This is Paul Martin. And Ray the Roadie. For the Rock and Roll Chicago podcast.

How are you today, Ray? I'm wonderful. How are you, Paul? I'm fabulous. Fabulous? Just Mr. Fabulous? I am.

You must be one of the sharks, then. No. No, I'm not a shark.

You're not a shark? No, I'm more of a guppy. A guppy. Okay.

Yeah, so. Why a guppy? I don't know. It's just the first fish that came to mind.

And they're kind of like feed fish. Actually, because, because actually, yeah, I thought of that. Because one time a record producer told the band that, that we should be more like a flock of seagulls.

And we, so we're going to call ourselves school of guppies. Oh, I see. I think, I think you could have gone somewhere with that school of guppies.

So that's why I thought of a guppy. And it's really kind of the opposite of a shark. Oh, I'd say quite the other side.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. I think they eat them for appetizers, the sharks do. Yeah.

So what you got going, what do we got going this week? This week, we have Worth the Risk. Worth the Risk. WTR.

WTR, kind of like GFR. Okay, what's that mean? Or Grand Funk Railroad or ARS. Yeah, Atlanta Rhythm Section.

Oh, you got one. Very good. Or ELO.

I bet you know that one. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

You know that one. Yeah. That's Emerson Lake and Oscar.

And Oscar. Exactly. Emerson Lake and Oscar.

Yeah. So it was a good time with these guys. Yeah.

A lot to talk about. It was a lot of fun. They have a lot to talk about.

And they talked about their band. And we talked for almost an hour and 20 minutes. Yeah.

But don't worry, folks, the podcast isn't that long. It's an hour and 45. Yeah, we extended it.

Yeah, I'm doing a little stand-up comedy testing that I want you all to listen to. All right. Tell me a joke.

Tell me a joke. No, I can't. I can't.

I have to wait. You got to test your material on somebody, right? I probably should, but I'm not prepared at the present time. So maybe later.

OK. Maybe on the outro. On the outro, maybe.

All right. Well, let's get to Worth the Risk and find out all about them. And you'll find out that they are worth the risk.

Yes, they are. How are you doing, everybody? Welcome to the show. Today we're talking with the band Worth the Risk.

How are you guys doing today? Hey, how are you doing? Good. We've got Margo and Liz and Mark and Cliff and Eddie. How are you guys hanging in there? You doing all right? Good, yeah.

Oh, yeah. We're tired of coping. Surviving.

Surviving, yes. As everybody is. Yeah.

So tell us a little bit about the band. Let's start out with maybe when the band got together. When you started.

When it all came together. When it all came together, right. Let's see.

Well, Mark and I played together. Mark plays bass and I play the guitar. And I'll kind of introduce everybody real quick.

So Margo plays keyboards. Liz is our lead singer and Eddie plays our drums. And so Mark and I played together in another band previously.

And then when that band kind of went to the end of the limit, we left with a couple of other folks and started up the band. And then we had a process of trying to find a name. So we went through several hundred names before we finally settled on what we have now.

And there's the whole story behind that. But it's probably been, what's it been now? Probably about three or four years that we've had this. Yeah, I mean, we played out quite a bit.

We play everywhere from Oaklawn all the way down to we've been as far down as Pontiac. You know, I mean, we cover a lot of area in the local area. You know, in the local area here, mostly the southern or southwest suburbs for the most part.

Sometimes southeast suburbs, too. It just depends on where people want us at. But we put the band.

Oh, I'm sorry. Is one of you from Worth originally? No, I don't think so. Okay.

I just thought maybe you had to name it somehow. No, no. So actually, the way that the name came together was Mark and I were going through all of these names and some of them were pretty wild.

And then just one day we were talking about, you know, we're kind of worth the risk. You know, when we go up and we talk to some of the venues that we talked to, they didn't know who we were because we had changed the name from the previous band. And now we had a new name.

They knew us, but they didn't know who the new band was. And so we were kind of like, well, hey, you know, we're worth the risk. And it just kind of rolled off the tongue.

It was easy to sell. It's really easy for us to go in and talk to a venue because we say, look, you know, here's who we are. Here's what we play.

Here's what we do, what we can do for you. And here's what we charge. And we're worth the risk.

And it rolls real nice. And they like it. And it fits us.

Well, we actually call the people who follow us riskers. Mark came up with that, I think, or maybe it was Liz. One of the two, maybe everybody.

And then some of the people, some of our folks that are out there, call us WTR. So we go by either one. If they were named after the town, they would be worth the friendly village risk.

Well, you mentioned Pontiac. That's where I'm sitting right now. Oh, there you go.

Yeah, great. Great place. I played at the VFW out there on that stage at Pontiac.

Oh, OK, yeah. I've played on the stage a few times myself, yes. Yeah, yeah.

So some good stories there. And there was one of the radio personalities from up here actually had a place a little farther up from Pontiac. Odell? I can't remember if it was Odell or not, but had a real nice place where they used to have bands out there all the time.

That's been a little while ago, so. Yeah, yeah. Well, unfortunately, the VFW is now closed.

Oh, no. It just closed in the last few weeks. Great stage, good bar, and lots of great patrons.

