How did the concept of the band grow so quickly? There's sponsorship links, a ton of great friends and a whole mix of genres all across the website.

My original concept for the band was to have it encompass a variety of musical styles. Some of my favorite records, (such as) Steve Earle's “El Corazon”, the Stones' “Let It Bleed”, Rod Stewart's “Every Picture Tells A Story”, all have a wide variety of musical styles. We try to do gigs and cultivate relationships with bands from a mix of genres. That being said, we know we've got our feet planted firmly in rock-and-roll and our hands reaching out to styles like country, garage rock, psychedelia, blues, folk, punk, rockabilly and even a little Irish music.

We've also been fortunate enough to work with Kori Burkholder, our manager and one of my oldest friends in New York City. She's brilliant at organizing, developing new promotional strategies, and turning us on to new avenues to get our music out. She's been invaluable.

You hosted a birthday tribute show for the late great Gram Parsons earlier in November 2006. Which songs did you cover for that one? When/where did you all begin to discover his impact on your music?

That gig was the most fun I've ever had with my clothes on. I stayed up all night making myself a faux Nudie suit and the New Heathens played right in between Chip Robinson of the Backsliders with Eric "Roscoe" Ambel and Matt Mays and El Torpedo. The New Heathens performed "100 Years," "She" and "Return of the Grievous Angel." We were fortunate enough to be helped out with the glistening soprano of one of my favorite artists, Charlene McPherson of the band Spanking Charlene (their first record "Dismissed With A Kiss," will be out in March 2007 and look out, it's going to be a KNOCKOUT). Charlene sang the Emmylou (Harris) harmonies and it just gave me chills. We've reprised those songs a few times since, and will again on Saturday. It's such a pleasure to sing with Charlene.

The guy who turned me on to Gram was the same guy who turned me on to Muddy Waters, Chuck Berry & Howlin' Wolf: Keith Richards.  I was a massive Stones fan in high school and read Victor Bockris' biography of Keith, which talks a lot about Gram. From there I started listening to Gram and was moved by that fragile and supple voice of his, not to mention his brilliant songwriting. Ben Fong Torres' biography of Gram, "Hickory Wind," explains that Gram was trying to make "white soul music" (Gram's name for the genre was "Cosmic American Music"), which was essentially just American music without boundaries. That's why Gram is such an influence: because he can shine on a stone-country Louvin Brothers song like "Cash on the Barrelhead," as well as an R&B song like "Do Right Woman," as well as a pop classic like "Dark End of the Street" and THEN write "In My Hour of Darkness."

In October I saw the aforementioned Matt Mays and El Torpedo, the pride of Nova Scotia, at Southpaw . They totally won me over with their brand of rock. How was Matt and band at the tribute?

Watching them live is like French kissing an electric outlet, right? ZANG! I can't tell you how thrilled I was when Matt Mays took the Gram gig and then actually drove down from Nova Scotia with all of El Torpedo to perform. They played a shimmering version of "Wild Horses," and a rave up of "Dark End of the Street" that threatened to raise the roof off the club.

Those guys bowl me over. I can't stop listening to their record. "Cocaine Cowgirl" is easily the best rock song of 2006  (on par with Willie Nile's "Welcome to My Head.") I can't wait to watch them on Conan O'Brien tonight (12/15/06). The other thing about Matt is he's a tremendously nice guy, as are all the cats in his band. He's on my friend Abe Bradshaw's record label 02:59 (as is Willie Nile) so I can't wait to see where he goes.

On your myspace page: What's the song you sing in the YouTube link with Old Crow Medicine Show?

I believe that song is "Tell It To Me," featuring the zinger of a refrain, "Cocaine you're gonna' kill my honey dear!" We were doing a gig in Provincetown, MA when I announced that we were about to perform an Old Crow Medicine Show song. A guy at the bar perked up, then sang along with every word. I thought for a second he looked like a member of the band, but dismissed the notion as crazy because Old Crow are from Nashville, we were in Cape Cod, and they were on tour. After the set I introduced myself to him and said, "I see you really dug that Old Crow Medicine Show song," and he said, "Yeah! I'm IN Old Crow Medicine Show! I SING that song, that's MY band!" Turns out it was Ketch Secor, singer, fiddle player and harp blower for OCMS spending a weekend on the Cape. So of course we brought him up onstage to do that song with us again. We also did "Wagon Wheel."

What's your favorite poems/ Hunter S. Thompson stories? Have you encountered the man himself?

I WISH! I wrote "Doomed Generation" about him. I used to intern at Rolling Stone Magazine (read: fetch coffee, make copies, open mail) and the woman who got me the gig actually moved out to Colorado to be Mr. Thompson's assistant. She only referred to him as, "The Good Doctor." My favorite Thompson book is "The Great Shark Hunt”. You see what raw talent he had as a writer in his pre-Gonzo dispatches from South America and the American West. Then when he goes Gonzo on "The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved",  it's just a gas from there on out. I also love "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail" and his two collections of letters. I can't wait for the third.

