Hey, this is Paul Martin and Ray the Roadie for the Rock and Roll Chicago podcast. How you been, Paul? I've been pretty good. Pretty good.

How about yourself, Ray? Not too shabby. Not too shabby. It's been a little while since we've been putting anything out, but we've both been kind of busy.

A little vacationing, some work stuff. Yeah. Yeah.

That happens, I guess. It's called life. That's called life.

That's right. That's right. So we are back, people.

We have not forgotten about you, and as a matter of fact, today we've got an interesting fellow today. A really special guest, Mr. Doug Jewin. He's with the Sunshine Boys, Expo 76.

He used to be with the Slugs, him and his brother, Greg, they formed a band about 1983, and he's also one of the guitarists of Ploydog Pondering. Yes. Yes, he is.

And also on the radio, well, it was on the radio, now on Steve Dahl's podcast. That's right. He's on Steve Dahl's podcast every day.

Yes. Yes, he is. Busy man.

Very busy man. So let's get to it and see what Doug has to say for himself. Sounds good.

Let's go. Hey, this is Paul Martin. And Ray the Roadie.

For the Rock and Roll Chicago podcast. So Paul and I are out today, wandering around the Avondale neighborhood up in Chicago. We stopped into the Demon Tap for a cocktail, and who's here but Doug Jewin? Wow.

Fancy meeting you guys. Oh, my goodness. Who would have ever known you were here? I'm driven in from Woodstock for my nightly beer.

Yeah. Definitely. So how's it going, Doug? It's going great.

Thanks for waiting patiently for me this afternoon, and thanks for inviting me. Glad we could get it together. Oh, it's great.

It's great. You're a busy guy. I mean, you've got a lot of stuff going on.

Yeah. I asked you guys to, we were looking for a time and a date and a place, and I thought, well, I've got a studio session tonight just around the corner at Million Yen Studios. My band Sunshine Boys were recording some strings for our upcoming album.

So I'm going to check out, I'm going to head over there in around six or something. Is that where you've recorded before? Just one session there before. It's new to me.

This is a studio that our producer Matt Allison is familiar with, so he brought us over there. It's a nice little room, and it's going well. Let's talk to us about Sunshine Boys first.

Yeah. So it's a trio. It's myself.

I play guitar and sing, and Jacqueline Schimmel, Jackie Schimmel, she plays bass, and she used to play with Brad Elvis and Chloe and their band, The Big Hello, and she plays with a kid's artist called Justin Roberts. She's been with him many years, and they've been nominated for a couple Grammys, but they've lost out, unfortunately. She now plays in this amazing kind of punk glam band called Tiny Bit of Giant's Blood, which is amazing.

Cool name. Very cool name, and it's everything that you'd expect from a name like that, just this kind of production and five foot high gold boots, silver boots. It's awesome.

It's good. It's very, very over-the-top rock and roll. It's a stadium rock with punk kind of hybrid, and it's really great.

So she's on bass, and I've known her for a long time. We've played together a lot of different situations, and on drums is Frida Love Smith. She came out of a group called the Blake Babies, who were a Boston group that were indie rock kind of darlings.

In the early 90s, Julianne Hatfield, a singer-songwriter, was kind of the singer in that band. They had a lot of critical acclaim, made some amazing records, and actually our band, the Slugs, I was in. We opened up for the Blake Babies.

I was a huge fan of theirs, and I just happened to become friends with Frida, and the three of us were asked to back up some other people, some songwriters for a project, and I knew that the three of us were going to sound great on our own, so we did this thing. We did this gig, a couple of gigs with these guys, good friends of ours, and then they wanted to sort of make it more of an official group, and we were like, no, we're going to step away and form our own group. So that was in 2016, and we put out a record last year, and we're really far along on our next record.

Blue Music. Blue Music is the record, yeah. I like that.

That's a great CD. Oh, thank you very much. Yeah, very proud of it.

We think we've got another, an even better one, cooking up right now, so we're happy about that. Where'd the name come from? Sunshine Boys? Well, it came from a conversation that I had with Frida when we were just kind of realizing all the similar people, all the people that we knew, and all the places that we had played in our sort of previous 90s rock life, and we didn't know each other, but it just reminded me of a scene in the Sunshine Boys where Walter Matthau and George Burns are talking about all these old theaters they played, and I'm like, oh, this is like a scene out of the Sunshine Boys, and if we ever form a group, let's call it that. So that's how it came to be, and also the fact that two of the three members are women, and it's called Sunshine Boys, and they were okay with that immediately.

