Here's Paul Martin and Ray the Roadie for the Rock and Roll Chicago podcast. How you doing today, Paul? I'm doing well. How about yourself, Ray? I'm doing good.

I'm kind of excited this week. Who's on tap for this week's podcast? Who's on tap? We're talking to Tony Ingala from the band Joker. Joker? Is Joaquin Phoenix going to be here too? No, no, no, no, not that Joker.

You're Joker. Well, I know Cesar Romero's not going to be here either. No, no, no.

We're talking with Tony Ingala from the band Joker. Some of you may remember them from the late 80s or early 90s. They were a Chicago band that played quite a bit around town and around the Chicago area.

Yeah, they broke up for a little while and got back together back about 2013, I think it was, and they're rocking the clubs once again. Yes, they are. So let's get started with Tony Ingala from the band Joker.

To the Batcave, Batman. Let's go, Albert. Hey, this is Paul Martin.

And Ray the Roadie. For the Rock and Roll Chicago podcast. We're down in beautiful downtown Joliet, Illinois at the Illinois Rock and Roll Museum on Route 66 at our new studio.

Pretty cool here. Joining us today is Tony Ingala from Joker. How's it going, Tony? Hey, guys.

How you doing? Thanks for having me. Hey, thanks for coming. This place is really, really cool.

Yes, it is. Yes, it is. Very cool.

So, Tony, let's start us out with the band Joker. Start us off telling how the band got started. Okay.

The band, you know, we got started back in, believe it or not, 1985. And we were kind of all leftovers from various cover bands in the early 80s. And what happened was, as far as Joker goes, you know, music kind of shifted.

MTV, as you guys know, was formed. And I think a lot of us were like, yeah, this is something that, you know, we want to pursue and get into. You know, we were all influenced, obviously, by 70s rock.

You know, you're Zeppelin and Van Halen and Journey and all that kind of stuff. So, as it graduated to more of the heavier pop rock, I'll call it, because Joker was never a metal band or anything like that. I think those sounds really turned us on to where, you know, we wanted to start doing something like that.

So, we formed in 85. And then we had a pretty good run, I think, through 1994 when we kind of called it quits for the time being. Now, were you in other bands prior to that? I was in cover bands prior to that.

My very first band was called High Voltage. And I think this was in maybe 80 or 81. I was 15 or 16 years old, not to give my age away.

But 80 or 81, it was predominantly a cover band. Oh, gosh, Journey, Styx, REO, Lynyrd Skynyrd, stuff like that. After that, we ended up forming our own cover band, and it was called Frequency.

And that's really the vehicle that enabled me as a vocalist to kind of, you know, get into it a little more. And plus, it was mostly high school friends that were doing it. You know, a funny story is a good friend of mine and yours, Frank Pappalardo, was in the band Rampage.

And Rampage at the time was working with a company called Elite Entertainment, if you remember. Right, right. Elite Entertainment, they were a booking agency, and they were solely responsible for booking most of the mixers, senior proms, junior proms, and stuff like that in high school.

So they had this rock and roll show planned that Rampage would go all over the Midwest and do the history of rock and roll during a 40-minute class period, right, instead of doing the donkey basketball or something like that. They would come in, and their pitch was, hey, let us come in for free in your auditorium, and we'll put on a show for 40 minutes during the class time, right? The catch was, we're coming back at night and doing a concert for five bucks or whatever. So Rampage did that for years, and I don't know what happened with them, but suddenly maybe they just became popular and they needed another band.

So they asked Frequency, the band I was in, to do it. So here I am now, 16 years old, in high school still, going out and playing 200 dates a year. That's cool.

As the history of rock and roll. So that's kind of what happened with that band, Frequency. And after that, I think we all just kind of grew up, and a couple of us got really interested in wanting to write original music.

So that's kind of how Joker was formed. Now, who are the other members of the band? Members of the band, we have Mike Stone, to the bone, on drums. He's been a long mainstay.

Nick Sickich is our guitarist, and he's come through the ropes through the Cal City kind of area. Brian Smaller's on bass. My own neighborhood.

Your own neighborhood, yeah. Brian Smaller's on bass. We have Joe Marabelli on guitar.

