Right.

Yeah.

And so I never, I, well, at one point there I was in about 96 and thinking like, all right, everybody's kind of left.

I'm the last man standing at that point.

Everybody else said, fuck this, I'm going home.

And so here I am thinking like, what else should I do? Should I really have started a whole new band and try to play on a lower level or try to bring it back up? And I felt like, nah, maybe it's time to try something completely different.

And photography has always been a huge interest of mine all through the years.

right?

So tell us, where did you start? What got the ball rolling on putting this together?

Well, I gotta go back a few years.

I mean, traditionally I've always shied away from doing anniversary tours and anniversary this and anniversary that, just because we have so many occasions and I always felt like our time would be better spent making new albums rather than sort of revisiting the past.

At the same time, a 50-year anniversary is a huge thing and it only happens once in our career.

So we thought, you know, we need to do something special here.

And the idea started rather small and just sort of grew and grew and grew and more and more people signed up.

And to my big surprise, everybody said yes when we asked, hey, would you be interested in revisiting one of those early songs? Because, I mean, so many musicians have told me over the years that they listened to Accept and Fast as a Shark and, you know, Restless and Wild, these early albums in the 80s.

But at this stage, do you try to be more present in the moment or start to realize the gravity of what came before and what it means to a fan base and its place in music history?

So why did you choose that particular song to represent the current version?

I tell you why, because I always felt like that album has a very different place in our discography because it was recorded with David Reese and we wanted to have a change of styles at that point in our career.

And it all didn't really work out for many reasons, but I always felt the core material of that album was really strong.

And I was very curious to see what it would sound like if we take one of those songs and produce it the way we think it should have been produced back then.

You know, for various reasons, it didn't really turn out the way we would do it nowadays.

You know, so I thought, well, the material is strong, so let's pick at least one from this album.

And there could have been some others.

There's a thousand questions I can ask you about this, but the one I want to know most is like over the course of that 50 years, what are the biggest things you've learned about yourself and your music?

How did you go through your Rolodex and decide who fit what song? And were there people that you could have gotten, maybe didn't work out for schedule reasons? Like, how did you come to these guys?

Well, it grew from, I mean, of course, having been in the business for some time, you have a number of phone numbers and people that you've worked with before, like Phil Anselmo had jumped on stage with us one time years ago at a festival in Europe.

So I knew he had told me that he's an Accept fan and I've heard from many other people along the way kind of a similar version of the same story again and again, that when they listened to Fast as a Shark or the album Restless and Wild, you know, it inspired them to become musicians.

And a lot of people say Fast as a Shark was the first speed metal song in history.

And the whole speed metal genre was kind of... based on it to a certain degree.

So that's something that you know or that I knew, but I had no idea how many people would actually be okay with re-recording some of these songs together with us.

And that really surprised the hell out of me that hardly nobody said, No.

Do you think back? Do you still feel like, in many ways, that 16-year-old kid? And how did your parents react? I don't know.

I

mean, just imagine you're like a bunch of 15, 16, 17 year olds getting together, have this great idea.

Maybe we can have a band.

Maybe we can have some gigs.

Maybe one day we can make a little money and support ourselves.

And wouldn't it be amazing if we maybe one day go to other countries? But essentially, you have no idea how to do that and what it really means, you know, until one day you start doing it and then you realize, oh...

It's a little different from what I had thought maybe and for some guys it was just too much and some guys just sort of had different interests all of a sudden and touring became too much and everybody had their own reason why one, you know, people dropped off after a while and...

So if you could go back to that 16-year-old boy, what piece of advice would you give him about the journey?