They did not question it, so it just was, a lot of our decisions have been effortless and unanimous, and so that was just one of them, so it was never, there was never, how about if we call it something else, you know, that's just what it was. Now, do you do most of the writing, or is there a combination of all three of you? I do, the songs are credited to all of us, but I do the writing of the songs, I submit the demos, and then once it's in their hands, then I really feel it becomes songs, and they are excellent with editing and rearranging and adding bits, dropping bits, so I turn it over to them, and it becomes a group effort at that point. Now you said you were putting strings in there, but you're obviously just bass, guitar, drums when you play live, so how do you fill in with the strings? Well, we've played all the songs that were adding strings too, they've all been played live a bunch, and they were designed to play live, but when we started talking about one of the songs on the record, we thought this would really be great if it had some strings on it, and I play in Poi Dog Pondering, Susan Vells is the string player there, and I asked her if she'd be interested in doing that, and she said yes immediately, and so I sent her a song, and she loved it, wrote a great part for it, and then she said, do you have anything else? And between the band, we couldn't decide on two songs, we couldn't decide one of the two songs that we had thought of, so I sent her both, I said, pick what you want, whichever one you want, she wrote another one, and then she said, I think I've got something for the third one, so I think we're going to end up with strings, and then also another friend of ours who plays cello, Anna Steinhoff is going to be there at the session too, so it's going to have a nice sound, and I've never sort of been involved in recording strings before, I've never had it on any records that I've sort of done, and so I'm very excited about that, I've never seen it being done, so it'll be cool, maybe they'll overdub some stuff so it'll sound more like a larger section or whatever, it's all, I think they probably each have pickups in their instruments, but it'll be recorded live with good mics and stuff.

Very cool. Yeah. Very cool.

Very excited. What's one of your favorite tunes off of Blue Music? The title track is important to me, Blue Music, it just sums up a lot of, it's kind of a song for underdogs I think, it's kind of a song for, it was kind of a response to the amount of music that exists currently which is all sort of pointed and negative and does a bit of bragging at the expense of others, and I just thought that there was a, I couldn't relate to any of that, I couldn't relate to those sentiments, I couldn't relate to being talked at by music in that way, and I just sort of, I wanted to kind of celebrate all the instances where things have gone wrong, all the people who have not, who have been afraid to try things or have watched other things pass them by, and that's just a meaningful kind of message for me personally, and the band I think sounds terrific on that. It was a song that was sort of important enough to just name the record after, which is a you know, it's a large task, a large weight for a song to carry if you're naming an album after it, so you better be good at title songs, so that's a song that I feel builds nicely.

And you've got a show coming up too, don't you? We have a few shows, we tend to play in interesting little settings, but we're doing a show in a couple weeks at an art gallery in Evanston, so you can imagine what kind of hell-raising goes on at an art gallery in Evanston. But it's a place that's been hosting shows, and some of our friends have done shows there, and so we're gonna do that show, and then the very next day we're gonna be shooting a video for one of our songs on the upcoming album, so we're gonna leave our gear there overnight, which is great for a lazy old rocker, and so then we're gonna come back and we're gonna shoot a video. Travel light is my motto.

Yeah, I know, I know. I'm telling you, man, like, I... No more Marshalls or nothing. One of the greatest rock moments I had was when I went into the guitar center in, like, Algonquin, and I wheeled in this 4x12 cabinet, and it's a giant 100-watt tube head, and I just traded it on the spot for a little Fender Blues Junior that fits in the back of my car, and I was just like, I felt I felt so... You felt the weight off your shoulder.

I felt the weight, literally the weight, and I just felt, you know what, this is really what it's all about. You know, like, it's sort of, and in some symbolic way, I was like, alright, sorry, giant stack, I guess we'll never play Alpine Valley, but you'll find a good home somewhere. Even if you do, even if you use that blue shirt you're wearing.

Oh my god, I saw the Eagles, they had all just little combo amps on their stage, so yeah. So yeah, no, that was a great moment. I saw a travel light when I bought my car, I brought all my gear with to make sure it would fit in the back with the hatch shut, so yeah, that's how it is.

So tell me about your history, how you got into music. Originally you started the Slugs with your brother. Yeah, that was a group that started, I guess probably, I'd been in bands, I've never not been in a band since 1978.