And right now, currently our lineup consists of Todd Loizo on keyboards. And that's a whole different story, how Todd became involved with us. But it's a very good story.

He's a very good collaborator and a great friend. So tell us about your relationship with Todd Loizo and Gary Loizo. Well, here's how that happened.

So back in the day, we were recording with Gary over at Pumpkin Studios. We were recording the Cool Deal album. And again, we spent eight hours a day there for probably five or six months.

It was the best times of our lives. So Gary was a blessing to us. He was very patient with us.

And I haven't been through the ropes and having gold records with sticks and stuff like that. So what happened was we recorded 10 tracks there. And somewhere along the way, there was a discussion that came up and said, you know what, these songs would sound really good with some keyboards on them, as filler or whatever it may be.

Because at the time, we didn't have keyboardists. The keys that we used on our prior record and on stage would be either the guitarist, Jeff, or our guitarist, Joey, doubling on stage live. So when the songs were- Double guitar harmonies, you mean, right? No, no, no.

So the luxury of Joker was we always had two guitarists, which means if we had a keyboard on stage, one of them could play the keyboard. Oh, I see. And you didn't lose the rhythm because you had the second guitarist.

So that's the way that happened. So somewhere along the way in the studio at Pumpkin, Gary was like, I got someone that could fill in some keys. And so on and so forth.

So sure enough, it was his son, Todd. And I couldn't even tell you, I mean, I was- We recorded Cool Deal, I think I was 26 or 27. So Todd must have been 20, a young man.

Right. And he had his own band at the time, Dreams, which is a pretty good, popular Chicago band also. Sure.

That did a lot of great original tunes. So what happened was we would come back, you know, maybe the next week after taking a two or three day break from the studio, and suddenly these songs had these awesome keyboard parts on it. Nice, yeah.

We were like, Gary, where did this come from? Oh, it's my son Todd. And Todd would be in and out, but it wasn't like we ever had a relationship with him during it. So what happened was we ended up, you know, releasing the record, and it was great, and people loved it, and the keyboard parts were great and everything.

And it wasn't until a reunion show in 2015, when we finally had our reunion show, 15 or 16, Todd's dad Gary had just passed. Right. The year prior, and the show was in May.

So I reached out to Todd, and I said, Hey Todd, Tony Gallagher, we're thinking of doing a reunion Joker show. You know, we haven't played in 20 years, and we would really love for you to be part of it. The idea was to play the full Cool Deal record from start to finish, and then, you know, take it from there.

And Todd was like, I would love to. It'd be great. Yeah, so that's how we got back together with Todd.

We did some rehearsals. Todd is an extremely polished musician, so it didn't take him as long as it took us to relearn those songs. Let's just say that.

Part of the Cool Deal, get it? On the reunion show, we had a big video board, and Joey, who does all of our video editing right now, put together a full hour video to play along with our set as we were playing it. Nice. And part of it, and it really choked up Todd, and Todd, I'm sorry for it, was at the studio, and we got full footage of that studio recording with Gary and stuff.

He didn't even see the video or anything prior to being on stage, and here we are calling him up on stage to play this song that he was instrumental in helping us write, and the video of his dad behind us. Speaking of videos. It killed him.

Speaking of videos, isn't there somebody in your group that has a YouTube channel? That's right. That's right. Joey runs a YouTube channel.

It's called Chubby Likes, actually. Chubby Likes, which is a song that Joey wrote, by the way, and hopefully one day he'll release it. It's a great, poppy little song.

But anyhow, you could find probably 40 or 50 Joker videos, live Joker videos, as well as montages on that page, Chubby Likes. Okay. Sounds good.

Are you still recording with Todd Loaizor? We are. We do all of our recording right now at the Little Pumpkin Room in Plainfield, so we're carrying on tradition. Todd is an amazing engineer and producer, so we're super happy to rekindle that back at the reunion show and then keep it going even further.

And you have all these old videos from the past, right? We do. We do. Our drummer Mike's father, believe it or not, would come to every show and videotape every single show.

That's us. That's so cool. There's hundreds of them.

