a trio of ‘girlfriends’ who Arthur believes were professional strippers. “You start looking closely and you think, ‘My god, I wonder what those girls were thinking. I wonder what that prisoner is thinking. I wonder what Frankie’s thinking!’”

Some shots show real concern on Miller’s face as the security measures are taken. As an illustration of the era, Arthur points out the details on the entrance sign: “It is a felony to bring upon these grounds any firearms, intoxicating liquors, beer, wine, narcotics or benzedrine!”

The platform/stage in the prison yard had exclusion ropes – nothing that would hinder a stage rush, but that would be dealt with by the trained marksmen on the rail along the yard walls.

“Some of those armed guards had previously been in scrapes with prisoners,” Arthur says. “They’d been put up there for their own safety – they were in danger of being stabbed if they were on the ground. The prisoners in the yard, who’d been allowed to attend [the concert] for good behaviour, were the ones who’d be doing the stabbing, the ‘bad’ ones were still locked up.”

He makes note that the ‘girlfriends’ appear to be having a great time all the time.

“They were probably quite hardened to certain experiences, but their lives were at risk,” he says. “Maybe they thought they were under the Hells Angels’ protection. But the Angels’ lives were at risk, too. Who knows what was being fixed up? Inter-gang warfare could have kicked off. If you look closely, there are certain groups sitting a few yards away from the stage, and they’re observing. They’re not in the throng, where the danger probably lay. What did they know? How clever were they taking a step back?

“And of course Frankie and Henry and the guys all had to sign a form to agree that if they were attacked, kidnapped or killed, the prison was not responsible.”

While the tension remains palpable, the Frankie Miller Band clearly deliver a triumphant show, and if anything negative went down, nothing has been reported. It leads to Arthur’s selection of his favourite photo (above): “Frankie’s looking so proud, so happy. And how many pictures have you see in your life of Frankie Fucking Miller smiling?!”

The photo book puts the San Quentin adventure in context, with shots from the recording studio and on stage, at a time when Miller was performing on stages trodden in the same month by John Lee Hooker, Etta James and others of such calibre. With each picture offering thousands of words, it’s perhaps less distressing that Arthur wasn’t able to connect with those who remain alive from that day in San Quentin, including the insider who’d arranged it – whose jail term ended four months ago.

“I’ve been told the chances of any of the authorities involved are nil,” he reports. “It’s a period not many people want to talk about. “Frankie said at the time that it was society’s fault, not the fault of the prisoners. A lot of the prisoners from San Quentin who are now being rehabilitated – thanks to the help of musicians like Johnny Cash and Frankie – they’re writing their own stories. They’re being honest about how they got there. And the common thread is poverty, even in the twenty-first century. You can connect it all to Frankie’s upbringing.”

Arthur continues his quest to connect all the dots of Miller’s career, and hopes to offer more insight into particular events in future. One of the problems is that, even when Miller could speak, he didn’t often say much. The writer recalls that, when interviewed regarding his part in 1979 gangster-themed TV movie Just A Boys’ Game, Miller shouted: “Point the camera, ask the fucking questions!”

“He wouldn’t have thought any of it was important,” Arthur says, referring to Miller’s commitment to his music rather than celebrity or finance. He even suspects that Miller might have performed prison shows that remain unknown, perhaps at Glasgow’s Bar–L, “with one or two others, or he might have just jumped in with an acoustic guitar”.

Alas, Frankie Miller’s San Quentin show wasn’t recorded, and Miller will never sing again. Many things in social history won’t happen again. The fact that Trump has discussed reopening Alcatraz shows that some things could happen again, and some people seem to want them to. Think about that when you listen again to The Rock – it might be about you this time.

Incarcerated Ecstasy: The Frankie Miller Band At San Quentin by Davy Arthur is out now, published by New Haven. Buy from Amazon.

Horse Jumper Of Love make a lot of music, and it’s all good. This is a fact of life — or rather a fact of slowcore. We chatted with Dimitri Giannopoulos about their latest album, 2024’s Disaster Trick, but they’ve released a bunch of stuff since then, like a Songs: Ohia cover and a Winter collab. Now, the Boston band is announcing a 10th anniversary deluxe edition of their cherished debut album.

The post Horse Jumper Of Love Announce 10th Anniversary Deluxe Of Their Debut Album With 13 Bonus Tracks appeared first on Stereogum.