And that's when, you know, I was pretty good at guitar in high school, and I hooked up with some friends and they asked me to join their band, and so I played that, and then when high school ended and everybody went their separate ways, my brother and I had a band for a little while with some junior college friends of mine, and when that ended, then we started the Slugs. We didn't have a drummer, but we had my brother Greg on bass and another guitar player called Al Paulson, Park Ridge, and we all had the same job that we didn't start until about 3 or 4 in the afternoon, so we had our days free to kind of mess around, and it was a really sweet little period where you're sort of living at home and you're working, so you have a little bit of money and you can screw around in the day, essentially. So we did it, we formed a band, and we found our drummer Mike Halston, and that started in 83, and that's when we started really kind of thinking about original music.

I had to start writing for the band because, you know, you can't just play covers, you know. Not back then, anyway. Not back then, I mean, we started off doing covers, obviously, but then at some point you realize you have to start writing, so I just, I never, wasn't much of a writer, but out of necessity.

And I wasn't a singer, I never wanted to be the singer, but there was nobody else that knew the words or cared to do it, and I was maybe a ham in that regard. I didn't mind being at a microphone. So that started in, I guess our first sort of meeting was maybe March of 83, and we put out, we were slow moving, we put out maybe three records and had probably enough material for a couple more records, but it just didn't, you know, we never, we had some great shows, and we had people that still talk about us, and they were really kind to us, and, you know, we had some internal struggles in the band, just my brother and I, you know, that can be a weird, tough relationship, and we've since gotten it together very well, it's great, but we don't play together anymore, and maybe I don't, there might be a connection, I don't know.

So, yeah. Did you guys sign with a label, or did you just go? No, we were sort of, we, in the great sort of label, you know, feeding frenzy in Chicago about 92, 93, we just sort of held the door for everybody else who got through and got a record deal, and we, at that point, we were probably old news, you know, we were a decade old as a band, and... You had put out a couple of singles, right? We had a couple of singles, and by the early 90s, I think we had two records out, you know, two LPs. Two albums.

Yeah, so, I mean, we had some good songs, some very legendary live shows, we had a very strong following, certainly had no shortage of fun on stage, he says, pulling on his beer. So we, you know, we were a very spirited band, and we weren't afraid to kind of use humor when other bands were very serious, especially a lot of punk bands around town and stuff, and we didn't quite fit in with the things that were happening. You know, we played a kind of Midwestern pop rock, and somewhere in between the Who and the Replacements, and I don't know, just things never really kind of escalated to a larger level for us.

But we had some... How long did you stay together? Technically, I don't think we're broken up, but... But I think once I got asked to join Poy Dog Pondering in about 93, that sort of created a, I'm not sure how to put it, but I don't think the other members of the Slugs were super happy about that, even though it did ultimately help people, because Poy Dog fans are great, and they were like, Oh, what's Dog's other band? And people started coming out to see us, and they liked us. So we kind of limped through the 90s, and I think our last record came out probably in 2000, I think it was. So that was a while ago, yeah.

That was Junior. Junior, yeah. So then we continued to do some shows after that, and then what happened is that we would sort of reunite when somebody was saying, Hey, I'm having a 40th birthday party, or, Hey, I'm having a 50th birthday party.

Would you guys play? And we did. And so I think the last time we did something was when one of our friends asked us to play at her 50th birthday party at Reggie's in the South Loop, and that was, I think, probably... I'm going to say it's maybe five years ago to the date, around that time, so yeah. So it's been five years, and we had a great time practicing for that gig.

It was so much fun. We had, I think, three rehearsals. The first one was like we had a lot of fun remembering the songs or forgetting the songs.

The second rehearsal, we drank three bottles of brandy and then jammed and got really loose. It never sounded bad. It never sounded bad.

And then that third rehearsal was all serious, and it was great. If that's the last thing we do, we had a fantastic time. We don't really run in the same circles anymore.

If we did and somebody wanted us to do a show, it's possible we could do one. I love the name of your first album, Non-Stop Holiday. Non-Stop Holiday, yeah.

I didn't even know where that came from. I think it was probably one of those mildly sarcastic titles if our songs were maybe a little bit about frustration or something. I don't know.

It just had a good kind of alliterative non-stop holiday sound to it. So yeah, it rolled off the tongue. So we touched a little bit on Poi Dog.