Yeah. There's hundreds of them. As a matter of fact, I was at my father's house two weeks ago and rummaging through his garage, right? And sure enough, I find a milk crate of Joker videos, and I'm looking at them.

I'm like, it says, Joker Chicago Rehearsal Studios Showcase for Atlantic Records. Wow. So I called Joey up and I say, Joey, do you have this video? He's like, no, I don't have it.

So what's weird is Mike's dad would record these videos, maybe not give them all to Mike, who then gave them to Joey, but he gave them to my dad. Wow. That's very cool.

So my dad was sitting on this treasure and I just finally gave it to Joey last week, and Joey's going to put together a video of it. That's awesome. Yeah, it's interesting.

That's awesome. Now, besides Todd, are you all original members? We are, yeah. Actually, you know what? We had a couple different, we had a different bass player and a guitarist when Joker formed.

But what happened was is as we got more popular, these two individuals, and they're good people, but I think they got scared, and we ended up getting like an indie deal and we were signing a record contract and they were like, oh boy, wait, what does this mean? So they kind of helped themselves out and then that's where we discovered, you know, we got Nick and Brian in the band, and since then it's been that since 88. Well, the way I understand it, like when you first formed, you kind of got just reeled in. You weren't even a member.

You went in for a practice session or something and your singer wasn't doing it? Well, I don't know how you heard this story, but that's 100% true. What happened was frequency had broken up, right? And I was with my buddy Jeff, who was a really fabulous, talented guitarist, and I don't know, maybe six or eight months went by, I decided I was going to be a drummer and bought myself a nice Candy Apple Red Double Bass drum kit and that's what I was going to do. I was going to be a drummer.

And so I think I sat in my mom's basement for six months or so just cranking out drums and everything, and one day I got a call and he was like, hey, why don't you stop by our rehearsal spot? You know, we're right up the street on 79th Street. So sure enough, I went there and they were still called Frequency. It wasn't Joker, but they were doing a whole bunch of different covers and the singer they had was just like, I think he was flat on everything he sang and he didn't know the lyrics.

So I don't know, it just kind of sucked me in. They were like, hey, you want to sing a song? I was like, okay. And that's all it took.

I sang a song and they were like, oh, shit. Yeah, that's cool. That's pretty cool.

So that's exactly what happened. And from there, I guess our minds got together and we were like, we really want to write some songs and stuff like that, and that's really how Joker was formed. How did the name come about? I don't think we had a working name at the time, but I think that since we're all students of being smartasses for the most part, you know, people just go, you're a bunch of Jokers and stuff like that.

So I think that kind of just stuck and, you know, it's a fun name to have for sure. Especially now with the new movie out. You probably wouldn't be surprised to know that I was getting Facebook messages last week saying, hey, man, congrats on your premiere tonight.

You know, just jokering with me, I guess. And I was like, yeah, thanks. It was pretty cool.

Well, you could build off of that fame of the movie, the success of the movie, couldn't you? Yeah, I don't think so. I think at this point in our career, that they would probably own more of the rights to do that kind of stuff. As a matter of fact, you know, on Facebook, if you're promoting an event, you can actually pay money to have your event be seen by more people.

I tried to do that two weeks ago for our event coming up. Here's the shameless plug at 115 Bourbon Street on November 9th. So I tried to throw some money to it and not a lot of money, but so you make the audience bigger who's going to see it.

And sure enough, I got a message back from Facebook saying that I may have violated some copyright. And I'm reading through the ad that I placed and I'm like, it's got to be the name Joker and what's going on right now in the movie. So I'm like, all right, Facebook, if you don't want my 50 bucks to boost my ad, then that's fine.

We're still going to have a great draw. Yeah, that's cool. So now you talked about writing.

Who does most of the writing? It's different. It's different now than it was back in the 90s. So back in the 90s, Joker, we were a full-time band.

So we all literally quit any daytime jobs that we had and we did rehearse and we're together every single day, Monday through Friday, writing for five hours. So that's the way in the past. That's the way it used to be.

That's the way it used to be. The songs when we were younger and we had less responsibilities and everything. So we would all get together in a room and hash it out.

And what I mean hash it out, I mean argue. As you know, when you're in a band, that's what it is. Rehearsals are for arguments too.

