This band was, how can I put this delicately, instructive for a number of reasons. Guitarist Igor DaVilla asked me to join up after we had jammed a couple of time in the hopes of keeping Oncle Julien afloat. I figured, sure, why not, espcially since I wasn't doing anything else at the time. However, I made it clear that I was just the drummer here. What I didn't realize at the time was that this stripped me of any voice I might have had in the band, and that voice could have come in handy in addressing some of the band's deficiencies. So lesson number one was to be careful about neutering yourself, in the purely figurative sense.

I also learned that I can get out of bad situations, although it probably took longer than I would have liked. There were some issues in this band that made the latter stages a bit trying, to the point where rehearsing was just a nightmare. Rock and roll is supposed to be fun, and this wasn't.

Finally, sometimes you can try as hard as you know how, but you can't fix a bad song. Some of this had to due with the self-neutering, but try as I might, I couldn't get any of the band's material to sound anywhere near where I was happy with it. Were they "bad" songs in the absolute sense? I don't even know.

I was able to recruit bass player Eric Bachenheimer into URT, which was just getting started about the time this band folded. And for whatever it's worth, Question Mary did mark my return to playing live after far too long of a layoff.

There was lots of droning guitar in this band, so I tended to find a general groove or pattern that would work, and ride several variations of that in order to enforce some contrast on the song structures, with varying levels of success.

Igor and singer Heather Poliakoff were at each other's throats, to the point where rehearsals routinely devolved into screaming matches. And the recording was more than a bit flawed, in my opinion, although I excused myself from the mixdown for fear of my life. I just couldn't stay in the band and keep quiet about the things that were wrong with it, like Heather expecting every single person on the mailing list to come to the CD release party and to buy a CD. So, I guess I did take the easy way out by getting out rather than trying to fix things, but you have to pick your battles, and this one didn't seem worth it.