Yeah. How did that come about? Poi Dog was, they used to come up to Chicago quite a bit. They found a very good audience here in Chicago thanks to Norm Weiner and WXRT who really fell for the band and plugged them into a lot of shows and put them all over the air in their playlist.

And so they would come up and I got to know Max Crawford, the trumpet player, because he was coming to Lounge Axe, an old fabled club in Lincoln Park. He was coming up to visit. I think he was kind of sweet on the owner.

And I got to know him. We became very fast friends. And then Frank, the lead singer of Poi Dog, Frank Orrell, he happened to also fall in love with a Chicago woman and was looking for kind of a different environment to be in and loved Chicago and loved this woman, Bridget.

So he moved up here and Max came up and moved with him and they began to sort of put another band together based out of Chicago and with Chicago musicians. And they had kind of a rough go in Austin. They were a big deal and they had a couple, they did like three records for Sony and Sony dropped them and they never got the hit record that Sony wanted and they were sort of saying, well, forget it, let's start our own thing, let's start a new thing.

I think there were some frustrations within the band down there. And so I just had met Max and we had, I got drafted to play a sort of a backup band situation or throwing together a backup band situation for a great singer called Sid Straw who sang with the Golden Palominos. And anyway, I got along with these guys great and they were like, I think we started playing monthly shows and just feeling each other out and then they decided to make it officially Poi Dog Pondering after about six months and asked me to join in early 93, January 93, so yeah.

And then there was a little bit of a breakup of that band. You know, we had our own frustrations and our own kind of failures to hit it big or whatever. What was that like? That was probably 99 to 2003 or 4 or something.

And it was just, it's a band you never leave, you know. So I like, I got reshuffled out of the lineup but eventually I started popping in for one gig or a couple songs and then eventually, now it's essentially anybody who's ever been in the band is in the band. We played in Aurora at the River's Edge and there was, I don't know how many of us, when there's on stage, it's like 17, 15, 18 or whatever, you know.

Yeah, I was going to say, there's 15 or 20 guys in the band. Yeah, yeah, yeah, so it's everybody, everything. So it's pretty much all in, you know.

I'm a big fan of Poi Dog. Oh, good, yeah. Love the band.

But how would you describe that music? I mean, when people ask about Poi Dog, I'm like, you know, I don't know if it's house music, it's rock, it's soul, it's... It's folk. It's like, it's a band that is, it's just musically omnivorous. It really kind of, it's representative of how Frank O'Rourke enjoys all types of music.

And between all of us players, we're completely open-minded to all different types of music. And so there should be really kind of nothing stopping any band that loves a wide variety of music from doing it all, from exploring it all. Poi Dog, I don't think, is a group of dilettantes.

It's not a group of people who are just dabbling in whatever weird, funny thing. It's people who really like all types of music. So I have no way to describe it.

I can't figure out, there's not one thing you can put on it. Does Frank do most of the writing? Yeah, he does most of the writing. There are different processes he uses.

Sometimes he'll collect bits of stuff that people might have and send in, and he can work a groove around that or something like that. But for the most part, he does the writing and then turns over kind of the arrangements to the rest of the band. And then he'll tighten that up during the editing and mixing phase, stuff like that.

So he's, the tools of recording and all that are part of the process as well when Frank's working and stuff. But he'll go from a period of hard house music listening to strictly playing a nylon string guitar and traipsing around the world with that thing. So he's always exploring, and he's always looking for new stuff.

You haven't done much traveling with them. When they go on the road, you... You know, for the past couple of years, I haven't, just because I was working more of traditional hours. But in the days when I first joined up, in those mid-'90s, we did a lot of road work.

We did some touring as a support act for Dave Matthews for a little bit, and that was enjoyable to play those big places and experience that kind of life. That was nice. That was sort of the first time I'd been on that sort of larger sort of scale.

But we did a lot of stuff. We did a lot of touring. We did a number of trips around the country.

Probably a good fit with Dave Matthews, I would say. It seemed to work out pretty well. What happens, we have a... Their monitor guy was also... He's from the area.

Oh, okay. And he was our sound man, our monitor man as well. And he gave Dave a CD when they were looking for opening bands, and Dave was cool with the idea of doing some runs.

He was nice enough to come out and introduce us every night. So that was cool, yeah. That was very cool.

Now speaking of working regular hours, you've been working with Steve Dahl for how long now? I started podcasting with him probably about seven years ago. Then I took a little break when I got a job at MeTV. Oh, okay.