But anyhow, so that's how we would do. Someone would have an idea. It's usually back then it was Joey, Brian or Nick would come in with a guitar idea and potentially maybe a chorus, a vocal melody to a chorus.

And then it would take off from there. It was a lot different back then writing those tunes because, again, you're with each other 20 hours a week. Yeah, a lot of times.

These days it's a little different. These days the idea of it is still the same where Joey or Nick or Brian or even myself would have a guitar part or potentially a verse and a chorus and that kind of thing. But now it's kind of done to where we let each writer and joker go ahead and go ahead, that's your song.

I see. Go ahead and finish the song. If you need collaboration to finish the vocal or the lyrics of the vocal, I'm more than willing to do that.

We'll be glad to help, sure. We'll be glad to help. But we find that in our limited time now, it's much easier to write songs if someone has kind of the whole idea down and then presents it and says, hey, here's the song I have, what do you think? And then, of course, you take studio liberties on vocals and bass parts and drum parts and stuff.

But generally these days it's usually one person's full idea. And to be honest, I think it works a lot better for us five, I should say us six with Todd, that that person's song, he has the say-so on how the song goes. Because you know what it's like, you get five left-brainers in a room, you're like, you know, I hear this part this way.

And suddenly that song is changing and what happens is time goes by now and it doesn't get done. Right, right. So I think it's better to just have that one writer saying, you know, I'm really hearing it this way.

I'm open to suggestions on how you want to play, but the bottom line is going to be me. Right, that's good. Now tell us about your albums that you had.

Your first album was called? It was self-titled, it was Joker. We were picked up by Red Light Records, an indie label out of Chicago. To be honest, we had eight songs already on a demo of that record that we were doing ourselves over at Harebear Studios in Crestwood with Jeff Islinger.

And once Mark from Red Light got a hold of it or heard of us and knew we had a strong following and a good buzz, he's like, hey, let's get you in the studio, I want to sign you for a couple records, so on and so forth. So we went in and we did three brand-new songs that we were writing at the time, and then he released it as Red Light. I see.

Yep. And then after that was another album, right? After that, yep, in 1991, 92, we released Cool Deal, which was the follow-up to our first one. And that was also still on Red Light, but Mark had gotten good, what's the word I'm looking for, I don't want to say sponsorship, but either way, BMG and Zoo Records got involved and were going to distribute Cool Deal.

So that's what happened with that. Well, something happened, and it was only released in Japan, correct? That's true, yes. What happened was we spent a full summer over at Pumpkin Studios with Gary Loizo and did the whole record.

We went out to California and mastered it at one of the best mastering places we can, and then I think what happened was music changed. Truthfully is what happened. The grunge came in.

The grunge era, yeah. The grunge really came in, and I think that, you know, Joker as well as many, many super talented acts from Chicago and across the whole USA, a lot of them were just dropped. They weren't the happening thing anymore.

I mean, honestly, that's what happened. So I think that after that happened, I think Mark over at Red Light probably decided, well, I have this product, it's finished, what am I going to do with it? And I think he ended up working on a deal with Sony in Japan. The same thing happened 10 years earlier in 81 when Flock of Seagulls and stuff started hitting the airwaves and that kind of music started happening and all the 70s rock just fell by the wayside.

It did, didn't it? And it's funny, you know, to this day I think about what could have been, and at the same time I think of what it is now and all the things I probably wouldn't have that I cherish right now if something like that didn't happen. You know what I mean? So I guess I'm a firm believer in what is going to happen is going to happen. Fate, right? Yeah, totally fate.

So you guys went platinum in Japan? We went platinum, never went there, and haven't seen a dime. You know, it's funny. I mean, I could show you my social media stuff.

I get friend requests, interview requests from Japan all the time. Really? All the time to this day. So it's pretty funny.

There's an actual guy, and I apologize if he's going to listen to this podcast, who is from China and spends time, or he may have moved to Toronto, and he's following Joker. He's like, I'm a huge fan, huge fan. Let me know when you're playing.

I'm going to try to fly in. So it just blows my mind. So you know somebody's playing it there.

