Here's Paul Martin and Ray the Roadie for the Rock and Roll Chicago podcast. How are you doing today, Ray? I'm doing great, man. It's a beautiful night out.

It's warm. It's grayed out. I'm virus-free.

How about you? I'm good. I'm good. I'm social distancing, except I did shake a few hands today.

Oh, no. I did, but I came right home and washed them. Very good.

You got to keep that, get some of that disinfectant stuff. Keep it in your car, man. Yes, yes.

I need to do something, I guess, but maybe just not shake people's hands. Yeah, why were you shaking people's hands? Because they stuck their hand out there to shake mine, and because I'm a gentleman, that's what I do. I shake people's hands.

So, if anybody sticks something out at you, you're going to shake it? Maybe. Okay, that's you. You're welcome to do whatever you want.

Speaking of it, what's shaking this week? I'll tell you what's shaking. What's shaking is my good old buddy, Mike Aquino. We've got Mike Aquino this week.

He's a rocky guitarist, he's a country guitarist, he's a jazz guitarist, he's a blues guitarist, he's every man's guitarist. I bet you he's shaking it all up, man. Shake me all over, baby.

Yes, yes, he does. I've been looking forward to this interview, so let's go see what Mike has to say for himself. Let's go.

Shake it, baby. Everybody, we're meeting today with Mike Aquino, who is, in my opinion, one of the hottest guitar players in all of Chicagoland. How are you doing today, Mike? I'm great, guys.

How are you guys doing? We're doing well, thank you. Doing great, virus free. That's a good thing.

Yes, it is. Yes, it is. So, Mike, I mean, it's probably easier to name the bands or people you haven't played with than name the ones you have played with.

I was afraid you were going to ask something like that, so I actually had to sit down and write out a band timeline myself. It's bad. I don't know if it makes it look like I couldn't decide who I wanted to play with or if I just kept getting fired.

Well, I don't think so, but let's start in the early years, when you started playing guitar as a kid and how you got into that and what followed. To be honest, I started when I was eight and I know my brother was, my mom had just signed my brother up for drum lessons. And I saw a guitar and I'm like, well, I want to play that.

Which led to me getting a guitar, which then led to lessons. Like any kid, you don't practice enough for your lessons. I think by 10 or 11, it kind of fell by the wayside a little bit.

I still played a little bit, but sports were more important. And then all of a sudden I saw the guitar, it's sitting in my corner of my room and I'm like, I think I want to really get into playing that more. So I just started teaching myself a lot until I got into high school and college.

But yeah, there was a lot of, I started when I was eight and I mean, I did learn how to read early on. That fell by the wayside after a while, but picked it back up in college and high school. So it was just a lot of learning off of records when I really started to take it seriously somewhere around 10 or 11 years old.

It was learning off records, you know, moving the needle back and forth because we didn't have CDs back then, tapes and eight tracks and records and slowing it down, taking the record and slowing it down and having to try to learn out what you thought you got to play. And then I got it. And then you put it back on real speed and now, wait a minute, I've got to change keys now.

Hang on. You know, it was a lot of that until I got to high school and college. Now, who were some of your early influences there? My biggest influence.

Who'd you pick that record, that needle up and put it at? What record was that? Oh God. A lot of B.B. King. My greatest influence in playing the guitar ever, if there was one guitar player that I could say started it for me and I said, I want to sound like that is Brian May from Queen, who I actually did get a chance to meet and it was just the coolest thing in the world.

But Brian May, B.B. King, a lot of people listen to me because I do a lot of country and that didn't start when I started, but a lot of people would be probably taken back to hear that I'm a huge Iron Maiden fan. I love everything from the first record through Seventh Son of a Seventh Son. Everything after that, nah, it's not really big, but there was a lot of moving the needle back and forth on Foreigner records, Queen records, Iron Maiden records.

We had some Rush records too. My brother was big into Rush, so there was a lot of Rush floating around. So basically, your classic rock mixed with some Stevie Ray Vaughan and B.B. King.

Yeah. It was great in the days when we can open up an album too and look at it and check out the pictures and look at all the credits and everything on there. Nowadays, it's all downloadable.

You can't do that. I know and I miss that and that's part of the charm. I think it's coming back or it was coming back.