You guys are truly photogenic! What was that Relay Race Concert about?

Ye gods, I wish we were as photogenic as say, Matt Mays & El Torpedo! We're just fortunate to have a sweet manager who takes many pictures of us and stuffs them on our website. As for the relay race show, we went down to Dewey Beach, DE to play an Americana festival and the woman who booked us offered us a gig playing along the route of a relay race the next morning (a morning in which we woke up after three hours sleep on a hard, hotel room floor and at least two members of the band reached for leftover beer to quench their morning thirsts). I had to twist everybody's arm to do it but, as any of my bandmembers will bemoan, I love unusual gigs.

How did you get involved with the Guinness Oyster Fest......and how were the Guinness and oysters?

Do you know Laura Minor? Her voice will knock you sideways I mean this girl can SING. We met her on MySpace, she was nice enough to come to a few of our shows and since she knew the gentleman booking the Guinness Oyster Fest she recommended us for the gig. We owe her huge. The Guinness and oysters were fantastic, by the way. We had to split right after our set to drive up to Bovina, NY to play at our friend Chico's festival called "Livestock" that included his bands, "Future Farmers of America" and "Disciples of Agriculture," as well as Tandy, Eric "Roscoe" Ambel and Jim Lauderdale.

Great pics also of Ms. Daize Tomatoes at the Labor Day Tour. Did she do her burlesque thing during the set, or between shows? What does she think of you guys and the music?

Dazie, bless her soul, actually does her routine TO our music.   We all stand to the back of the stage and she comes out and does her thing. We met her when we performed a Surf Burlesque show at the Bowery Poetry Club. I asked the Grande Madame of New York burlesque, Jo Boobs, if any of her proteges would be interested in doing a performance with a live band backing them. Dazie stepped up and after that initial performance we've had her back several times. She's phenomenal and her routine to our song, "Getaway Baby," (in which she disrobes to her g-string and pasties) is a show stopper.

So much seems accomplished in 2006. What's in store for you all in 2007?

Selling a few more records would be nice! We'd like to open for some cool bands, throw a couple more "theme" shows along the lines of the Gram tribute in NYC, keep playing out in the region, build our audience and hopefully get started on our sophomore effort.

What do you guys drink when you are out to drink?

I've been known to say to bartenders, "Give me the girliest, fru-fru-est, least becoming of a heterosexual male cocktail you've got." Domenick is a bottomless well for Miller Lite. Dan is a Budweiser man who won't pass an opportunity to order Guinness. Butch keeps pushing me to try and get Tecate, his favorite beer, to sponsor us. Eric enjoys Mexican brews and often brings Heineken cans to practice. Kori, our manager, is infamous for drinking dirty martinis.

Being that you're all from all parts of the States, which can truly speak for the Americana part of your music, have you yet performed as a group in each of those hometowns (aside from NYC of course)? Do you plan to?

No! Eric, our drummer, is from Brooklyn and his is the only hometown we've performed in. I'm from Missoula, Montana and we have not yet performed there (despite my sending several CDs to the Rolling Stones management asking that we open for them at their October show in Missoula). Domenick is from Mundeline, IL and we do hope to get to Chicago this year. Butch is from Westchester, grew up on Cape Cod and spent a lot of years in Portland, Oregon, another place we hope to go. And Dan is from Connecticut. I think a "hometown tour" would be great.

“Getaway Baby” is a fine way to start the album up... a simple drum sound which puntucates the simply worded song; the solo  guitar is strong.

We cut the record at Eric "Roscoe" Ambel's studio, Cowboy Technical Services, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The reason we cut it there is because we're fans of so many records that have come out of there, particularly the Yayhoos latest effort, "Put the Hammer Down" but also songs like "Pigeon Heart," on Marah's 20,000 Streets Under the Sky and "Amorika v. 6.0" on Steve Earle's Jerusalem. We knew that studio would produce the sounds that we loved, and boy did it deliver. We played Roscoe's guitars all over that album and I think Butch and Dom sound particularly good on “Getaway Baby” , which I wrote after listening to a lot of Rod Stewart, BoDeans and Steve Wynn.

“July 1, Near Helena, MT”: Being a former Art Bell/Coast to Coast aficionado myself I'm most curious about this one. Did that ever happen? Did Art or Coast to Coast have any response to this song?