Somebody is playing it somewhere. Someone is definitely playing it there. You know what's weird? Occasionally you get a message on your messenger for Joker.

They're like, hey, I want to release a cool deal in Japan. Get a hold of me. And I'm like, eh.

It's weird. It's really weird. Same thing happened to Cheap Trick.

They didn't hit it big until they went to Budokan. For sure. For sure.

By the way, one of my hugest influences ever. Cheap Trick? Cheap Trick. Oh, yeah.

You know what's weird is I grew up on singers and songwriters of the 70s. I'm growing up and really had awesome taste in music. And we're talking Jim Croce and I'll even say John Denver and Carly Simon and James Taylor.

This was my Saturday when I was a little kid growing up was house cleaning to this great music. And then growing up, I had older brothers that listened to the new stuff coming up, which would have been Wings, Journey. And really, it was always really melodic stuff, though.

My brother listened to Sabbath, but I didn't get hooked on it. It was always the melodic stuff. And the point I'm trying to make by bringing that up is going back to Cheap Trick is that my biggest influences happen to be the Chicago bands, believe it or not.

Rodeo, Cheap Trick, The Sticks. I can even take it further and say Off-Broadway. Oh, yeah.

Things like that. But you guys are known for some strong ballads, too. Oh, you have Lorraine off the self-titled.

You have October Wind off of Cool Deal. I mean, A Little Bit of Heaven was off of Cool Deal, too, which is a great. It's a great.

Starts with the acoustic guitar. Starts with the acoustic. Yep, starts.

And you know what? To be honest, guys, we could literally probably get in the room and throw out 20 ballads in three months. Ballads is not a problem with Joker. Anymore.

Maybe it's because going back to me again, I grew up with those sort of songs, and those are the songs that I think about are in my wheelhouse, you know? So you say you got some new stuff coming out? You got some new songs? We are right now. Right now we've been collaborating and writing, you know, maybe for the last six months heavy. Prior to that, we were trying to collaborate in a full band setting, but again, it slows everything down.

How many songs you got done already? Right now we have five right now that are in mixing process. And another three that are in what we call the phone demo stage where it's a full song, but it's not done in a studio, and all the parts are there. We just got to get in there and do it.

And you would be surprised to know that two of them are ballads. Imagine that. Yeah, imagine that.

But you know what? The types of the songs, the lyrics are really good. It really pertains to what's going on with us right now, that kind of thing. As opposed to, you know, when you're 20 years old or 25 years old, it's very dreamy.

It's very, what if I had this love relationship and oh, my God, and that kind of thing, you know? Or, you know, I lost my teenage girlfriend, love relationship, but now it's like real life, this shit. Yeah, I had that relationship. And boy, am I pissed.

This shit happened to me. So it's a little different, but it's a lot more fun being a little older writing songs because you're mature. You're mature in your songwriting.

You're mature in your abilities. So it's a lot smoother. Time is a charade.

Minds and hearts just follow. When I close my eyes, you're always here with me. Time waterfalls.

We always could be more than memories in my heart. We're here for more. So next year we should see a new CD out from you guys.

You know what? That's really the goal. It's really the goal. I mean, you know, for the last, we reunited in 2013.

We do have some songs that we wrote after we reunited. None of them actually made it to the recording studio. But what's interesting is, you know, we've kind of, we're trying to stay relevant and trying to play out.

But we still have a very strong fan base that comes out even to the local clubs. And we're so, so grateful for that. So this is kind of, we're still alive.

We're still breathing. And we still have people that want to hear new music. So that's really what it's about for us right now.

We want to be relevant. We want to continue to be creative. We want to continue to try to give some more fans.

So what happened in 2013 that you guys all of a sudden decided to put this back together? I really, I really don't know. I mean, I could tell you over the years from 94 to 2013, every member of Joker did continue playing. And they were in different bands, different original bands, different cover bands.

And I don't know what happened with Fate. And I think it was Nick that probably got a hold of me and said, hey, you know, let's try to do something. Maybe we could, you know, become this or do this and do this.

And from there we organized a meeting at a tequila bar. Oh, very good. And that's literally what happened.

