Well, what about your current projects? Steve has Stereo Fallout, while PJ has RA and every cover band in NJ. Pete, you have your solo project. Are those projects just being put on hold?
PL: Well, I really don’t have anything together right now. I’d been doing things on and off for different record labels. Actually, Steve had just worked on one. It was a company called Liberty N’ Justice. They’ve been putting out these CDs for the last few years basically of singers from our genre of music. The last record that I did with them was a couple of years ago. I was on it, Sebastian Bach, Stephen Pearcy, Mark Slaughter, Jani Lane, etc. I’ve been on a couple of those projects and will probably do some more, but those are easy. They don’t take up a whole lot of my time, ya know?
PJ: For me, RA is not on hold. RA is always, we’re busy, then we do nothing, we’re busy, then we do nothing. So, right now, we’re just on hiatus until January. We released a record back in September. We toured over the summer, but we tour, then we stop for a couple months. Then we’ll go out at the end of January for a little bit, and then we won’t do anything for like four months. Maybe some fly-in shows here and there. As for playing with every cover band in New Jersey, I have to be! Gotta keep busy! (laughs)
So, most of us know what Steve and PJ were doing with the cover bands and their own personal projects, but what were Gus and Pete doing since the end of Trixter?
MGS: Well, I was actually the first guy to leave the band. I never thought that I would be the guy to quit, and totally run away from the drums, which I found shocking even to myself, but I dove into this idea of doing something, and when I see something that I want, I go after that one thing and nothing’s going to stop me! That’s the way I get. Maybe it’s even to my detriment that that happened, but I got into marketing with a number of different facilities and I developed this reputation of being good at revenue generation. Most notably and most recently, a place called Dave And Busters, where I worked for three years and did really well there for two years, and come year three, they demanded way too much, so I said, ‘Fuck this place! I’m buying my own place!’ So, I bought The Copper Bottom in Florida, NY, and am doing very well there. I dig the gig and that’s why I do it!
PL: I’ve been doing my music stuff also, I moved out to Arizona, and I got involved in some real estate stuff, but I’ve been keeping myself really busy! That’s probably another reason why that kind of hit me over the head when people kept asking about the band over at that convention. I had no idea!
SB: The one thing that is unique about this whole situation is that Gus and I hadn’t spoken in 12 years! We had a little bit of a falling out, and that was a little bit of a stumbling block in a sense, but within five minutes of us seeing each other and talking it was back to the old days, and we were cracking up! And we’re getting along better now than we ever did! As all of us are, because when you get older, and you look back, you realize how special something like our success was, and the greatest thing about it is that we can capitalize on it 15 years later—still!
MGS: I don’t even remember what the finer points of that falling out was all about?
PL: Yeah, he does! (laughs) Yeah, he does! (laughs)
PJ: That was really the big reuniting because me, Steve, and Pete always stayed in touch. Gus kind of just disappeared. I didn’t really hear from him for a real long time until I saw him about two years ago because I stopped in at his restaurant. I had a gig up there about two miles away. I walked in and he was in full maitre de mode, so he walked right by me and said, ‘I’ll be right with ya!,’ and then he stopped dead in his tracks, and took a double take. It was hysterical!