Everything's been put on hold right now, but I think it's coming back. There's just that charm about getting lost and looking at the pictures or reading the lyrics as the song's going down and catching all the mistakes in the printed lyrics, but they're actually singing. You're like, wait a minute, no, that's not what he said.

Yeah, right. But yeah, no, I agree with you. That was the coolest thing was to be able to look at an album cover or an album sleeve and look at all the artwork.

It's a lost art now. I hope it is coming back. I hope it seems like some albums are being released with a PDF file that you can print up and read some of the stuff, but it's still reading a piece of eight and a half by 11.

It's not that hard work, right? It's not that with like the, if you look at it on a PDF, the colors aren't going to fade. They're little wrinkle lines did, they were real, they're organic, you know, right, exactly. Yeah.

Yeah. I think I was picking a needle up and putting that in the parlor and the Raiders. I'm a little older than you are, I think, but the Raiders are great though.

Come on, man. I was, it was great. I mean, I loved, I loved working with, with kicks and hungry and, you know, all the, yeah, I've never done that quite, quite a bit, but your, your, your phonograph was that one with the big horn on it, right? Yeah.

Yeah. So, so, so you went on to college, right. And you, and you said you, where'd you go to school at? Okay.

So college, I, I landed in college at college DuPage first, where I did an associates in the arts degree there. That's where I met one of my biggest, three biggest mentors. A guy by the name of Tom Tallman, who my first day going to school at COD was his first day teaching at COD, walked into his theory class.

And I believe he walked in with his long horn tech, Texas longhorns, coffee mug, and walks up to the front of the classroom and goes, if you're here to learn how to love music for everything it is, Mr. Bauer's music appreciation room is across the hall. Go over there. If you're here to learn how to hate music, you're in the right class.

Yeah. And Tom and I, he, he has been a mentor and a colleague and a best friend now for 30 years. So and he's recently retired from COD.

He's truly one of the most brilliant musicians I've ever met in my life. Just absolutely amazing. He's a trumpet player by trade and just, he's just one of those guys you go, if it wasn't for you, this is all your fault, Tom, he's one of those guys, but I did my associates degree there.

And then I transferred to Roosevelt university, Chicago musical college. And I picked that school because they had a cool double major program. You could get a, basically a music ed degree with a jazz performance degree tacked onto it.

So I did a degree in music education and jazz performance. Yes, I was at one point certified to teach K through 12. And you know, there's a lot, I'm not anymore.

I didn't keep the certification up. I wish I would have. But I realized that teaching in the school system wasn't for me.

It just, I loved the teaching aspect, but so early on, that wasn't what it was about. It was more red tape and pleasing upper brass rather than actually teaching students and having fun. Plus being a guitar player, if you're a guitar player and you're trying to get a job as a band director, even if you're a straight A student, national honor society in college and you go to audition for teaching a band job at a high school and the person after you is maybe a B plus student or a B student and you were an A student, but they're a trumpet player or a trombone player, they're going to get the job before you are.

Yeah. They're going to get the gig first. Because they're steeped in that tradition of it where I wasn't, which was okay.

I decided, well, I've done that. I can take a lot of the stuff that I did learn how to do in that degree and I can use it in teaching privately and I can also use it in working in other bands with other stuff going on. There's been lots of times where I've used a lot of my music ed degree when I never thought I would, you know, directing choirs at the drop of a hat, directing a string orchestra at the drop of a hat, rewriting string parts for a show 30 minutes before a gig because the string arrangement that someone downloaded was wrong, you know, and having to go get over here.

All right. What do you have? Okay. We need to change this here.

We need to change it. And just rewriting their string part 30 minutes before a performance. It's come in handy.

It has come in handy. I'm glad I did it. Now, were you playing, were you playing, just to go back a little bit, were you playing through high school and stuff and playing out in bands or? In high school, all right, so I had two bands in high school.

I had, there was Blue Metal, which was like a blues band that did like classic rock. We were like named after the metal album from Pink Floyd. So it was like blues and Floyd and Neil Young and Hendrix.

It was basically all that stuff, you know, you can just imagine the practices in the basement with, you know, smoke and smells everywhere. And that band, I was in my junior year and we did play a lot of parties. We went out and played.