Yeah, so then I took a couple years off from the podcast and was working with that company. And then when Steve went back on the air, he asked me to come and be on the radio. So that was, I don't know, five years ago, maybe four years ago.

And so we've been... And now the radio's gone, but we do our podcast every day. Right. So we do that out of our separate homes, Steve and Brendan Greeley and myself.

How'd you get linked up with Steve originally? Honestly, it was VM Music. I was... You know, in my kind of non-rock career, I've been doing a lot of... copywriting, advertising, and stuff like that, marketing. That was my day gig, freelancing and working at agencies.

I've been doing that since probably 93, in one form or another. So I was in this kind of long-distance relationship with a job. I had to drive to... I don't even know, Riverwoods or someplace.

Every day. It's kind of a big hike from Woodstock. And I was like, I'm going to treat myself and subscribe to Steve's podcast so I can listen to it every day.

I'd miss him and I'd like... It was right around the time he might have switched over from being a free podcast to a subscription. You were a fan of his from... From day one. Right.

From Back of the Loop days. Yeah, for sure. WDAI, high school.

Blew our minds. Yeah, me and myself as well. You know what it's like.

I had heard him trying to come up with a musical idea on Garage Band, using one of those sort of built-in loops and stuff. He had a bit called... We still do, Floor Idiots. And he was thinking, I want to write a theme for this.

And he's playing with his drum beat. And I'm just going... There's this itch in me. I'm going, man, I can do this.

I can do this. And so... And I think I had sort of sent him a Facebook friend request. And he started talking about me on the show.

Like, who's Dag Julen? Pete Zimmerman said. He was a producer at the time. And the label stuck with me.

And kind of a joke. He goes, you don't know the great Dag Julen? So that's... And so Steve was mocking Pete for that and mocking me without having met me. And so I think in a way... True Steve Pageant.

Yeah. Oh, yes. Yeah, of course.

To prove, I guess, myself, I wrote a Floor Idiots theme. There was no request for it. But I knew Pete a little bit.

And I just sent this theme song in, unsolicited. And it went over very well. And then... And that's the one we hear today.

Yeah, I had to clean it up for the AM radio. I had to take out the F word. But... Yeah.

So... So then he was like, hey, can you do a closing theme? And then I think he asked me, like, hey, we've got this thing going. Can you... And I think there must have been something in our kind of rapport that we might have had via e-mails or whatever. And then it also came a time, unfortunately, that he was sort of purging a large amount of people whose salaries he was paying.

He was looking to tighten up his operations. And I think he just felt something, some sort of affinity. Right.

And could recognize that I was a fan. And I think I went and introduced myself at one of his live events. I brought some CDs.

And I had a little too much to drink just to get the courage up. And I was like, I just wanted to prove to him that I was a real guy, that I had done real musical things. You know, that I just wasn't somebody who was, I don't know, an obsessive fan or something.

A one-hit wonder? Yeah, right, right, exactly. So he began to, you know, we communicated. And then, honestly, and I think I've told this story before, but it's the real, it's the absolute truth.

There was a time when my wife and I were both really underemployed. She was only working part-time and my freelance stuff had dried up. And we're like, what are we going to do? One of us has to go to the Jewel store and get an application.

We have to do that, you know. And we're like, yeah, for sure, that's the way. Okay, and then she left the room and I looked at my phone and there was an email from Steve.

Hey, are you working full-time? I'd like to get you more involved with the podcast. And, I mean, it happened. Wow.

Listen, it's the right tape. It's funny how that works. I hit reply and that afternoon I went over.

I was just like, it was midday, and I was like, I can come over now. I went over now, hung out with him for a couple of hours and then it was there, basically. I think he said he wanted to hire me.

We hung out and got a vibe, I guess, for each other. It worked out. That's crazy.

Now, you do The Open every month. I do. Would you keep track of it all month long as you're doing the shows? You know, I used to.

I used to do that. I used to write something down if somebody said something really funny and write the time down and stuff. But I felt like it was taking me out of the game a little bit.

If I'm waiting for the next quip, I'd rather, I just listen to the episodes. I get surprised by something. It never fails because somehow a couple of quotes come up and all of a sudden you can thread things together.

I just forget about all the things that we do and all the things that we say. I'm just constantly amazed at how funny those guys are. I tell them every month, I'm like, you guys are so funny.