And we sat down, and obviously the chemistry has always been there. So now as an adult, as older adults, we're like, I'm still kind of mad at you from 1992, but can I put it away? Can I put it away and be in a room with you for a while? I mean, it's so funny how that happens to musicians, but it's true and it does happen. So that's kind of what happened.

And we ended up writing some new songs and at the same time decided, well, if we're going to go out and try to play some gigs, we'd probably learn some covers. So we did that, too. Now, back in the day, you didn't do any covers? We did.

We always did. We always covers was always part of Joker's show. However, they weren't the covers of the day we would do.

Right. And we were highly influenced by by the Sweet. So so over the years, we did.

Little Willie actually landed on Cool Deal. Fox on the Run, we did just covers. And I think the reason why is we had five people in the band that were perfectly capable of singing.

And Sweet always had great harmonies. So we did that. We covered Cheap Trick and we covered the stuff we wanted to cover from our idols in Chicago.

As a matter of fact, back in the heyday, we had a full 20 minute medley of all Chicago artists. Oh, wow. That's cool.

Yep. Going back. I mean, we did we covered Styx.

We covered Chicago. We covered Enough's Enough. We covered Off-Broadway.

We did Cheap Trick. It was a full 20 minute song. Yeah.

Of our Chicago idols. And what's interesting now is the cover aspect of our set these days is also medleys. Like we have one 36 minute monster medley, we call it.

Wow. Of the hairband era. Oh, OK.

So so and it's continuous. It's a 30, 36 minute song. Now, how long do you play if you do a show now? Like for instance, you said you're playing at Bourbon Street coming up, right? On the 9th.

Yep. And and what? It'll be a two hour straight. Two hour straight.

Yeah. Two hour straight. Yeah.

Are you playing in the back room back there? Actually, the front room. The front room? Yeah, the front room. OK.

It's great. You know, Kenny over at Bourbon Street, he's a good friend of mine. He's very generous to us.

And and we love playing there. It's a very central place. You gotta remember, we're a Southside band for the most part.

Right. And most of our following is from the Southside. Right.

Right. So it's pretty cool. But yeah, that's what we do.

So so we do, you know, it's probably about 50 percent Joker originals and 50 percent covers in a medley sense. The other the other medley we do is a 70s medley, which is I mean, hits my heart every time because it's the guitar vocal. Yeah.

Rock. Right. That we grew up on.

So to be able to go back and do those kind of things. And again, in a medley sense, it's a continuous song. It's 50 minutes.

Well, well, I mean, your your songs have a lot of guitar harmonies. Yeah. Which was popular back in the 80s and back in the 70s.

And and vocal harmonies as well. That's it. That's that's what we are.

That's what that's kind of what we do, which is which is weird, because, you know, when you look about when we got a record deal in the late 80s and stuff, that's what we were. We weren't trying to sound like, you know, the bands that were coming up, your motley's and your rats and stuff. We were just us.

So a lot of times people back then would be like, well, what do you guys sound like? And I couldn't tell. I couldn't tell him, oh, we sound like docking with, you know, with blah, blah, blah. It was always just what we were, you know.

Have you ever considered recording your medleys? As a matter of fact, the 80s, the 36 minute 80s monster medley is recorded. We ended up recording it with Jimmy Riley over at Perfect Sound in Downers Grove two summers ago. We haven't released it, but it's it's immaculate.

It's beautiful. That's awesome. It's perfect.

Now, I understand, you know, you don't label your stuff as heavy metal, right? I don't think we do. I think there may be a few songs on the self-titled record that are really edgy and a little bit harder. But it's it's extremely difficult for me to label it heavy metal when there's vocal harmonies.

So what I had heard, it's called heavy aluminum. That's exactly what we used to call it, heavy aluminum, because it wasn't quite, you know, Judas Priest or Iron Maiden. But at the same time, there was edgy parts of songs where you're like, wow, that's really that's really hooky.

That's really heavy right at that part. And then, of course, it would always go back to that part of harmony. It's music you can tent your turkey with.

That's right. That's exactly right. Now, now, is your new stuff similar to the 80s stuff or similar to the stuff that you wrote back then? Or is it evolved a little bit? It's evolved for sure.