I'm glad you appreciated the Art Bell angle. Here's the true story behind that song. In college in Montana I used to host a radio show between 2 a.m. and 6 a.m. on Sundays. One Saturday evening a buddy of mine and I hitchhiked across the Idaho border to a natural hot springs to hang out, talk, and ogle pretty, naked, hippie girls. We started hitchhiking back around midnight and got picked up by two carloads of university freshmen who all went to high school in Helena. All the way back to Missoula they played a gag in which they would watch for headlights coming in the distance on this twisty, windy mountain road. When they saw a car coming they would park their car off in the forest, pour gasoline from their spare gas cans across the highway, wait until the approaching headlights were just about on top of them, and then toss a match onto the gasoline and watch the driver freak out as he or she drove through a wall of fire. Reckless and dangerous, yes, but also memorable.

For the song I combined that encounter with a story about a time in which an old band of mine was playing down in Dillon, MT for Y2K and the bassist's car got jammed in a snowbank up in the mountains. We got a tow from a toothless wrecker man who yammered all the way back about conspiracies he learned about from Art Bell. The song came together when I imagined that dude running into the match-happy teens on some dark, twisty mountain road near Helena sometime around the Fourth of July, when everybody in Montana gets a little pyromaniacal.

As a prologue and an epilogue to the song, when we were putting the record together I reached out to Art Bell to see if I could use a soundbyte from his show in the song. His people seemed very enthusiastic about the idea at first, but after I sent them the lyrics they declined. After the record came out I wrote a letter to Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer asking that he make "July 1, Near Helena, MT" the "Song of the State of Montana" for July 1, 2006. He also declined.

“141” is absolutely the most complete song...all band members strongly represented on that recording. Which one of you lived in 141st St in NYC that lent the story to the song?

That was me. I moved to NYC from Missoula, Montana on Sept. 1, 2001 and signed a lease on an apartment at 162 W. 141st Street on Sept. 9, 2001. Harlem was like a photo negative of everything I grew up around and at first I felt like I was on Mars, then I came to love it. The lyrics to that song are so brutally honest, sometimes I feel self-conscious singing it. I even name-checked Mrs. King, the elderly lady who lived in that building from 1956 until she died in 2004 and would hold packages that didn't fit in the mailboxes in her apartment in return for a can of Miller Lite from the corner deli. I got the chorus one morning when I woke up and there was a raging block party happening outside and a DJ spinning records was shouting into the microphone, along with the hundreds of people jammed up and down the block, "141!"

Fun facts for you guys about 141st St in Manhattan: Alexander Hamilton,  killed in a duel in 1804, has a statue at his former dwelling, Hamilton Grange, at 141st and Convent Ave. Now, about that Lou Costello statue (appears in one picture on the CD)..?

That ties into the Lou Costello statue in Paterson, NJ quite nicely because Alexander Hamilton was the man who founded the city of Paterson, NJ, where Lou Costello was born. Paterson, 15 miles as the crow flies from Manhattan, was famous for being the site of a giant waterfall along the Passaic River. As the struggle for American independence ramped up in the late 18th century, Hamilton saw that hydro power from the falls could be used to manufacture goods to compete with the British. Hence Paterson was born as America's first industrial city. In its heyday it was famous for making locomotives, Colt .45's and so much silk it was nicknamed "Silk City." After the second World War Paterson fell on hard times as manufacturing jobs vanished and white people fled to the suburbs, which is essentially where the town is today, impoverished and mired in political wheelings and dealings. Lou Costello, who is immortalized with a statue in the middle of the old Italian part of town, is still the city's favorite son, stemming from the days when he used to sign off on his TV show by saying, "Goodnight to all the people in Paterson!" Incidentally, to my mind Allen Ginsberg should be the most lionized person ever born in Paterson, but when he died the flag at city hall didn't even fly at half mast because a councilman objected to Ginsburg's sexual orientation. This may have something to do with why so few people know that Bette Midler is also from Paterson.

"Goodnight, Paterson" Which of you lived there and will the city ever rise again?

I didn't live there, but I worked as a reporter for the daily newspaper in Paterson for more than a year. The wretchedness of the job was exceeded only by the dreariness of the city. I wrote dozens and dozens of stories about plans to revitalize the city, none of which ever happened, hence I took a potshot at the city council in the lyrics (a sentiment that's not often expressed in American song). One day a former mayor took me on a tour and we ended up on top of a mountain. He looked out over the city and said, "Paterson, she's like a pretty girl inside an ugly dress." I quoted him verbatim in the song.

“Back To Jesus “is also a standout..The drums crack and explode. A sweet solo guitar heard albeit too briefly taking over, with harmonica nice touch to add on solo..almost buried the other guitars guitars lost in mix. How tough was recording this song...or was it?

Cowboy Technical Studios has an upright spinet piano that my buddy Martin Goodman played on the recording and it sounded perfect. That song, more than any other, just came out as a wall of sound, but it fit the joyous, frenzied, stomp of the song itself. These are some of my favorite lyrics.