It's a treat to listen to. It just happens. I'll stumble upon something, it's like, oh, that's got to be the closer, whatever.

It just happens. There's a freewheeling element to it and there's also a hyper, under the gun, holy fuck it's due tomorrow kind of element. Sorry to swear, but that's what it's like.

Based on that, you can get some great work done. A deadline is a great thing for a writer. There's one other avenue that you're out there with, Expo 76.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. How long have you been there with that? That's a 10-year-old band. That's a cover band.

The concept on that is just, for my whole musical career, one of my little either super annoying traits or enjoyable campfire slash party tricks is that I've memorized a lot of songs. I don't have any real-world skills, but I have been able to file a lot of songs away. And I just thought, I would be talking with our keyboard player, Kenny, who's been a friend of mine and a label boss of mine and a bandmate of mine in different situations for many, many years, and I was just like, man, if we could form a cover band that plays this stuff that we love, and again, it goes back to that idea of all sorts of genres, all sorts of, like, it's not just going to be focused on one thing.

We can pluck something, a show tune, or we can pluck a punk rock tune or something, and it all is going to make sense because we care about it all and we love it all. And if we can form a band where we don't want to put a gun in our mouths because we've played some song we detest for the millionth time, it's truly based on songs that I just love and never get tired of. The other guys obviously bring in songs and sing songs, but I was just like, there's a ton of songs I just love, I've been obsessed with, and it's made it super easy for me to just keep playing, and we add new songs all the time, but it's really the love that we have, and it's also, it's really kind of a tribute to when we were all kids.

I've got a huge collection of the old WLS and WCFL surveys, you know, the top 40, and if you look at any one of those, and you look at the playlist, what it was like in the 70s, there was no separation. It was like an R&B song, a glam rock song, a country rock song, a disco song, or a new wave song when the time got right for that, a proggy kind of song. It was all there together, and listening to it, no one ever said, how can you play Charlie Daniels after Stevie Wonder? I think it just created something in people of that generation that just like, they were open to stuff, so it was like, in a way, it was really a peak of that kind of thing.

The productions were great, and the songs were great, and so we grew up listening with those kind of ears. There are no words That can speak The sight of you makes me weep Baby, you feel like I feel Please let me know that it's real You're just too good to be true Can't take my eyes off of you And so these things make sense. It's just kind of according to Dag Julen.

Kind of, a bit, yeah, you know. Kind of taking the garage band out to the public. Well, I've always wanted to detail the things that I was based in the band under, and I've mentioned NRBQ before.

They were a band that when I first was ready enough to hear them, I recognized the swing in their backbeat and the wide range of their musical influences and vocabulary. I latched on to that and loved it. So it was them, and then the Hamburg-era Beatles.

Not that I saw them, but I read so much about their mythology, about how they just dicked around on stage, and they'd play, they'd churned out hours and hours of songs, and it was all this from Rockabilly to now actually some crazy stuff. And then when I was a kid, my parents had these live records by Trini Lopez, like PJs. And growing up and listening to those records and watching the Dick Van Dyke show, when they'd have everybody over at the house and they'd put on a show and they'd do a party and everybody was playing, that whole sort of loose, live vibe was big for me.

And so that all kind of sunk in with me. And so Expo's kind of the regurgitation of all that. It's definitely a super loose environment, but it's supported, I feel, by really tight playing.

Tremendous humor from all of us, great rapport. All the guys in the band, they didn't know each other, but I knew them in different ways. And we were all the same age, we all had the same hairline.

And we all had the same kind of person. You couldn't fit in this band. Yeah, you couldn't be in the band.

I'm right there. So everybody got it right away. I had these long conversations on the phone, like, I've got this concept for a band.

And at the time, my wife was like, you do not need to be in another band. You're already driving 40 minutes, 60 miles, whatever, you're already missing out on enough. And I'm just like, you've got to trust me on this.

And it's worked out wonderfully. It's just a great experience. And you do most of your work with, you're performing with Expo.

That's the one that, yeah, we have residencies every month. We have gigs that we play. You play at Simon's every month.

Simon's every month, Fitzgerald's every month. And then there are other places we're starting to develop up north in Highwood. We have a private party.

We just got through doing a couple of weddings. People ask us to do a wedding. We're like, great, that's fantastic.

But you've got to understand, we do what we do. We don't do, and I want to tell you this right up front, we don't do Celebration or the Chicken Dance. We don't know those songs.