Yeah. I have a story there when we played out there some years ago and had a gentleman out of the audience that came up, tall guy, long black hair, and he was like a local rock guy. And we're like, OK, come up on stage.

It's always good to get people on stage when they're local. Everybody likes that. And it's a lot of fun.

And he said, what songs you got? So I showed him the list. He's all, I could do Born to be Wild. I'm like, OK, that's a standard.

No problem. So we get up and we start playing. And his vocals were raw, raw.

He was a total metal guy. He never sang a word. And it brought the house down.

The people just loved him. So it was a lot of fun to do that. Thanks for letting me up that night.

I appreciate it. Well played, well played. So we do that quite often.

Well, you know, if there are people in the audience, we can tell they're really into the music. Mark buys tchotchkes and things like that, that we give out, you know, blow up guitars and beach balls, all kinds of stuff. And oh, I thought you said tchotchkes.

Man, I love those things. Yeah, we give out sandwiches. They're worth the risk.

Get a sandwich. But we'll get people on stage and we'll have them sing with us a bit if they know something like, you know, we do some of the old standards to, you know, like the Sweet Home Alabama or some of the other Leonard Skinner type tunes. We do quite a variety, you know, from because we have a female lead singer, Liz, you know, we do some Pat Benatar.

We do some Stevie Nicks. We do Fleetwood Mac stuff. These are all things we're working on.

We're always rotating the songs. So for a couple of years, we did the same songs and now we're rotating to new songs. But the way that the band was formed was we wanted to do something that other people weren't doing.

So we started playing, I don't know if we were the first to do it, we started playing the secondary songs. So, you know, a lot of people would play Hit Me With Your Best Shot by Pat Benatar. We pick a different song.

Maybe we're doing Fire and Ice or something along those lines. Everybody knows it. It's a classic.

They hear it, but not a lot of people play it. So our stuff's a little more difficult to play, requires us to do a little bit more work. But we have fun doing it because we try to make it sound as close as we can with a little bit of our flavor in it.

A little more of the deep cuts, right? Yeah. It's still stuff that people have heard. It's just not the same thing as everybody else.

I found that I usually go around when we're not locked down, I go around and watch a lot of the other bands and meet people and talk to people and I watch what they're playing and see what songs are going over, what type of songs, what type of audience they have, how the crowd gathering is, the different venues. And that gives you an idea of what people like. And then every once in a while, you talk to somebody and you ask them, hey, what do you think about this song? They're like, oh man, I haven't heard that song forever.

So yeah, it'd be great if you guys play that. And we've done a couple of other kind of interesting things. We started this at the VFW in New Lenox.

You like VFWs, don't you? We like VFWs. I'm retired military, so I'm all for VFW. We play the main stage over in New Lenox for their park division over there.

It's a really nice big venue. So one of the things that we did start doing, though, was at the end of the evening, at one point when we first put the band together, we only had a certain number of songs and we were playing out. We ran out of songs and it's kind of like, well, do we start playing the songs over again from the beginning because maybe those people weren't there or do we do something different? So we just started taking requests from the audience and they might ask for something like Rocky Like a Hurricane from the Scorpions, right? Well, it's got enough intricacy into it that you need to rehearse it.

But we knew at least the intro. And so we'd say, well, we'll just play as much of it as we know and then we'll pick another song and we would do that. And they had a blast with that.

People were just yelling out songs. It was a lot of fun. So don't everybody out there steal that idea.

It's a lot of fun to do that. So how long have you been playing guitar, Cliff? I've been playing since I was nine. So it's a long time.

So three years. About three years for Cliff. Yeah, about three years.

So no, I've been playing. Oh, gosh, let's see. Well, so I grew up on the first concert I went to was Grand Funk Railroad.

So that'll tell you about then. I think I was about 14 at the time and I got into the concert. So that's been a ways back.

And I played in a lot of different bands. I was in the military, so I traveled with the Air Force and I played in bands on the side and I just kept it going over all the years. And then I got lucky and I met all these guys.

You go through a lot of different band members and you look for a lot of people. And we just kind of lucked out. We brought Mark into the other band previously when we started and he fit right in.

So, you know, we had him come in and we were going to do you said, you know, pick a certain number of songs. And I remember how many was it? Mark was like five. Yeah, we said do like five.

Mark learned like 40 or 45 of our songs. And so we're like, OK, you know, you sound really good. We'll give you a call.

And he's like, no, we're not quitting yet. I learned all your songs. So so it turned into a little bit of a longer audition.

And we had a four hour audition. It's a good time. We hired Mark.

We grabbed Lizzie just a couple of years ago. Sight unseen. Yeah.

So so what we did with her, we had her do some online auditions. And I was actually staying at a vacation house down in Tucson for the winter and gone down there. And Mark was back here and we were talking back and forth and we started looking for people.

And Liz had an audition video out on I forget what the site was now. It was a band. I think it was band.

Maybe it was band mix or something like that. But anyway, we we listened to her and I gave her a couple of different rock and tunes to do. And she auditioned on them.

And it was kind of fun because our kids helped her. Her husband was helping her. She had and she had equipment in front of her.

She knew how to use a harmonizer and some other things, you know, to do different things. And so we thought that was pretty cool. And when I got back, we brought her in and tried her out.

