After Dark Cloud stormed out on us in 1993, dismal spirits fell over Kirk and me. We had only just begun to have only to begin again. A drummer is the hardest one to do without. But within a month, we found Richie. Richie was a vast improvement and an asset being a superior drummer.

 Our hopes soared at the amount of talent (as well as an extremely goofy sense of humor) he brought to the band. Richie and I bonded immediately, and often keep on belting tunes out long after rehearsal was done, and everyone had gone home.

Influenced by John Bonham (of the mighty Led Zeppelin), Rich was also a bit of a square peg, being a bit less "metal" than the rest of us, but otherwise a perfect choice...or at least, when he showed up. As you can probably gather by his picture on this page, it was quite an inside joke for us to place pictures of Richie on milk cartons to tease him about the problems we had with him. The only thing was, it was not very funny after awhile.

 Richie was fired early in 1994 to be replaced by Ray "Dizzy" Castaldo, who later joined the infamous 99¢ Special. While Ray got more involved with 99, Richie started hanging around more and convinced us to give him another chance. This led for him to play the only club date he has ever played with the band (outside of a few small shows here and there for private parties) at the Lost Horizon.

We were all ready to head back into the studio to release a new demo when Richie announced that he was going out of state for a few weeks. We planned our studio time around his vacation time only to find him not returning. This left us in a bad situation, or as it turned out a good one. We began to experiment with computers and after one week of time (with the help of Ray for his drum parts) managed to program our entire set into our beloved Amiga 500 for our studio time and the several shows we had booked.

When Richie returned several months later he tried to resign, while we simultaneously attempted to fire him. There was a few arguments over money, who was in the wrong, etc. But eventually everything worked itself out. And the sequencing our our drums had become a staple of our sound ever since...