Virga

It all started back in 1982 when I was in the studio in LA with Stevie recording some preliminary tracks for Texas Flood. I had taken a break from recording to streach my legs and have a cigarette when I heard yelling from another studio room. I went in to take a look and found Geddy Lee hunched over a telephone with a look of distress on his face while Alex Lifeson argued vehemently with their manager. "Fuck it!" the manager screeched "As long as Mr. Peart can't play there is no album!" As I quickly gathered, they were on a deadline to finish Signals but, as luck would have it, Neil had injured his wrists earlier that day in a bizzar accident involving bi-penal surgery and thirteen Thai hookers. Things looked pretty bad in there so I began to slink out, but before I could make it out the door Geddy spotted me. "Yo Nate" he said "You wouldent happen to know anyone who can play drumz like a motherfuckin demon would you?" Well, I was about to shake my head and continue my slink out the door but it just so happened that I had met a dood named Mikey the week before through my buddy Ronnie Padavona who played in such a fashion. So I told Geddy to hold on while I gave Ronnie a call. "Yo Ronnie" I said "Remember that guy Mikey you introduced me to last week?" "You mean the dood that plays drumz like a coked-out Leviathan?" he responded, "Ya" I said "Gimme his number." So I called him up and asked him down to the studio. By the time he showed up half an hour later Geddy and Alex were already sceptical. "Who the fuck is this guy Nate?" they said "We've never heard of him before and we sure as hell don't trust Ronnie!" "Trust me" I said "I've seen him play". So, to make a long story short, Mikey showed up blew all our minds and Signals was finished before the deadline. In the aftermath though Mikey and I started jamming for shits a giggles on weekends and pretty soon we had a good thing going. Right around that time, Ronnie called Mikey and I in for a secret Vegas Kings renunion tour in Europe with him and Billy de Wolf. After a successful run through Norway and Sweden we preparing to leave for Finland when things started falling apart. Mikey and I had gotten into a fight on a train in Sweden over whether a particle violating the principles of classical mechanics by penetrating or passing through a potential barrier or impedance higher than the kinetic energy of the particle would create the nanoscopic phenomenon known as quantum tunneling. Anyway the argumet had picked back up and this time it escalated to a fist fight. That night the tour broke up. Ronnie and Billy headed back to the states, Mikey went to India for spiritual clensing and I in my anger ran off into the night leaving my bags, passport and money behind. Waking the next day lost and alone without money or any way to contact my friends my only hope was to hitchhike east to the Russian boarder and spirit myself across. Once there I traveled south with what money I had untill I hooked up with a frendly squad of Chechen rebels fighting the oppression of Russian federal control. Sadly, after fighting at their side like a brother for several years we where forced to disband when Russia regained control after the Second Chechen War. Wandering aimlessly for many weeks I eventually made it to Grozny and got a room in a cheep hotel. After settling in I decided to go out and get something to eat at a cafe I had spotted down the street. I walked down to it, took a seat and hailed what looked to be the only waiter, a skinny fellow sporting blond dreads and a full beard. To my suprise he ran over to the table looked down at me with a smile on his face and said "Nate, is that you?" Low and behold it was Mikey. It turns out that after studying with a great Maharishi for several months he realized that he hated peace almost as much as he hated wisdom. So he joined an Afghani black metal project touring in the area after he slaughtered their previous drummer with two broken drum sticks and began working his way up the continent eventually ending up in Chechnya after most of the band was slain during a particularly brutal concert in Gronzy and had been living there ever since. After trading stories and much heated discussion we decided to move back to the states with the money Mikey had saved up and get the old band back together. So we moved back, settled in the only shithole suckier than Chechnya, and decided to record all the songs we wrote while in Chechnya. We hope you enjoy them.