Then I also had in my junior and senior year, I had a band called Gordo and the Destroyers. Now Gordo was Gordon Crosby, who was the choir instructor. Gordon is one of the other three mentors that it's because of them I do what I do.

And he was so cool that, you know, we had him in the band with us. That band played a lot of the school functions. That band would play a lot of the school functions and then Blue Metal would play all the parties and get paid to play parties.

But that's what I did in high school was playing in those bands through high school. College was those bands didn't exist anymore. And that became I playing a lot of jazz quartets, a lot of jazz trios, you know, Sunday brunch at the Hyatt at my time with like COD was a lot of, you know, playing a lot of jazz stuff.

I played with the College of DuPage professional jazz ensemble. I don't think anyone, the only myself and the other guitar player were the only students at the school. The rest were all pros.

Great education to play with that. The head of jazz studies at Roosevelt when I was there was Rob Parton. I don't know if you guys remember Rob Parton, trumpet player.

And Rob set in on my performance scholarship audition. And after my performance scholarship audition said, hey, man, you sounded great. And he goes, do you own a Tux? And I said, well, yeah, of course I did.

And I'm like, yeah, he's like, yeah, if you're not playing this this weekend, I need a guitar player at the Old Star Plaza at the banquet hall there. He's like, yeah, I need a guitar player. Can you, you know, you can read, obviously.

I'm again, he's like, yeah, can you do the gig? I'm like, yeah, sure. So I went out and rented a Tux, made enough money to pay for the Tux and then a little bit. And for the whole time that I was in Roosevelt, I did the high society jobbing Tux gigs, you know, where you play everything from String of Pearls and Chattanooga Choo Choo through That's What Friends Are For and, you know, all time rock and roll.

So you kept getting his formal wear in business. I had three Tuxes. I had one.

I had them in rotation as they were out getting, you know, I had one I would wear for like Friday and Saturday. And then I'd send that one out and I'd send that one out and go get the other one. And then I had a third one that was ready to go.

So I, it was that busy in those days playing those that Chicago and I guess Indiana real high society Tux gigs. Now, what year was that? What year was, what year did you graduate from Roosevelt? I graduated Roosevelt January. I graduated early, January of 97.

So it was last century. You know, so I probably did, I probably did those Tux gigs from 93 or 94, probably through 2001, you know, and while that was going on, I also had in college a band called Blue Illusion that played all like the college towns, you know, where we could have been downtown at the Park West or we'd be at Otto's in DeKalb or Andy's in DeKalb. And yeah, it was your typical early nineties to mid nineties rock band.

I kind of split the difference with those two all through the Roosevelt years. The Blue Illusion band gave way to, gave birth to another band. It kind of changed its name and then changed one person and became the Daniel Grove band.

Which was my first big country band. That was the mid nineties through like 2001 or two. That was a huge band on the circuit throughout all of Chicago and Indiana and up by the state line by Wisconsin.

Just, it was a pretty, that was back in the days when you could play, you know, there were 11 honky tonks in Chicago and you could play three or four nights a week, sometimes at the same place. When did Kimmy Hayes band start? Okay. Kimmy Hayes band started, it had to be around 2000.

I know because I was, because I was out of college and I was just beginning to wind down playing with the Jobbing band, with the Rock Partner Orchestra, which had just turned into Bradley Young Voyagers. Things were beginning to wind down a little bit with the Daniel Grove band. As the 2000s hit, country scene kind of just died.

Everything died, you know, so that was dying. And Kimmy had, from my recollection, she was with the Janes, Fabulous Janes, and she had recorded her own record, which I think was like Adam from the Janes, was Adam Blair and Christian Blair. And I believe they did one show.

And I don't know what happened. I don't remember what happened, but she fired the guitar player. And she was asking around for names and numbers for guitar players.

And I think from like three or four people she asked, she had the same name and the same number, which was mine. So she called and I'm like, yeah, I'll check it out. Because it came from like Christian and Adam and or Dia at the time.

I'm like, you know, yeah, I'll go, I'll go meet with Kimmy and check out the tunes. And she gave me the record and I learned the record and we rehearsed and the rest was Chicago rock and roll history. It was a roller coaster ride for 11 and a half, 12 years, you know, and it was it was a good bet.