And she fit really well. That girl, you get to see her on stage. She is a bundle of energy.

She goes like an energizer bunny from one side to the other. And and the kids love her. When we played New Lennox, I've been a couple of years ago now.

Parents loved us. We were babysitters. Yeah, all the kids were up front.

And Liz said to the kids, we were getting ready to play. And she says, OK, everybody needs to sit down. And she took her hands and did the sit down motion like grade school teachers do.

And all the kids folded their legs and sat on the stage in front of us. It was really good. So, yeah, very entertaining.

And and then we happened to grab Eddie, our previous drummer, had a detached retina right before one of our gigs. So we needed a quick replacement. And it was on a Wednesday and we were playing on a Saturday.

So Mark knew Eddie. They played together before in another band and a couple of bands. And so we had a discussion and asked Eddie if he thought he could do it.

And Eddie, Eddie memorizes like everything. He knows how to play everything. He teaches drums, you know.

So, you know, he's really a solid, good, solid drummer. We're glad we got him. Are you the newest member of the band, Eddie? Pretty much I am.

Yeah, I am pretty much the newest member of the band. Did the band go through some changes just recently? Because I saw on your on your Facebook page, on your website, one of the two, that it said you're going you've been doing this hiatus. Of course, we're all on hiatus.

Yes. But that you've gone through some changes and stuff. Yeah, we so we tried a couple of different guitar players.

And what we ended up doing was settling on adding in keyboards. So Margo was actually running sound for us. I taught her how to run sound at one point because I had the board.

Her guy had to try to teach me. It's a digital Behringer board. So it's kind of, you know, I'm the manual reader.

I read all the manuals and they laugh. They laugh at that. Just throw her in the deep end and she'll get a hang of it right.

Yeah. And so she ran sound for us. And then we found out that she could play keyboards and flute and she sang and harmonized.

And so we graduated her from that to keyboards and brought Scott. Scott was Liz's husband and he runs sound for us. He's not here tonight.

But yeah, former military guy. And so we brought Scott in and trained him on how to do that. So now he runs sound for us as well.

And everybody kind of loads in and loads out together. We don't have our own roadies yet. But, you know, we have a good time.

And the thing I was going to tell you about Eddie that was really unique was for that gig, I gave him 45 songs to learn on a Wednesday. And he came in on Saturday and played every one of them like note for note. And so we got paid.

He was the first one that got paid. And I told Mark, I said, you know, we need this guy in the band. And in the meantime, our previous drummer was getting ready to move due to work.

And so the timing, the transition worked really well. And we transitioned Eddie in and he's been great. So and all of us sing.

You're not the first one, Cliff, to say that, you know, we got to keep Eddie in the band. Eddie and I went through that with another band. So let's stick with Eddie.

And Eddie, what is your history? Where what bands do you play in or prior to this? So like I said, I actually pursued a couple musical degrees while I was going in college. I have an associate in arts from Moraine Valley Community College. And during those years, while I was attending Moraine Valley, I actually was in an ACDC tribute band with Mark.

Yes. I played in that band for three years, then transitioned to Vanderbilt College of Music, where I got my bachelor's in music ed degree. And then after I left college, I played in another three piece band with, of course, the bassist Mark once again.

You can't get rid of me. Nope, I can't. I cannot get rid of him.

You're sitting about 75 feet on the other side of the wall next door to me. I know. And then I actually, there was one band that I actually enlisted.

That was an Elmhurst, without going into much detail about that. That was a five piece cover and original rock band, but I only was in there for about a year. I took a little break from the rock scene, like the rock performing and bar scene.

And then I actually focused on playing percussion ensemble as a non-credit class at Moraine Valley Community College, just to keep myself in the loop of music. And now here I am sitting as a full-time teacher and now the drummer worth the risk. So Mark decided to let me come back into the band.

I just get into the band. And my technically audition was that gig that Saturday. So that was like my audition right then and there.

Sink or swim, huh, Eddie? Yeah, pretty much a sink or swim audition. And I had to learn 40 songs in two days, 45 songs in two days. And I still had took my CD player.

Listening to them between sets. Just to stay focused. I didn't want to lose focus at the gig.

I wanted to perform my heart out. Well, that's a cool story. It's a very cool story.

OK, Margo. I don't have the exciting history of music in bands that they do. OK, thank you.

I'm a newbie. This is my first band, but I've been in music. I started taking piano lessons when I was seven.

Oh, OK. And my dad was a minister, so I played the organ and the piano every Sunday, every Sunday night, every Wednesday night. Oh, wow.

That I started playing by ear. And one of the older ladies in the church heard me play, and she paid for my first year of piano lessons and gave me a piano. Wow.

That's how I got started. Where's the church at? That was in Wisconsin. Oh, OK.

But then I ended up moving to Morris with my family. My dad was a minister here, too. And then I stayed in Morris when they moved.

So I've been here for a long time. So you can read music, right? Yes. Yeah, I know.

I play a lot of classical music. Not classic rock, classical music. And now I'm learning how to play classic rock.

That's OK. We're going to teach her how to play stuff off of leftover chur. So.

There you go. How about Liz? So tell us a little bit about your history. Well, according to my mom, I started singing when I came out of the womb.

