So I called him up.

Jerome Augustinyak, drummer for 10,000 Maniacs.

I was in my band, The Stains, not doing too well in school, trying to finish up.

I was actually contemplating going out with these two brothers that I knew from East Aurora who were going to play Van Halen covers in roadhouses and drive across the country in a converted step van.

And John and Dennis actually called me three or four different times, and I was hemming and hawing.

Uh, he'd been playing drums since he was a young teenager, and so he said yes.

And then they started talking about, "Well, we'd like to record a record and take this on the road," which [laughs] in, in a way is what I was trying to do with the, uh, the covers band, you know, the, The Brothers from East Aurora.

I was, I was basically trying to, like, get out of my life and, you know, do something.