That was a fun band, you know, a ton of personnel changes, but that was a fun band. I loved playing in that band and getting to work with Kimmy was like, I mean, you talk about a powerhouse of a vocalist. Oh, yeah.

God, you know, so just to keep up with her energy and her voice, you had to bring your A game and you had to spin around and turn that amp up, man. You see, you know, I imagine so, because like you said, she's got a lot of energy, a lot of energy. She would bring in great songs.

She wrote great songs. And it was fun to put those songs together. And, you know, we were lucky, you know, when that band got to, I'd say, its height of its run, I mean, we could pull 400 people in at a show and play easily 60 percent originals, if not more.

And they all knew them. Right. And that was, of course, that's back when the original days of playing in and around Chicago in the Midwest were great.

It's not like that anymore. But that was fun getting to play your songs and see people requesting and singing your songs rather than just having to play Sweet Home Alabama or something like that. Yeah.

How much writing did you do with Kimmy? On and off. We did. I was more.

I mean, I did a lot. I did some writing with Kimmy. Most of the stuff was written by Kimmy.

I'd say I was more involved with the arrangement of putting everything together. I mean, I did some I've done writing on and off with her from the second record, which was Porcupine Girl, I think had the first song that we wrote together called Tell You Ride. That's the first song that we wrote together.

And then from there, it was a lot of helping her with the arranging. Obviously, I wrote a co-wrote a bunch of the stuff on the Red 14 CD, Watered Down Whiskey. We talked to her.

She was our podcast last week. And I think she credited, I think it was Watered Down Whiskey, as she said, she wrote with In Your Garage or something. Kimmy and Paula.

Kimmy and Paula during that era. I was married at the time. And Kimmy and Paula would pack up the car and drive up to my place in Aurora and we'd sit in the living room and we'd exchange ideas and start writing.

And of course, I'd go out into the garage for a smoke break and we'd play darts and keep writing the song and going over stuff. So, yeah, we wrote that song pretty much in the garage. And I love that song.

That song, man, when I listen back to that song, it hits that chorus. It just opens up. Yeah, that's a good song.

I mean, I would say as time progressed with the Kimmy Hayes Band, I was more involved in the writing, always in the arrangement, more in the writing. But I'd say the big one that I wrote with Kimmy would be Watered Down Whiskey, for sure. So you're still spending a lot of time in the garage writing songs? I spend a lot of time writing songs in the garage, on the deck, on the couch, at the kitchen table.

I like the acoustics in my dining room here, so I'll just sit here. For a while, I was co-writing a lot of stuff the past three or four years with a friend of mine, Brad Nye. If you guys remember Dick Holiday and the Bamboo Gang, Brad was the singer for that.

That was his band. Brad's got a company called Big Palm Entertainment. So him and I were writing a lot of material for different artists under Big Palm Entertainment.

So I did a fair share of writing in the past four years with Brad for that stuff. That's where a lot of the originals have been geared towards different artists that Big Palm picks up. You know, it's interesting.

When you talk about, when you get the right people together about the Chicago music scene, you realize you've played with everyone out there. And the more people that you realize that you've worked with, the smaller your circle gets. Right, right.

Awful crowded boat, but you're in good company, if you know what I'm saying. Well, okay. So I know after Kimmy Hayes, I don't know exactly when, but you played with Lucky Town and Junkyard Groove, and I don't know who else was in there.

It's a mess. Okay, so after Kimmy Hayes, Lucky Town actually started around 2008. Lucky Town was a country band born out of, okay, so I noticed, Ray, you had posted that you guys interviewed Smoking Guns, which are dear old buddies of mine.

We all go way back. I go back with them to when they started that band. They started that band back when I had the Daniel Grove band.

So one of the key members to starting Smoking Guns was a guy named Andrew Jess or Andrew Whetstone. By 2008, drummer from the Daniel Grove band and I were missing playing country. So we started this band, and we found this guy, Andy, who, let me see if I can see this right.

I got to get it right. Andy is Artie's nephew, isn't he? He's Artie's nephew, right. Now, Andy had gone from singing with Smoking Guns and then doing a bunch of stuff on his own to singing with this band called Mason Rivers.

I don't know if you guys remember Mason Rivers. Andy was singing with Mason Rivers, and he had a keyboard player in there by the name of Chris Holla, who used to be part of the Daniel Grove band. They got me into that band.