Um, I guess I was I was kind of a clown. I've always been a bit of a clown. I know.

I'm just liking I guess you could say I'm a lead singer because I like to be the center of attention. I got my first solo in when I was five years old in front of a stage and I was super comfortable. I was actually the lead singer of a group during Desert Storm that actually we performed and recorded and we're on national TV.

And it was a song that a man named Mike Schuller, he took the old classic song, My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean and change the wording to kind of just help be like supportive for the troops. It actually gained a lot of popularity. So I we did music videos and I was on a telethon.

I got to be on Good Morning America. So it was really it was a really a lot of fun. And I really enjoyed doing that.

And so you're traveling to then? Yeah, it was a lot of traveling. Yeah. But I loved it because it was, you know, we were we were famous, you know, we got to do a lot of concerts and malls and people came up to us and, you know, ask for our autographs.

I think I was probably seven or eight when that happened. And so I thought I hit the big time, even though we really we weren't getting paid because it was just something that they were we were doing for charity or for the for the military, really. I just I started doing like just choir at school and I did a lot of solo and ensemble competitions.

And so I did a lot of choral performance. The one time somebody approached my mom when I was singing and asked her, you know, hey, we'd really like her to audition for something bigger. We think that we could take her somewhere.

My mom, like, shut it down, which I kind of like take my fist. I'm like, I could have been Britney Spears, but she knew better. I could have been Britney Spears.

And I like my hair. So but I just kept singing throughout high school and singing at church and that actually my church band, the guys in my church band actually started a band. And it wasn't like the church band.

It was just the guys who wanted to play some covers. So we started playing out. And then that was around the time where we weren't they weren't really making any movement.

So I like Cliff said, I kind of put my feelers out there on band mix. And that's when I met or found Worth the Risk. And they really they did put me through the ringer, like asking me for a video like, oh, do this song.

OK, well, do this song. OK, well, can you do this song? And I was like, yeah. Actually, when they auditioned me, they auditioned me through video.

And then I had to do an interview. And then it was like I felt like I was kind of dating them. But it was like dating them like that because I didn't know if I didn't know if we were like going steady.

And so they would be like, well, we're going to talk to you. Like, I think I talked to Cliff over the phone while he was in Tucson. And but he never really said I was.

And he's like, oh, yeah, yeah. We're going to we're going to talk to other people. And I was like, OK.

And then I talked to Mark for like, I want to say it was like an hour on the phone. Him and I were just hired at that point. You were hired.

But he never but they never told me. And then we went out to we went out to eat and they're talking to me and they never told me. And I was like, I don't know if I got hired or if I'm still dating them or if they're swiping left.

I'm not sure. And on the back end, on the back end, Mark and I were going, yes, because because I made her audition to heart Barracuda, which is not an easy audition to do. And we kind of ranked her off of that, too.

So we've done some cartoons since then. You guys are kind of mean, aren't you? Well, we've been doing great. They want to make sure you're serious, for sure.

That's when you first start. When you guys first started, did Cliff, did you interview Mark and Mark interviewed you or what did you guys do? I mean, yeah, so I was well, I was actually in yeah, I was actually in this other band and we had lost our bass player. We went out, we were looking for a new bass player and Mark showed up and we did several people.

We interviewed several people. The interview was a little bit different than what we do now. But, you know, then Mark came out and the nice thing about it is there's no egos in the band.

Nobody's better than anybody else. You know, we all have portions of jobs we do. You know, Mark looks for gigs.

Everybody kind of looks for gigs, you know, and I handle kind of HR and finance and all that kind of stuff, because I'm, I guess, an older statesman, I guess. And don't you guys make fun of me because I'm old. But anyway, so, you know, there's everybody's everybody gets along really good.

You know, we're family like, you know, if there's an illness or anything like that, we all take the time off and let the person heal up. And, you know, and we don't argue too much. I don't think usually, usually what happens is I start saying something and Liz looks at me like, no, that's not what we should be doing.

And that pretty much shuts that right down. So that's how she's looking at you right now. That's exactly it.

But I tell you, I really what I really enjoy about the band myself is that we do have a mix of older and a mix of younger because Eddie and Liz are significantly younger than us. And some of the music that we play, you know, wasn't music of their time. Right.

So it's stuff that Mark and I, we know the songs like cold. And so then we help Eddie and Liz and Mario come in on these songs and fill in the parts the way that we want them to sound, which is really cool. And everybody's really good about homework.

Yeah, they do their homework. They practice at home. And then we do rehearsal and we have some fun at rehearsal.

But that's usually where I get in trouble because I'm a taskmaster. I'm like, you know, we got this much time. You know, we got to get it done.

But it pays off because when we go out and play, we get a chance to have fun. It's we know our parts. We know who's going to do what.

And unless the equipment messes up, which happens to everybody once and that once in a while, we go out there, we have a good time. So yeah, I know about that. Yeah, yeah.

So it happens. But yeah, you know, we put everybody went through kind of their own interview type. And we were really concerned about having somebody who had energy for like Lizzy on the front end.

I can tell you. So the one time out all the times I remember playing so far was when we played on the new Lennox stage and the stage was huge and we were in the middle of the stage and I'm over there playing. And here comes Liz.

