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OK, kids, rest time is over. If you've been thinking to yourselves, "Gee...it's been awhile since I heard anything over there at that darn Moosenet, or whatever they call that thing they got going...anyway, as I was sayin', I haven't heard nothin' about nothin' but the tour that's already gone and the CD that's not even done yet for two months now!", well, then, you're right. Rest was a necessary thing after the rigors of touring and documentation of such touring (the latter debatably being the more difficult of the two tasks). But, as I said above, rest time is most definitely over. Winds of change are blowing through the Beer For Dolphins schedule for the second half of this year...and for the second time in less than a year, The Life Of Bryan, Inc. is in fully operational crisis-management mode. Enough teasing...I've been wanting to get this off of my chest for weeks now. Listen closely.

Some of you more "in-tune-with-the-cyber-grapevine" people out there already know this fact to be true, but for those of you who don't, here's the crux of the matter. Some four weeks ago (give or take a week), Steve Vai contacted our beloved Keneally. It seems that Steve has recorded a new CD due to be released in September of 1996, and that he'll be touring with Joe Satriani and Eric Johnson in some sort of "Guitarapalooza" tour in October and November. After that, he'll be taking off to tour the world. When I say world, I mean WORLD...Japan, Australia, South America, Eastern Europe...we're talking a long, long tour here, my friends. So, probably seeking a little bit more band maturity and stability than Devon Townsend could provide him, Mr. Vai asked Mike if he was in fact interested in playing in his band...guitar, keys, and some vocals as well. After about 10 days of self-analyzation and debate, Mike decided that it would be the right thing, career-wise, for him to say yes.

Now even though Mike and I have discussed this situation at great length over the past few weeks, I'm not going to put words in his mouth. I couldn't hope to illuminate his thought process better than he could himself, so you'll need to check out his July 20 "Mike Types To You" for the official rationale. But it doesn't take a genius to figure the whole thing out...it's a great opportunity for Mike to gain exposure, to work with a fellow Zappa guitar alumnus, to make some decent money (don't get me wrong, we made MILLIONS on the BFD tour), and, not the least importantly, to play some very challenging and worthwhile music. Allow me to jump ahead a bit in the chronology of the story and say that Steve's new material is very cool and no cakewalk, that's for sure. But, back to the matter at hand...I know what you're thinking--where does this leave me??? I soon found myself asking the very same question.

Actually, I soon found myself asking Mike this question, leading to some awkwardness. Hadn't we drawn up a pretty formidable battle plan for the rest of this year? It's now almost August, the pre-determined month for advance planning of the Fall '96 BFD Tour, centered around the Halloween show at Burlington, VT, at which we'd play an entire Phish album...remember? We'd be promoting the new double-live CD Half Alive In Hollywood and the home video Soap Scum Remover...we'd have been on the road twice more in a year than Z had been in two years, with timely product to boot. But now, well...it's safe to say that there won't be a BFD tour in the second half of this year. At one point there was an effort to maintain just the Phish show on Halloween, but I believe that too is a casualty of this new information...again, you'll have to check Mike's writings for final confirmation on that. But back to the issue of ME, goddammit. Pardon me, but I didn't leave Z to play with just The Dyke and The Jews, if you know what I mean. (By the way, someone suggested to me that the real title of Act 13 should have been "Mike, The Dyke, and The Kikes". Hey, rhyming is more important that PC around these parts, especially when it comes to my own clan...wish I thought of that.) Niceties soon were tossed aside, and in their place were my anxious inquiries: "Does he have a bass player? Can I kill him? If I do, will you tell anyone?"