I got our old drummer into that band, and we had Mason Rivers, which was basically the Daniel Grove band with a different bass player. So then the girl, Kelly, who ran Mason Rivers, wanted to hang it up for a while. So we decided to go on under the name Lucky Town.

We auditioned a new bass player. Andy, at the time, had a second band called Straight White Trash. He grabbed the girl singer from that band and brought her into Luckin, which gave us Lucky Town.

I see. And then Lucky Town, we used to play a bunch of shows with Smoking Guns. It was a blast.

Every gig was like a family reunion, and that's when the country scene was beginning to pop up again. They say it takes 10 years or so of something being gone, and then it comes back every 10 years. So that was Lucky Town.

And I want to say, I even got to look at my list here. That was Lucky Town. Pretty much hung it up around 2013.

But also, this is where it gets crazy. This is where it looks like I didn't know what I wanted to do. But it's also, I think it's a sign of the scene.

As time has gone on, there's no secret that as 20 years ago, a dollar was worth more than it is now. We never got paid more for gigs as time goes on. We're all still making the same amount.

So you have to play five times the amount of gigs or five times the amount of bands as you did 20 years ago to make the same amount of money. Also, at the same time with Lucky Town, I also played with the Billy Childers Band. Billy Childers was from Nashville, wasn't he? Or no? Billy had recorded a record in Nashville.

Billy's originally from Charlotte, North Carolina. He was a Nashville artist who was based here in Chicago. I ended up playing with Billy from 2007 to 2013.

Billy was one of the bands that I ended up going out to Las Vegas every December. We played for the National Finals Rodeo along with the Suzy Dodds Band, which I played with from about 2000 to 2005 and 2010 or so to 2015. So there was a good chunk of the 2000s where I was in the Suzy Dodds Band, Billy Childers Band, Lucky Town, Mason Rivers.

Kimmy Hayes. Kimmy Hayes. Who am I missing? Oh, well, I mean, we can't.

And then from basically from 99 or 2000 still, even through to this day, there was Jim Peter Ricken World Stage. From 2003 to this day, there's Pride of Lions. And that's just starting from the 2000s up through like 2010 or 11.

There's been stuff that's been added since then. I'm looking at this list going, dear Lord, I'm still part of like two, three, four, five, eight bands or something like that. Well, see, I think that's great because I come from an era back in the late 60s and the 70s when you played one band and that was your band.

And you didn't go play with other bands or anything. But now it's a job. And it's the guys need to, you obviously need to pay the bills.

You're right on point. You're right on point. I mean, I started out like that.

And even in the early 90s to the mid 90s to the late 90s, you could do that. You could have one band and then or maybe if you were if you had two bands, you had like one band was the covers band and one band was the originals band. Right.

You know, just so you could and you made money with your covers band and you didn't care whether you made money with an original band or you were making money with your original band and you just did the covers to have fun. You wanted something you didn't take as serious. Right.

And it was it was basically, you know, around 2000 that everything changed. Just like you're saying, you know, it's like now it's like, oh, Lord, now I have all of these bands, you know. Well, I've I've had I've had guys and one given night I've had a bass player when I worked at Blue Chip.

I'm talking about, right, because I've been retired from there for a few years. But but I would have a guy come in and play in the Six O'Clock Band, a bass player or something. And he's sticking around.

He goes, well, I'm playing in the late night band, too. I'm like, really, you know, you know, so it's called job. And it's the guys what the guys need to do.

You hit the nail on the head. I was just going to say it's it's the non tux or non suit version of jobbing nowadays. And it doesn't come with the jobbing paycheck.

It doesn't come with that corporate paycheck. You got to pay the bills. Yeah, there still are very high paying gigs out there.

There's just fewer and far between. We lucky enough I had fallen into in the past, I'd say five, five years with a friend of mine, Lisa McClowry. We started this thing called Rock the 80s, which had morphed into the Beat Goes On, which is a sheer tribute that she does.

And just basically since December, either November or December of 2019, we started doing full band shows and it's casinos, theaters. I mean, we're unknown on the circuit and we're getting a chance to sell out 1600 seat, 2000 seat theaters. What? You know, you're flying around doing all these shows and it's and it's one of those really, you know, it's a great gig to have because, you know, you can do that and do four of those, you know, or like do three of those a month.