She's bouncing over towards me over there and she's singing and carrying on. And then she goes bounding away, you know, and the energy was just amazing. She's fun to watch.

She pulls surprises. There's still a brassiere hanging in the ceiling of one of the venues that we played at. It's quite an interesting, fun time when we play out.

Everybody has a good time. So I don't think he was trying to embarrass you, Lizzy. I was.

I embarrassed myself. It's OK, because when that happened, we got a lot of attention. I can imagine that.

It's funny that there's been times that Liz and I will do a duet or whatever on stage and people go, you guys married? Nope, it's all part of the act. Nope, it's all part of the act. You know, I've been doing this for 45 years.

My wife is like, as long as you come home. We do a lot of fun stuff, too. We go wireless.

So Mark and I both go wireless and we go out in the audience and we play in front of the closed, you know, we bring people on stage, you know, if they want to come up and sing with us. We had the mayor in New Lenox came up and sang with us. We had.

He's a good guy. He's a great guy. Yeah, we had a police officer that came on stage and sang.

Yep, yeah. He was singing background vocals with us. And so we had the police up there.

It was fun, you know, so we have a good time. We try to have fun with everybody. Our typical motto has been we want to play music that everybody knows, but not the main music that, you know, everybody else is doing.

We want to have the patrons have fun and enjoy it and ask us to play things that they want to hear. We may not know it. We'll try to do as much as we can.

But we also try to work for, you know, the venue that we're playing for, you know, if it's a bar or something along those lines, you know, we try to draw the crowd so that they can have some fun, get people up and dancing. We don't just play the hard rock stuff. We've got a mix of newer stuff.

I mean, we play some Black Keys, you know, and we go back to the Guess Who? And then we'll turn around and we'll play Grace Potter, Grace, Grace Potter, and then we'll turn around and we'll play, you know, you know, Eddie Money. So it just it just depends. And then we all take turns singing.

Everybody in the band can sing. That's one thing that is probably that's probably the hardest part about being in the band is trying to get the vocals right. And everybody knows that it's always tough.

You know, we have to harmonize and figure out who can sing what, you know, what. So we, you know, we work on all of that as well. And we're just getting ready to move to using in-ear monitors.

I know a lot of people use those, but we try a lot of different things. Some of the venues are really tight. We played in some places where I had a TV right over top of my head and I'm 6'4".

And I couldn't move. I mean, Cousins in Tinley Park. That was Cousins.

Yeah. And I couldn't move. I had to stand still all night long.

You know, with the with the monitors, we can do things like we don't have to bring the amps on stage. We can run directly into the PA. So we monitor your in-ear monitors are a great thing, especially, I mean, for a small stage.

It's great because you're not as loud. Your volume isn't as loud off the stage. And for a big stage, you can kind of spread out and still hear yourself or or it's like your amplifier is following you wherever you go.

Yes. So we were playing in a venue. So I'll give you one story.

So why this is important to me. So we were playing in a venue and I went out front wireless to go to go play a lead. Well, Mark's a big guy like me, you know, but he's a little he's a little wider and stouter than I am.

And and so Mark started to follow me out there. But he stepped between me and my amp and my amp was directional and I couldn't hear what I was playing. So I was having to play till I got him out of the way.

I was having my problem. Not my problem. No, we haven't.

We had to talk about that. And we really haven't had that issue. Oh, I know you threaten me.

Do not step in front of my amp. Yeah, because we don't always make everything. Sometimes we make the equipment depending on the size of the venue.

Other times we go direct into the board. The pods on the floor and then other times we go just amps. So, you know, just straight amps.

Yeah. So, Mark, we missed we kind of missed that when we lost you there for a little while. Okay, I was trying to listen.

But tell us a little bit of your history. Well, I'm an Oklahonian. Most of my life I did do a stint in Arizona where I had the pleasure of working for the sheriff's department out there and Sheriff Joe for a few years.

But playing bass for 45 years, I've had the pleasure of sharing the stage with many famous bands, UFO, Three Dog Nights. Eddie and I have did. We did Problem Child, the Bon Scott ACDC.

We were all over the place. We opened for Boister Cult. We did I played the Leftovers in the South Side with buddies of mine for years.

Was the original one of the original bass players for Busker Soundcheck. My buddy Paul Camp is in Led Zeppelin, too. Maybe you guys know him.

He's really a great guy and a good friend of mine. But we've had the pleasure of, you know, we played in college together. So a little bit of this, a little bit of that.

I played in private consultation. I've done The Seeds. I've done Second Wind.

And then I just found I found Cliff. And then, you know, it's funny. It's like we're like brothers.

And I look at these guys and I look at the walks of life that everybody in this band brings. And everybody brings something special. And like Cliff said, there's no egos.

There is no animosity. Unless, of course, I stand in front of Cliff Sample. I know, but or step on one of his pedals and break a cable, which I've done.

He's done that. You know, but I have a pedal board, too. So bass player's got a pedal board.

Ask Roger about his pedal board. Right off in the pedal. What did I do? I went and bought you a cable the same week.

Nice one. So, you know, again, we do what we have to do. You know, we all spend money and time to do what we have to do.