The songwriting aspect of it has evolved a lot more for sure. But I can tell you that the songwriters are still edgier. It might be a little more bluesy than past Joker stuff as far as the riffs.

And there's a couple of songs we're working on that might have and might even be a little more progressive than Joker would be. However, there's a couple of songs that will fit totally into if you think of Joker, exactly what what would a new Joker song sound like? Yeah, it's there, too. So is Joker and Cool Deal available? Joker and Cool Deal is available, I believe, on iTunes.

Cool Deal, the self-title is available on iTunes as well as a third CD that we released, boy, back in 93. We recorded In Indiana. It's an EP, but that's also available on iTunes.

OK. I think that one's called Joker Last Hand. OK.

We never had intentions on releasing it. I think back in the day after the music started shifting, we went in, we had these songs, and our thought was, hey, let's record these and maybe shop for some new representation or a deal or something. And obviously after that, the band kind of split up.

And it wasn't until years later that that CD became available. So what are some of your favorite songs to sing or some of your favorite songs from the past? Are you talking about Joker songs to sing? No, original stuff. Original stuff? Yes, Joker stuff.

Well, you know, I love singing the ballads. I have a soft spot in my heart to sing ballads. I really do.

I think that ballad songs really strike people emotionally. And I'm that kind of guy myself to where I love hearing those ballads. And I love that people can pertain it to their life and then tell me how much it means to them.

Right. So to me, you know, you take your songs like Lorraine and A Little Bit of Heaven and October Wind. You know, Lorraine's about a love lost, obviously.

October Wind is also about being sad because potentially, you know, your girl's leaving you. A Little Bit of Heaven is... I thought Party for Your Life was about your girl leaving you. Party for Your Life, you know, those were the yuppie tunes that, you know, that we had.

You got to remember, you know, coming into the 80s, one of our biggest influences was Van Halen. And Van Halen, to me growing up, was about party, girls, cars. Right? Yeah.

I mean, that's what it is. That's what their lyrics are about. At least until Sammy got there.

Then he kind of made it more about love. You know, Dave wasn't talking about love, as you know. He ain't talking about love.

Yeah, so the songs like Party for Your Life and those were always fun. However, the ballads, you know, I like singing the ballads best. Yeah.

Yeah, man. So where can people find Joker if they're looking for you? Well, hopefully not my house because I do have a security camera. No, you can find us on Facebook.

I mean, the biggest way to find us is probably on Facebook. We have a lot of followers and I think that that's the easiest place to find us. But you can also check us out on Twitter or you can check us out on Instagram.

We have yet to do a Snapchat, but that could be kind of fun too. Do you have a website? We have a new website actually under construction. So there's not a website I'm going to steer anyone to at this point.

Okay. So you got a show. The only show you got coming up is Bourbon Street right now? That's right.

Yep. We're concentrating on recording our new songs. And right now we got the Bourbon Street coming up on November 9th.

To be honest, when we reunited, we decided that we didn't – although we are playing covers, we don't want to be a saturated cover band where we're playing this club this night and then next week and we're here and next week and we're here. We try to make our show special to the people that are seeing them. So truly, I mean we're doing three or four tops a year in the Chicago area.

All right. All right. Well, thanks very much for coming in.

Oh, thank you guys. I appreciate it. I appreciate it.

Thank you so much. This was a lot of fun. Yes, it was.

Thank you. Thanks. That was Tony Angala from Joker.

And they're a great band. They've got some new music coming up too. Yeah, and they're going to be out and about doing some live shows this weekend at Bourbon Street.

You can get out there and see them. It's refreshing to see somebody that's still out there trying to make their own original music. Yes, it is.

And they've got some great stuff, some great music out there too. Yeah, you should check them out. And make sure you check us out on all your favorite podcasts, downloads, subscription thingies out there.

Make sure you like and share our Facebook page. Are there thingies? There are thingies. You know, wherever you get your podcasts.

Oh, okay. I get you. Yeah, those thingies.

Yeah, sure. So, all righty. I hope you enjoy this week's show.

Make sure you tune in again next week for another episode. We'll talk to you soon. See you.

Thanks for listening. Bye. Bye.

Bye. Bye.