And it's as well as doing 12 or 13 other gigs, you know. So Lisa McClowry is a huge part of the world stage. They do is I want to say, Lisa, what she started out as a as a background singer.

2003 or 2005, I think somewhere around the same time that Kimmy was part of it. But Lisa started out as a background singer with world stage and every background singer would get, especially if they were already an artist like Kimmy was and like Lisa was because Lisa has a whole history in L.A. Before coming back to Chicago, Jim would let the background artists be featured on a song and Lisa went from being a background singer to being a featured artist to eventually Jim was producing her stuff when she I think she was signed to Sony New Groove for a while for like smooth jazz stuff and seeing where they were going to put her. So Lisa, we've kind of had like the Lisa McClowry camp for 17 years, 15 years or so.

It was fun, you know, and I think and I the guy that I that she would switch off with me playing is a friend of yours. I do believe, you know, Kurt Bonomo. Sure.

Yeah, that's so. Kurt's great. Yeah.

So it was early years of Lisa's stuff. OK, I was I was aware of that. See, you learn something new.

We're all in bed together. Yes, you do. Now, when did you have time to do your own CD? When was it was released? That was probably released 2005.

Well, it probably started in 2005 and it was released sometime. I can't even remember what year it was released, but it was released before 2008. I know that for a fact.

OK, called Your Side of Town. Yep, Your Side of Town. It was kind of one of those like like a movie that went straight to video.

It just went straight to iTunes. There was no physical product. Basically, it was a conglomeration of songs that I was writing.

So this was during the heavy country period, you know, at early 2000s, the mid 2000s. I was shopping songs in Nashville to get cut and going through Keaton Music Adventures. Chris Keaton, who was a good friend of Jim Peterix at the time, he was Jim Peterix's first song plugger.

So I was going through Chris and shopping songs to get to get recorded. I didn't care who recorded. I didn't care if I recorded them.

I wanted somebody else to record them and make a hit out of them. Sure. As long as I owned the song.

But had nothing got cut by any artist. But there were a couple of songs that were put on hold for a while and then dropped. But so I which is, you know, I made it further than a lot of other people.

I never made any money off of it. So I took a lot of these songs that I was shopping and then recorded a bunch of more stuff that I had written and I put it on that CD. If I could go back and do it again, there's so much stuff I do different or fix up or make it sound more finished because I was under the gun.

My wife at the time, we were going to have a daughter and I'm like, well, I got to get this out now or never. Every now and then I'll log on to my iTunes account and see if there's any money in the dashboard there. I think that's like 40 bucks, you know, but, you know, there's a lot of songs there that have found kind of a rebirth.

Some of them in my writings the past three years have been for an artist named Ross Clayton, who has kind of we've brought those songs back and he's re-sung them. So there might be a future for some of those songs. Which ones is he re-done? Do you recall? He sang, he re-sang a lead on Panama.

He re-sang a lead on Hey Girl. Those are the two off the top of my head that I remember he sang a new vocal on and that we were possibly going to recut some of the music so it didn't sound so 2005. It might, you know, try to get it to sound more 2020 instead of 2005.

I don't know. There's a certain charm to that 2005 kind of thing. It had much more rock and roll to it than, you know, than I think that's what's missing.

Well, that's what happened with Nashville. I mean, the whole pop rock thing went away and Nashville took that over. But, well, I was listening to some of them and I bet you do.

Oh, God. It starts out as a rocker. It kind of got a good rock and rip at the beginning there.

The interesting thing about that song, that song wasn't even supposed to be on that record because before Your Side of Town, I cut a demo CD called The Attic Demos, you know, because it was recorded in an attic. It was real original. And I recorded that.

The engineer was Mike Corcoran, who I don't know if you guys would remember. There was a ska band in Chicago, pretty big band. They forgot what label they were signed to, but they were called Deals Gone Bad.

Okay. It was cut in his studio, which was in the attic of the music store we both worked at. And I Bet You Do was one of the songs on that early demo.

And it was that demo that led to the genesis of the Your Side of Town CD. The Your Side of Town CD was all recorded at Peterrick Studio. So I know that the full featured release, I wanted to be from that studio.