I know Paul. I know I've known you forever. Ray, I don't really know you, but I know of you.

So, I mean, we're in definitely uncertain times right now. I don't know what bars are going to survive this coronavirus. I was kind of dismayed to see the kind of I've done.

I played at the Aragon years back on Lawrence and I didn't realize the building was in such crappy shape that the snow was going to take out a wall. You know, I saw that on news last night, so I was like a little dismayed. But Eddie and I had the pleasure.

We worked with Johnny B on the loop as both in studio and at the live remotes. We had a blast with him. I've known him for 30 years.

So he's actually he's actually doing a podcast, too, that I'm listening to on the weekends. Ray, I think I can tell you and Paul like Cliff and I were all born in B.C. before computers, you know, but we learned by adapting. You know, I'm talking to you on a, you know, on a Commodore 64, you know, and it's just we've got Windows three one.

So we're working on, you know, but, you know, we learned by adapting. You know, everybody works. Everybody has a second job in the band.

More or less, there's one or two of us that are retired. But we shouldn't talk about that, Margo. But, you know, we have we have the medical field is representative.

We have Cliff's the computer guy. I work for the state. So I actually work for a division of the state that's very busy these days.

And in a retired psych nurse. So I have my hands full. Yes, yes, you are.

Yeah, no. And then it is Vanderkoek guy. And then I got Lizzie, you know, and we all get along.

That's the coolest part about this band is I love this band. And I told Cliff and his Cliff's brother plays drums. And he looked at me.

He says, I'm glad you're with my brother. I'm like, I wish I would have known you guys 35 years ago because you go through so many walks of life. And Paul, you can testify to this.

You meet so many people in so many venues and Cliff played all over the world, too. You know, I met people in Jamaica playing and you know what? And they're still friends of mine to this day. Right.

You know, and then you meet people that kind of use you and abuse you and they kind of come and go like a flash in the night, like whatever happened to them. You know, we've gone through a guitar. We went through guitar players like water for a while.

It was like spinal tap. They kept this. You know, I lose.

I lose interest. You know, I don't want to play. Call me when you got a gig.

You know, we're not in. We're not in for long all we're in for. We're in for the quality is not the quantity.

You know, there's you know, there's finite amount of years left and everybody, you know, and then like, you know, when I can tell you when Eddie and I when we brought Eddie into We needed a drummer and everybody told me, no, no. And I says, I got a guy. It's like everybody in Chicago.

I got a guy. And Eddie was like 18 at the time. So we're like sneak him into bars, putting a Marine Corps head on him.

Don't shave. Sit in the court. Don't talk to anybody.

And he was the original problem child, you know, but everybody's like, he's too young. And we told brand where the story is like, you are the problem child. Eddie is like the best.

He's got the best meter of any drummer I've ever played with. You know, he's got that mental, you know, and if it's not right, he will stop the song in rehearsal and say, let me do it again. I want to get it right.

He stops the song when I play it in the wrong key and tells me that's not the right key. And he's not even looking at a book. He's got the he's got the beats permitted up in his head.

So the drummer and drummer drives the bus, right? Yeah, buddy. But anyways, that's that's that's the history. That's the history of worth the risk.

I want to thank you guys for all having us out. Yeah, this is a lot of fun. Let's take a time out here for a second.

Hey, Ray, what are you doing? I'm getting my blue rest on. I'm playing my banjo, except there seems to be something wrong with the strings. Well, you know, Ray, GHS makes strings for all types of instruments, electric and acoustic guitar, bass guitar, mandolin, ukulele, and even banjo.

Then I'm getting new GHS strings and my banjo will sound better. I don't think it's the strings, Ray. GHS are easy to play with rich, full, balanced tone available in many different gauges.

Great for all musical styles. So if you play, play with the best, play GHS strings. Have you guys been and you mentioned about COVID and what have you? How are you guys surviving? Have you played much at all this past summer or or have you played at all for that matter? We had, we had what? Maybe three gigs, four gigs that we had set last year, well before COVID.

And it seemed like we just, you know, we didn't, we never canceled. We held out hope. We were like, we'll do it.

We'll do it. And it just seemed like with the state, you know, shutting down, we got canceled. When the bars shut down, went to limited capacity, we got canceled.

So we just decided to take the time and then, you know, say, hey, let's look at the songs that we have and let's add more. So, I mean, even though we haven't been able to get out and play to an audience, we've, we've been utilizing this time. I think I feel like, yeah.

And like really, really like working out the bugs in, in songs that, oh, you know what? We're not, we're not real solid on this song. Let's work on it. Or let's add some more songs so that when we do get out, well, you know, we're going to be ready to go.

Yeah. Well, we, what we like to do too, is we like to do a show and then rotate the song list with some new songs. We want to have enough songs so that we can mix and match.

And it's always different because for too many years, we played, Mark and I have done this before we played for the first couple of years together. Just the same songs over and over. And, you know, bless, bless those guys out there, like the stones or whoever, you know, that play the same exact tunes.

And everyone wants to hear those all the time. I couldn't imagine writing my own tunes and then doing that. All just those, because everybody out there likes to do everybody else's tunes, you know, so, cause there's a lot of good music out there.