“Doomed Generation” seems to have a deliberately 60's feel...I kept listening  to it and wondering why it felt familiar. Then I recalled these songs "It's My Life" by The Animals , and "Happening 10 Years Time Ago" by The Yardbirds.  It was also well thought to have the patriotic, rebellious "Red, White & Blues" follow it.

"Doomed Generation," did have a mildly psychedelic feel to it, but that wasn't by design. It's just where the song seemed to want to go. I think it's great that it reminded you of the Animals and the Yardbirds. I actually patterned it after a Warren Zevon song and made the death of Hunter S. Thompson, my favorite writer, the song's subject (Zevon once said in an interview that he wrote "Werewolves of London" in homage to Dr. Thompson). Red, White and Blues is a rip-snorter musically. Lyrically I tried to express some of the summer-of-2004 frustration over the presidential campaign.

"Helena" is also well done, almost a retelling of The Byrds "Mr. Spaceman" ..what are those sounds at the end?

 I think that's Domenick on slide guitar unless...are you suggesting...might we have been bugged by aliens? Better have Scully and Mulder take a listen.

There really is a “Kansas Romeo”? What prompted you to write about this subject? Sounds like drums were mic'd closer...vocals stronger on this than on the others.

The song is about Matthew Limon who at the time was serving a 17-year prison sentence in Kansas for having consensual sex with a 14-year-old boy when he was 18. He should have been protected under the state's "Romeo and Juliet" law, which draws a distinction between a 19-year-old having sex with a 15-year-old, and a 43-year-old having sex with a 15-year-old. But Limon was not protected under the law because the courts initially ruled that it only applied to heterosexual relationships. Had Limon's partner been female, his maximum sentence would've been a few months. Thankfully the Kansas Supreme court has since freed Limon, ruling that punishment for same-sex offenses cannot be more severe than different-sex offenses. But Limon did spend five years in prison, four-and-a-half more than he should have.

The subject matter of the song raised some eyebrows. The lyrics tell the whole story of Limon's ordeal. His dad was a cowboy, he was a second-generation American and he grew up in a small town on the prairie where he sang in the local church. His parents thought he was mentally challenged, so they sent him to a group home where he met the 14-year-old. When the boy asked Limon to stop touching him, Limon obliged, but the authorities were so freaked out because the encounter was homosexual that they chucked Limon away where all he did for years was pray that god would change him. This isn't the sort of thing that dudes in bands who like to dance around on stage like Aerosmith usually sing about. But it was a bastardization of justice and therefore worthy of bringing to people's attention.
A reviewer from the Village Voice just wrote to me and said he picked "Kansas Romeo" as one of his Top 10 Singles of 2006.

”For Crying Out Loud” is awesome....lovers of great americana rock guitar need to hear this one!

This song was written by a hero of mine, Keith Christopher of the Yayhoos, who in addition to being a good friend and hoot to hang out with has always been incredibly supportive of us. I first saw Keith jamming with the Bottle Rockets on the song "Stoned Faces Don't Lie" at Brownies in NYC in 2001. Later I met him at a Steve Earle solo show and he invited me to see his band the Yayhoos. When it did, it was all over. I was in love with the Yayhoos. They're everything that's great, cool, kick-ass and rapturous about rock n' roll. Keith showed me how to play "For Cryin' Out Loud" in its dropped-D tuning in his kitchen one day, and we used it to audition players when putting the band together. We recorded the song not only because it's so brilliant, but because I love singing it so much. Now that it's on our record, I get to sing it anytime I want. Whenever Keith's around he comes and plays it with us. He'll be at Lakeside tomorrow night.

Getting Eric Ambel to produce "Heathens Like Me" must have been a dream come true. What prompted the opportunity to get him for the album? Eric must have taken a real liking to your sound, as you cover one of his bandmates' own songs

Heh-heh, well you might've noticed my slight of hand there. Eric "Roscoe" Ambel didn't actually produce the record -- that was us along with Roscoe's engineer Greg Duffin -- but we did record it at his studio, and we brag about that fact every chance we get. Roscoe is our favorite producer and he's such an awesome guitar player that we try never to miss one of his gigs be it with the Yayhoos, Steve Earle, Mary Lee's Corvette, Tandy or his own group The Roscoe Trio.  Hopefully we'll have a bigger budget for our next record (our first was funded through an insurance payout after an 18-wheeler crunched the trunk of my 1999 two-door Chevy Cavalier on the New Jersey Turnpike and I asked myself, 'What do I want more in life, a record or a functioning trunk?') Our goal is to have Roscoe produce our next record, if he'd be willing, and you're right, it would be a dream come true.