We could fake our way through that. So they're like, if you guys are cool with that, then we'll come out and play. And people are always cool.

And that's the reason they usually ask us this, because they respond to that kind of far-flung, whatever, set list that we have. So tell me quickly about some plays and films and stuff that you've got some music in. I have, yeah.

And TV shows? Yeah, some of the Slug stuff landed on some... Some of the Slug stuff? Landed on TV shows, and that's been great. I mean, it continues to keep me in the low three figures. But yeah, there was a... My friend Kenny, who's our keyboard player at Expo, he also runs Pravda Records, who signed the Slugs, and administers music for tons of people and got a bunch of stuff on TV, and that's great.

So I've had that. I have friends in the theatrical world, and they've asked me to write music. I've written sort of experimental music for a play about crystal meth addiction.

And then I wrote some 80s music for a play just a couple of months ago. So yeah, I want to do more of that. I want to try to expand that.

So obviously you feel that this music, like the Slug music, that is in some of the shows or whatever. Yeah. It feels so relevant today.

Well, I mean, it was in the early days of the WB or the CW, whatever it was, like Party at Five or Dawson's Creek, when those things were happening. Everyone is gobbling up music for those shows. So I got lucky on a couple of numbers.

And there's some little bits that have ended up on MTV shows, and I don't know. Well, see, I've always had this theory. It's just a theory, my own theory.

But there's a resurgence of music every 20 years. I mean, in the 80s, the Motown music came back. And then in the 90s, the 70s stuff.

In the 70s, everybody's watching Happy Days. They're watching the 50s and stuff like that. Right, you're right, right.

I just did a show, Sunshine Boys just played at DePaul University. DePaul, they had like a humanities fest, which is celebrating 50 years of Woodstock. And so they had some artists playing some songs from Woodstock.

And they had a couple of people. They had, was it, Geraldo Velez, who was Jimi Hendrix's conga player. He was up there talking and jamming with us as we did the Woodstock.

And then they had, I believe his name is Danny. Danny, oh, I forgot his name. He was the lead singer of Sha-Na-Na.

I was just going to say, for some reason. Forrester or something. Yeah, he was there.

He's gone into a really interesting career in forensic pathology. Or pathological forensic, whatever it is. But anyway, so there it is.

I was thinking about that myself. That's an amazing thing, Sha-Na-Na played at Woodstock. And it was the most punk rock thing of all time.

You know, it was great. It was super cool to watch like old films of him up there at Woodstock and doing it. And we had to, after the show we were talking, we just said, you guys invented punk rock.

All righty, well we're, you know what, I don't even know, we usually end our podcast and say, well where can we find you? But we can find you like all over the place. Pretty much. Is there a website though? There's a few of them.

By the tail? Yeah, well sunshineboys.net, dogjulen.com, that's not updated. There's expo76.com, toydogpondering.com, doll.com. What else am I doing? Facebook, Twitter, all that stuff. Where are you on Twitter? Dogjulen.

I'm also more show stuff on dogdollcast, one word. Or sunshineboys around there too. When's the Sunshine Boys new album? We're looking at May 1st.

The album is called Work and Love, and we feel that the workers holiday of May Day is a good time to put it out. And we're lining up all the videos and promotional elements before that, so we're giving ourselves a lot of time, so looking at May 1st. Good little well with that first one.

Yeah, thanks, thanks so much man. Good luck with that. Thank you.

Thanks for making the drive up here, guys. That's right, thanks for coming and meeting us, and we enjoyed having you out here. Thanks so much.

Thank you. Nice. Thanks.

Wow, Ray, that was, Dogjulen is surely an interesting fellow, isn't he? He sure is. I can't believe he runs down here from Woodstock every evening just to have a pint. Well, if it's good, then you travel long distances for that.

It is, it's a nice place, a very nice place. That was a great interview. He was a lot of fun.

Yeah, very talented guy as well. Quite talented, very busy. He's busy.

He's got a lot of bands that he's in. Yes, he is. Yes, he does.

As well as the podcast with Steve Dahl. Right, right. It was fun talking to Dog and getting some insight into what he does.

Hope everybody enjoyed it. Make sure everybody's checking us out on Facebook, our website, and make sure you listen to the RoadtoRockRadio.net every Monday at 6 o'clock. They feature one of our podcasts.

And check out the Illinois Rock & Roll Museum on Route 66. All right, thank you for listening. Talk to you soon.

Bye. Bye.