There was someone floating around the scene, but he soon decided that the tour was too long for him to be able to consider it seriously. In other words, maybe I wouldn't have to commit murder in order to get on board this train barreling through my life at 100 m.p.h. So the goal became clear...I needed to get on this tour, and fucking fast. Steve had met me once, a long, long time ago, at the release party for Z's "Shampoohorn" of all things, back in March of 1994, and he knew that I had once played with Dweezil. Mike assured me that at the first, second and all other opportunities that arrived, that he would inform Steve and his manager of my presence, availability and ability to handle his gig. The big picture started coming to me while Mike was making his initial contacts with Steve about me...either the next five to six months (the approximate length of the tour, starting in October) were going to be spent on the road with Steve Vai and Mike Keneally, travelling all over the world, making good money, playing good music, meeting cool people...or those months would be spent in Los Angeles, trying to scrape together a living on whatever work I could find in town, trying to supplant the lost income of whatever the fall BFD tour would have brought, and probably trying to find another stairmaster somewhere so I could make sense of all of this. There wasn't, and isn't, a whole lot of middle ground here, folks...either it's gonna be a kick-ass bitchen good thing, or it's gonna suck harder than a black hole.

In the meantime, the nuts and bolts of getting the gig came into place. Mike, after many weeks of futile attempts, arranged a meeting with me and Steve up at his studio in Hollywood (this was Thursday, 7/18). I brought with me a tape of some selected tidbits from "Half Alive..." as well as the tunes I played on on "Dust Speck", with the mindset of hopefully reinforcing the fact in Steve's brain that, after my stints with Keneally and Dweezil, I'm used to being abused by guitarists. The meeting went well in some respects, not as well as I'd hoped in others. First of all, the Steve I met wasn't the bronze-and-gold painted "Sex And Religion" Steve at all...he was really down to earth, friendly (I'm sure it helped having Mike there with me), and all the stuff that goes with it. He relayed to us an insane story about how a sample of bees buzzing from the wrong sound effects disk led to a situation where his album release date was held up by some mom and pop organization demanding a hefty copyright ransom of $500. or something...the music business is so, so, SO fucking stupid. He also played for us some of the new material off of his soon-to-be released CD (we got to hear the infamous bees), and it's pretty damn cool stuff, as I mentioned before. There's this thing called "The Fire Garden Suite", which is about 12 minutes long, and a total fucking bear...Mike's going to have to cop some pretty outrageous programmed keyboard parts; good luck, man...but BACK TO ME!!! I asked Steve who played bass on the CD, and he smiled and said "me"*. Then I asked him who played drums, and this is where the plot thickens.

The drummer's name is Mike Mangini*, a Boston area veteran who is very into Terry Bozzio...an accuracy machine with a taste for super-imposed polyrhythms. He was in the band Extreme for a bit there, but more importantly to the story at hand, all the way back in 1990, when I was a student at Berklee College Of Music, my roommate Mike Yee, a drummer, was taking lessons from him. At that time, Mangini was playing in a then bedrock band of the Boston scene, The Rick Berlin Band (a band which, coincidentally, Jon Finn used to be in...you know, the guitarist/Berklee professor who we played gigs with on the BFD tour...the circle never ends). The bassist for The Rick Berlin Band was a large black guy named Phil, and he was really good. You have to understand that the summer of 1990 was my big "breakthrough season", a time in which I practiced endlessly and my playing went from below average to somewhere slightly above. I was 19 years old. So me and my roommate Mike Yee (everyone's fucking name is Mike all of a sudden) would go check these guys out sometimes, and we even went to a birthday party for Rick Berlin himself I believe, and hung out for some degree of time. But it was every once in a while at best...I knew Mike very little and his bassist Phil even less. Well, you all know where this is headed, right? Steve told me that Mike Mangini had recommended a bass player, some guy named Phil, and that he wanted to listen to him as well. What this meant to me is that Mangini and Phil have been playing together for at least six, seven years, and that Mangini was probably pushing as hard to get his guy Phil in the band as Keneally was to give me my shot at getting the gig. And rightfully so, but in the name of self-interest, this information didn't please me. It would be like if there had been another bassist auditioning against me for the Z gig...of course Joe would want me to get the gig, after all, we went to school together, we play well together, we're used to each other, etc. etc., which would put the other guy at a disadvantage, you'd think. Well, now I'm that other guy, and I'm going to have to go in there and just do my best and hope it's enough. Obviously Steve is going to make the decision he feels is best for him and his music. Everyone knows here that I'm not saying anything negative about anyone, right? Mangini and Phil are a talented, experienced rhythm section who can handle the gig, and if it turns out that way, so be it and Godspeed. BUT I WANT THE DAMN THING AND I'LL GO THROUGH HELL OR HIGH WATER TO GET IT. In a lot of ways, this is my first real audition anyway...the Z thing was setup by Joe, which made me really comfortable, and I never really auditioned knowingly for Mike...one day he just decided that I was the guy. Time to grow up, I guess. The thing that makes me laugh is that I looked very different back in 1990, mostly due to the wetness behind the ears and the greenness that I exuded at all times. I wonder if Mangini will recognize me, or even remember me from that era. I know that if some kid seven or eight years younger than me that I knew from one of my former students was standing in the way of my rhythm section happiness that I might be a little, well...you know what I mean. So there it is, in all its glory...the audition is scheduled for early August. I won't write again until after this whole thing has been settled one way or the other.