Well, looking on your website, I see you, you've got quite the, a selection of different artists that you play. On a night you guys are playing, each one of you, what's one song that you would want to do? Each one of us? Yeah. See if we can start a little feud going on here.

Well, I like Thunder Island. What's that? I like Thunder Island. I like, I like Badfinger.

I'm a Badfinger fan from back in the day. And so I do like, we do like No Matter What. We could do Baby Blue if we wanted to, but we've done No Matter What.

Pretty well got that down solid. And people have heard that before. I don't know.

Or Crazy Horses. Yeah, have you ever heard of Crazy Horses? By who? By the Oz brothers. Heavy metal.

Oh no. So the Ozmans way back in the day did one heavy metal tune called Crazy Horses. You'll have to go listen to it.

It's on YouTube. And it starts out with Donny Osmond using a keyboard that he slides his hand across the strip on the keyboard. And it does a song, a sound that sounds like horses screaming.

And so it's like a theremin on the board. Yeah. And so you'll have to go listen to it.

It's a really good song. And now everybody will be playing it, but it jams. And you got to watch the video when they do the choreography, because the choreography is amazing.

We still have to work on that. What's the name of the song again? It's called Crazy Horses by the Ozmans. After this podcast airs, you're going to hear on the news.

People don't know why, but Crazy Horses by the Ozmans has just gone viral on YouTube. Way to the top. We're going to get letters from the Mormons.

It's the outfits. That's the true giveaway, the outfits. So do you guys have any gigs coming up? We haven't set any just yet, because we've kind of been waiting to see what's going to open up.

We've talked to some of the venues. We've talked to some of the promoters out there. And we use a couple of different promoters to help us find gigs at some point.

The issue has been that the bars can only... We say the bars, but any of the venues, no matter where you're at, can be about 25% full. That's not enough for them to draw money to pay... That's 25% of what we make. I tell you two things.

Like fine wine musicians get better with age, and the equipment gets heavier as we get older. Travel lights, my man. Travel light.

Smaller is better. Size matters. Yes, it does.

Yes, it does. Right. We've gone with smaller gear.

I use Mesa boogies for the most part, or Boss. The new Boss digital amps that they've got, you can take a sample, and it sounds like a Mason boogie or a Marshall. I mean, I can switch it really quick, which is really nice.

And Mark has a variety of... I've got eight or nine amps behind me. You guys want to buy it? They're all tanks. Everything from Vox to going back.

But I'm using hard key stackables now. They're just nice. And Eddie uses acoustic drums, or he'll use electronic drums.

And we've tuned those now to where they sound really good coming through the PA. So it matches up really, really well with the PA. See, and I'm still rocking it through my pig nose.

Pig nose is great. Love those amps. Put some batteries in the back, you can go hit the beach with your guitar.

I'll say Mark and I, we maintain our visual presence on... We have a webpage. It's worththeriskband.com. And we've also got a Facebook site as well. And so there's pictures, there's the bands on there.

It introduces everybody in the band. So you can see what's new, music. We have some sound bites.

We cut back on our sound bites. We had full songs on there at one point. But we ran into some issues with that.

So we cut them back to just short clips. Because a lot of times, the venues want to hear you. And most of them don't want a DVD these days.

A few years ago, we used to hand out a folder with DVDs and photos and all that. They want a web... So we give them some sound bites and some photos. And some of the past events that we've been in, places to go to.

And then different ways to contact us as well. We have an email that goes along with the website. And people can send us an email there.

And we take any suggestions that get thrown at us and talk them over and see what we can put out there for everybody. I'm thinking the Pig Nose Band. I like that idea.

That's pretty good. The Pig Nose Band. Now, if you can come up with a pig nose for a bass player, I'm in.

I'll tell you, Paul Camp had one in college at Bradley back in the early 80s. It was awesome. But then he had a little Vox amp too.

So it is what it is. I thought about starting one up and calling it Pig Nose in the Snouts or something. Pig Nose in the Swank.

What about original music? Have you done any original music or any writing? I did some original music in Busker Soundcheck way back when. Again, that's Northside clubs, man. They don't have parking lots.

That's pieces of land congruent to the venue where you're playing, where you don't have to haul your gear through bad neighborhoods and park four blocks away and try to get back to it at three o'clock in the morning. Unless you're playing at Metro, then Joey will let you park in the loading dock, only long enough to unload your car. Then you can go find your place.

I've written originals over the years, but we don't really play them because even though we could probably write some pretty decent originals, but the last one I did in the studio sounded like Pat Benatar. I've played that type of music before. As I went back and I listened to it some years later, I'm like, wow, that really sounds like Pat Benatar knockoff.

So you fall back into what you've learned. We've just been so busy. When we went to pick our song list last year, we took over 500 songs on a spreadsheet.

We kept adding to it. And we kept adding to it because everybody wanted to do this song or that song. Even tonight, Mark and I were talking about it.

He's like, we should do You're So Vain by Carly Simon. I'm like, well, we've got all these other ones to learn. It's all great tunes.

All of them are good. But we finally whittled it down to 73 songs. I think we're at 58 that we're working on right now that are newer tunes.

