They say, “You never forget your first love”.  I think this can also be said about the first bands that musicians play with.  I know this holds true in my case.  Scare Tactics was the first original band that I formed and played guitar for.  The last time the band played was around 1994, which as of writing this article makes it roughly 23 years ago.  Most people would probably say "let it go man" but it has always nagged me that so many riffs and songs that came out of that project have never had the chance to be completed or released. I think this type of music is where I do my best playing and it just felt like a total waste to abandon all of it.  Given the fact that I haven’t been playing in bands as much these days and who knows if I ever will again, I decided that it was finally time to try to get all of the old Scare Tactics material recorded and out there for people to hopefully enjoy.  At the very least, I had a lot of fun doing it!

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Initially, I wanted to see if I could get “the band back together” but that proved to be impossible with guys now in families, moved away, etc.  Then I wanted to see if I could get new people to form a band but that also proved to be a challenge. Most musicians do not necessarily want to join a band where they are just playing some guy’s material.

[NOTE: As of Oct 2017, a new lineup was formed for live shows!]

I was left with no real choice but to record everything myself.  And that is exactly what I ended up doing! I handled all of the drums, bass and guitar duties on this project. However, I cannot sing to save my life therefore I had to search for the correct person to handle the vocals.  As luck would have it, I happened to jam in a band where I met the perfect singer for this role.  Dee St. James agreed to help out on the project and in fact, he’s so damn close to the original Scare Tactics vocalist Mark Liebelt, its eerie!

I felt compelled to describe how I ended up back here so I wrote out the history of the band.  I didn't expect to write such a detailed memoir of bands I was in but as it turns out, Scare Tactics seems to have dictated many of my musical endeavors. Re-visiting the history was more for my own nostalgic satisfaction but it might prove to be interesting to some people. Most likely bore the shit out of many but whatever. It's pretty easy to just not click the history link, haha! I also tried to explain how each of these songs came about on the notes page.  Again, more of a trip down memory lane for myself but I actually like reading liner notes from other bands as well so what the hell. 

This is material that is almost 25 years old but hey,  it's FINALLY out there!

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-Mike