What do you think of all that, hmm? There's a lot of information up there to digest, so chew lots and swallow slowly. After you've completed your meal, let me know how you feel about it.

Let's see, what else is going on...we've got some gigs coming up in the LA area, with the return of Joe Travers on drums. The most notable show will probably be on August 31 at The Troubadour, where it'll be us, The Raging Honkies (Michael Landau's power trio) and Tony MacAlpine (remember him??). Some local publication named Rock City News has nominated Mike Keneally and Beer For Dolphins as "Best Band With A Guitarist In It", or something like that, for their annual awards show. Only problem is that the show is scheduled for a date during which Mr. K will be in San Francisco, so maybe I can get Frank, Toss and Joe to come with me and we can be Mike Keneally and Beer For Drummers. Actually, speaking of Toss, I've been able to play with him again for the Jews around town--always a musical pleasure for me. What else...oh yeah, I crashed my car into someone else's car. Someone else's Jeep Comanche, to be exact...of all things, I have to go and rear-end a fucking Hummer. It was totally and completely my fault, and I'm sure that my insurance premiums will reflect that fact as accurately as possible. At least I've got the most bitchen rental possible...a 1996 Chevy Blazer for $9.95 a day until my car is fixed. As Homer Simpson might say, "Woo-hoo!!"

And, probably the most important news of this entire treatise: Brad Dahl, he of the Poison Control Center, is dangerously to securing some sort of page for himself and his antics right here at Moosenet, Inc. He's negotiating with our beloved CEO Chatfield as we speak, and a deal should come soon. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 7 years, $125 million. He'll make us twice that in merchandising; I can see it now...Frozen Meat Pie T-shirts, a Taco Bell tie-in, Brad-Fu Rap CD's...coming soon to a browser near you.

Hey, you want short articles? Go read USA Today, or what my idol sports-radio show host Jim Rome would refer to it as, "the multi- colored fishwrap". You know what you'll get around here...over- dramatic, long-winded storytelling with some feeble attempts at self- deprecating humor. Don't worry about my self-esteem...I love myself enough to get this gig without resorting to violence against Phil or anyone else, even myself. Maybe. Until then, here's to truck stops all across the land...may I be getting off of a tour bus and eating at one somewhere this fall. Little Debbie Snack Cakes and Corn Nuts never tasted so good................B.B.

* This little bit is a startling half-truth on my part...Mike Mangini is not the only drummer on the new Vai CD; Dean Castonova and Chris Frazier are only two of the others that appear as well. And Steve certainly meant that he played bass on whatever track we were listening to at the time (something else my fog-laden brain has completely forgotten), not the whole CD. So this is some serious potential misinformation right here...I'm SORRY!!! It made the story better, didn't it?....B.B.