I see. Working with Larry Millis. Every time I find that disc of the old demos, that song stands out.

It still rocks out. I love the song. I would love to recut it.

So now let's move on to Jim Peterrick and world stage stuff. How long have you been playing with him? Obviously, since it's 2003 or... Peterrick and world stage. I met Peterrick in 97.

He's done two world stage records under the name Jim Peterrick and world stage. The first one came out in 2000. Now, I played guitar, I think, on seven tracks, which means we started doing that in either 98 or 99.

As far as an intact member since the first world stage gig, which was 2000, it's been 20 years. I met Peterrick through a friend of mine, Joe Vanna. He was good friends with Jim.

And I met Jim through Joe, which led to... Jim called me to do a session. I'm like, yeah, sure. Here, come play on this song.

Well, he didn't tell me that the song was called To Miss Somebody, and it was the duet song between him and Dennis DeYoung. So this is my first time recording for Jim. I walk in, he hands me the 65 Strats, says, here, use this guitar.

We're going to run you through this amp. And then in through the door walks Dennis DeYoung. And I'm like, jeez.

What? So they put me through the ringer on that song, which then led to a second song, to a third, which led to seven songs on the record alongside my buddy, Joel Hoekstra. That's how I met Joel, and that's how I met Ed Breckenfeld and Clem Hayes. And it was great, because when Jim put the band together, all of a sudden I turn around and the keyboard player is Christian Cullen, who most people would remember from The Fabulous Janes.

Well, Christian and I went to College of DuPage together and studied music under Tom Tallman and Lee Kesselman and all those guys back in 1990, 91. It comes around. It comes back.

It comes around, goes around. It's crazy. So yeah, so I've been with Jim performing since 2000, recording since late 98, early 99.

So and I mean, under Jim, there's been all the world stage stuff, all the world stage gigs, all those great artists that we get to work with. In 2002, Giovanna and I put together a band called Mecca, which was signed to the Frontiers label in Europe. I was only part of the first record, but Jim produced that.

In 2003, Jim put together Pride of Lions, which was his vision of where Survivor would have gone. And I've been part of that. And we just finished recording a new CD.

So that's going to be coming out soon. Who's that? Toby Hitchcock? Mr. Hitchcock himself. That's Toby.

Yeah, it's the old gang. It's Toby. It's Jim.

It's Ed Breckenfeld, Clem Hayes, Christian Cullen, and myself. It's the boys. Making a lot of noise, which we do very well.

Jim had his Lifeforce project during all this time too, which was the smooth jazz stuff. I did all of that. Have you done any writing with Jim? Jim and I did some writing on the Mecca record.

He'd pretty much write the song, but every now and then you'd come in and you'd change something or you'd write a riff or something like that that really sparked a different thing or a word or something like that. And you'd start ending up on the same writing bill. The only song I remember really sitting down writing with him was a song on the Mecca CD that ended up being on the bonus.

It was the bonus track on the Japanese release and it was called Mischievous. I remember I was at Jim's house. Jim, myself, and our dearly departed friend Fergie Fredrickson from Toto.

Fergie was one of the two singers in Mecca. Jim turns and is like, yeah, the record's pretty good. We got all the songs and everything like that, but we need a rocker.

We need something. I'm like, well, I got this riff. I started messing with it a day or two ago.

Well, let's hear it. So I started playing the riff and Jim just starts singing and Fergie just hits record on a tape recorder and 20 minutes later, the song was done. And it was cool.

It was a very Toto-esque with horns, kind of like Toto meets Aerosmith type tune. Jim is very talented that way, isn't he? I mean, just to come up with words and come up with an idea for a song. If there's one thing I've learned is you have to keep the tape rolling on that guy all the time because he is so fluent in coming up with stuff over and over and over again.

It's just ridiculous to watch him work because, I mean, he's always on. I've never seen him have an off time in doing anything, which, you know, and he's the third guy who is the mentor. You know, it's like, well, without Jim and without my buddy Tom Tallman and Gordon Crosby, without those three, I'm not doing this.

He's a dude I could call up and say, hey, man, wanna go have some coffee? Yeah, sure, I'll meet you over there. Okay, you know, and we don't even need to talk about music. You know, he's that cool of a dude.