How do you pick a song? Does somebody come in just to bring a suggestion? And then somebody else goes, no, I don't want to play that song. So I'm a computer nerd. And I love this because I take a spreadsheet and I put all the info into a spreadsheet and I sort it.

And then I send a copy to each one of them. We use Dropbox. And I put it up in the Dropbox.

And each one goes through and they put a number one in on the songs. There's a column. They put a number one.

And then that adds up at the bottom. And we find out how many that there are. Right.

Well, I take and cut those out and I paste them all into a master. And so now I have everybody's preferences. And then you go across the columns and you say, well, OK, we got five people.

We should have five down to a number one or none if you don't like it. Right. So if we get five ones going across, that song gets an X. We put it on the list.

If it gets zero, it goes off. If we're doing a cutoff because we have too many songs, we may cut it off at three and say unless it has a four or five, we're not going to mess with it right now because somebody likes it. You know, it's not high enough on the list of everybody's priorities.

And then we try those songs. We'll work on them. And sometimes we're a little overambitious.

I mean, yeah, you know, we put we put down Boston a couple of times. And quite honestly, some of the vocals in Boston are pretty high and pretty tough. We've done some Led Zeppelin and I give Lizzie credit.

She has done the Led Zeppelin shot after she does like, yeah, you know, so. And we're all allowed one one veto, one veto. Yeah, if you if you really don't like it and you really don't want to do it, you go, I don't want to do it.

It's not an argument. We don't even argue about it's like, OK, well, we'll set it off to the side and say anything, Margo. You know what I'm thinking, though, it is it sounds like I was going to say, man, the way Cliff puts it, it sounds super sexy.

My God, we had we had a battle when we got to the Black Keys and a couple of other bands the guys brought up because I was like, you know, that just does not sound like us. You know, it's because there's a certain feel that we have in the band. And I like all kinds of different types of stuff.

But when it gets when it gets down to it, it's usually kind of a discussion. And then we go, yeah, OK, we'll pick a couple. But we're not going to do all these.

Do you get really current with like shut up and dance or. Oh, I would love to take by the ocean or. Well, we had to bring Cliff.

We had to bring Cliff past nineteen eighty five first. That has been a major struggle. Cut off.

There really isn't any good music past nineteen eighty five. Not true. Not true at all.

Well, thanks for joining us today, guys. We appreciate it. Thanks a lot.

It's a lot of fun. You look forward to seeing everybody out this summer. We tell Karen we said hi.

So we definitely will. Thank you very much, guys. Take care.

Rock on, guys. Bye bye. Bye.

So that was worth the risk. That was Liz and Cliff and Mark and Margo and Eddie and and the whole gang. The whole gang.

Kind of like Spanky. Spanky and our gang. Right.

Pig nose and pig nose in the snout. Pig nose in the snouts. That's going to be mine.

That's going to be my new band. I'm going to put that together. Pig nose in the snouts.

I like it. Maybe a doo-wop band. Oh, sure.

There you go. Yeah. Well, I don't know that worth the risk is doing any doo-wop, but they do a lot of classic rock and which we all love classic rock, don't we? Yes, we do.

Can't get enough of it. And Liz on lead vocals. Cliff's playing guitar.

Mark is playing bass and singing. And Cliff is also singing. Everybody's singing.

Everybody sings. Margo plays keys and sings. And Eddie's a drummer and he sings as well.

And Margo plays the flute also. So maybe they do some, I didn't ask them, maybe they're doing some Jethro Tull. Perhaps.

Why would you say that? Why is he stereotyped? You have a flute. You got to play Jethro Tull. Why is that? Because you have to.

Oh, okay. I mean, Jethro Tull, they're hand in hand. It's, you know, it's like you get strings and you think, you know, Emerson, Lake and Oscar.

That's right. No. They could play some Chicago with a flute.

They could. They could play Color My World. That's right.

That's got some fluting in it. So a flautist. A flautist.

Yes. It's somebody that plays the flute that is kind of like not, kind of good, like going away and not popular anymore. That would be the fleeting flautist.

Oh, I see. I'll remember that. Thank you.

And I've got to check out this Crazy Horse by the Asmunds. Oh, I'm downloading it now as we're speaking. Yeah.

I'm going to rock on, man. It's going to be on your playlist, right? It's going to be on my playlist. Yeah, I'm going to, I'm going to, yeah.

Play me some Asmunds. That's right. That's right.

Maybe I can transcribe it for my banjo. Sure. Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. See what it sounds like.

Okay. Well, thanks for listening, everybody. Be sure.

We want to thank GHS Strings and we want to thank the Illinois Rock and Roll Museum. Be sure and go and check out the, go online and check out the Illinois Rock and Roll Museum, even if you can't get there in person right now. They're not open yet, but.

No. You can also become a charter member. That's right.

By going online at roadtorock.org. That's where you can find them. And you can, you probably find some pictures there of what they're doing and how things are progressing there as well. And you can also go to our Facebook page and our website and like all our previous podcasts and share them with your friends.

Let the people know about us. Thanks for listening, everybody. We'll talk to you next week.

See you next week. Bye-bye. Rock and Roll Chicago podcast does not own the rights to any of the music that's played on this podcast.

The music is used to promote the band or musicians that are interviewed.