He just really is definitely like my musical father figure. I guess you could say. You've been doing some shows now.

You doing them on a regular basis? You doing them at Thursdays or something? I've been doing two shows. I was doing, I've been doing a Thursday show called Locked Down, Loaded and Live, which turned into Locked Down, Loaded and Livestream. And the goal with that was to just, my goal with that was to just do songs for my working set list that I would have been doing with Junkyard Groove, the acoustic duo stuff.

I do with Jason Sterman from Junkyard Groove. And I did one show and I loved it. And I got the itch to do another one.

Like, oh, I wanna do another one, but I wanna do it now. Okay, wait a minute. I don't wanna wait a week.

So wait a minute, maybe I'll wait till Sunday. That's what I'll do. There's all these people in the comments wrote down all these requests.

I'm gonna do an all requests show on Sunday called, you call it People's Choice Show. I'm gonna call it. So I did that.

And now between the two shows, it became a running thing to where we started going to see how far we can go without repeating songs. Oh, okay. Well, they repeat songs on the radio.

So I mean, you can, you know. Oh, I know. It's okay if you repeat a song once in a while.

Well, we're doing that now. We got to the point of, I don't have the numbers in front of me, but we got to the point of, ended up at 211 songs without repeating any songs. That's awesome.

I think it was like 24, 25 originals. The rest were covers. And it was like 180 or something like that, different artists.

I've rebranded the lockdown loaded in live shows to lockdown reloaded. You've got a lot of followers on Facebook too, so. Yeah, you know, and they're all, they're awesome.

And to be quite honest, if it wasn't for them coming to these shows, I wouldn't be doing it. I'd be laying on the couch, watching the science channel, like how the universe works or something like that. Any chance of hearing the album side of Indiana DeVito? That would be a request.

So that would be on the You Call It show. And let me see. Yeah, yeah, let me see.

In the Garden of Eden. So how do we find you on social media? Where do we find you at? Probably the best way to find me, Facebook. So you just look up facebook.com slash Mike Aquino 1. That's my, usually everything I do is done, is posted through the Facebook page.

There's also a Mike Aquino music page on Facebook. Or, I mean, you look up the different artists that I play with. Look up Junkyard Groove Chicago on Facebook.

Jim Peterik on Facebook. All those different bands. The Beat Goes On on Facebook.

I think it's called The Beat Goes On Show. That's the shared tribute through with Lisa McClowry. I'm kind of like everywhere.

It's kind of like throwing a stone. And like you said before, it's easier to talk about the bands I wasn't in. Pick a band that you think I might have played for.

I'm probably on there somewhere. Well, thank you, Mike. I appreciate it.

I don't know what happened to Ray. We lost Ray somewhere. That's right.

But I'm still going to thank Ray. Thank you, Ray. Thank you, Paul.

Thank you very much. It's been quite enjoyable. I loved talking to you.

Good to see you again. Good seeing you, my friend. It's been way too long.

Thank you, man. Adios. Bye-bye.

Okay, so that was Mike Aquino. Mike's got some great stories, doesn't he, Ray? Yes, he does. And you know, you gotta shake it, shake it, shake it, shake it like a Polaroid picture.

Okay, don't quit your day job. This is my day job. Oh, yeah, that's right.

Well, don't quit it. We're in trouble. Yeah, if you quit it, then I'll have to do it by myself.

So that's right. That was a great interview with Mike. Mike's a really cool dude, man.

He's very, very talented. Yeah, very talented guy. And it was great talking with him.

I haven't seen him in quite some time. But he has some story. He has some things about his career that I didn't even know.

And it was very interesting, very interesting talking to him. It was good. It was a really good.

It was a good interview. I enjoyed it. I myself have never met Mike prior to this interview.

And I mean, I learned a lot about the guy, too. It's really very interesting. Yes, he is.

Yes, he is. Well, so don't forget to tune in every week, people. And check us out.

This next episode, next week's episode will be episode 50, 50 episodes for us. 50 episodes. We're getting into the senior citizen area.

Yes, but so we're looking forward to that. And meanwhile, be sure and check us out on the road to rock radio dot net. And every every every Monday night.

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Make sure you subscribe so you never miss an episode. All righty, everybody. Thanks for listening.

We're glad to have you here. We will catch you next week. Bye bye.