Ep 194 The Artist Formally Known As Vince

The Artist Formally Known as Vince Band (or TAFKAVince Band for short) formed in 1996 and began playing out regularly upon the release of 2002's At Last CD. Other notable releases include 2007's Welcome To The Show, the 2011 vinyl release On Display, and the singles "NYC" and "Luck," which were released in 2014 and 2016, respectively.
The band plays a heady mix of glam, punk, and rock n' roll and has built a reputation as a fierce live act who have graced stages at the Empty Bottle, Beat Kitchen, Liar's Club, Subterranean, Reggie's, The Hideout, and Double Door in their hometown of Chicago and have performed at the esteemed venues Berlin (NYC), Plain Dealer Pavilion (Cleveland) and Slash Run (Washington DC) while on tour.
We were fortunate to slow them down a bit to see what's coming up for them.

Transcript

Coming to you from the studios at the Illinois Rock and Roll Museum on Route 66, it's the Rock and Roll Chicago Podcast. Hey everybody, it's Ray the Roadie. And this is Hollywood Mike on a lovely July evening.

Yes, a lovely July evening. Yes. Very warm.

No rain. Yeah, yeah. No rain, no nothing.

The sun's shining. I was in the pool earlier. Yeah, were you really? Yeah.

Yeah, you have a pool. I do. I've never been invited to his pool.

No. Well, no, I don't know. He has to work on that.

That's right. You know, yeah, maybe I'll think about it. I'll wear my assless chaps if you do.

Oh, Jesus. Now, no, no, no. You can actually sit in my giant swan, my blow up swan that floats around.

Oh, okay. No, I don't have a swan. No.

No swan. So what else is up? Not much on this end over here. No.

I'm just living the dream. I hear you. Enjoying life.

How about you? Living the dream as always. You know, always looking forward to another podcast. Yeah, me too.

Yeah. Do we have one? We have one as a matter of fact. Yeah.

We've got Vince here. He's with the artist formerly known as Vince Band. Oh, the artist formerly known as Vince Band.

Yes. So there was the band called Vince. It's well, it's based.

I'm still formally Vince. Formerly Vince. So I'm still Vince.

Perfect. So how you doing, man? Doing all right. Good.

You came from Chicago? Yep. Yeah. You've been a Chicago native born and raised? Born, grew up in the suburbs mostly.

And then back in the city after that. Gotcha. Okay.

All right. So what kind of stuff you do? It fluctuates. The band is kind of glam punk.

And then outside I do a kind of folky Americana thing also. So it keeps me busy. All right.

Places for all my music. So take us on the journey. Tell us where it all began, where it all started for you.

That's a good question. As this, as the artist formerly known as Vince, it started in the mid nineties. Some good friends of mine, it was my brother and one of my best friends started a band called Bitter Boy.

And I was kind of hanging back and recording demos for them and doing their live sound and booking them and being their manager and a million other things that I didn't really know how to do, but kind of knew how to do to be involved because they had the band set. And then one of their first shows, they're like, finally booked a club show. And they're like, you should open for us solo.

Because I was doing a lot of solo shows at the time. And we just, I'm like, okay, I'm like, but I just don't want to be my name. Okay.

So, and it was right around that time that Prince was going by formerly, same period he was talking, they were all calling him formerly and my name is Vince and it rhymes. So we called it that, put it on a poster and then that show never happened. The club, the club closed down before they can have this show.

And then the next thing they had booked, I wasn't on. And I don't know if I have a poster somewhere and I don't know if the poster might be formerly, but somewhere I got clever and changed it to formally, so that I would still be Vince. Ah, gotcha.

And it was, it was a joke, but not a joke because I love Prince. Yet it was funny and I like to have a sense of humor and then stuck. I made a tape and started passing it around to friends to try and get gigs and to try and get people interested in the rock part of it.

Cause at one side was all my folky stuff and the other side was my rock stuff that I recorded all myself. Right. But I wanted to get a band.

So it was a good way to have something to say to people. You can look, you can listen to this and I can either get a gig solo or I can give to people to try and build a band. And the name just kind of stuck.

Right. Right. My friends all picked up on it and I started playing some gigs around solo and here I am 30 years later.

That's pretty cool. So, so there isn't the band anymore. There is.

There is. I just go back and forth. Um, like I'm always with the band yet.

I'm always writing music here and there. And sometimes we all get busy cause everyone's in other bands too and works and we're adults and it gets busy. So like if we have a couple of months where I can't seem to hook up with everybody, if I can make some calls and someone's like, yeah, we got room to put you out alone.

I'll go play alone and play my other stuff. And then, you know, and when, and when the band does get together, it is officially called the band formerly known or the artist formerly known as Vince Band. Or the shortening of Tefka, Vince Band with the initial try and which is still confusing.

Everything I do is confusing. Um, but it's, it's all based around me, but the band is a band. It's like five of us and everyone does their part.

It's not like I'm, again, I'm not Prince recording everything. I need them cause they're all better at what they do than me. I just bring the songs and lead it and they come in, make it sound amazing.

Speaker 2 There's very few people that are like Prince or Royal Prince. He, he literally could do it all. He, he is definitely one of maybe my favorite artists.

I mean, he was just spectacular. Could do everything. He, you know, he even, he even did country music, you know, not that he made it popular or anything like that, but he did and he could, it was incredible.

He could do anything. And one of the best shows I ever saw him was a super bowl program in the rain. That was phenomenal.

I mean, he didn't run away. He just stayed right in it. You can't script that.

Nope. You know, rain starts coming down. Nope.

I'm staying right here. Tell the lighting guy to put some purple. I mean, how perfect is that? That was awesome.

Everything worked out for him. I actually saw him three times in concert. And the last time I saw him, I can't remember the year it was, I was, wasn't too far removed from high school, but it was one of the first performances where he would send his band backstage and he just played acoustic guitar for about 30 minutes.

That was, that was just amazing. I mean, to this day, I actually cover Little Red Corvette the way he played it acoustically. And then in the bands that I was in, I said, look, this is the way Prince does this as an acoustic solo performance.

Let's see if we can translate this with the full band. So it's a full band playing Little Red Corvette, but it doesn't quite sound, you know, the way, but interesting. Yeah.

Interesting. Yeah. No, I love the name.

I love the name of the band and everything that you have going on. When I first heard, I was thinking back to the Will and Grace show where they had that character and he had his own one man show called Just Jack. So when did you get the, so when did you first get the music buzz? How old were you and how long have you been doing this? As a kid, my family loved music.

I listened to records all the time. We got a piano. I took piano lessons as a kid.

Then I decided I wanted to play baseball because I was 10 years old. Right. You know, gave up piano.

And then in high school, I messed around on guitar because my neighbor played guitar. It was one of my best friends. He started showing me things and I started taking piano lessons again.

Then I went off to college and took a piano class and took a classical guitar class and brought a guitar with me to college. So I started getting a little more and then picking up lessons here and there. And that's when it really, I mean, it was always there, but it really hit in college.

Right. Like I was hanging out with people. I was in theater school, but I loved a bunch of the guys played guitar.

So we're going to hang out and jam and they'd teach me things. And then I was doing a play that I put together with somebody adapted from a book and it was going to have songs. So I had to learn, figure out what songs I wanted to put into it.

And so I was learning songs. And then that's when I wrote my first song because there was like a section, I had a song I wanted to do, and it was just too hard for my skills at the time. And so I wrote a song and I don't know if we ever ended up using it in the play, but it was like, Oh, that's how you write a song.

I just kind of figured it out. I don't know, you know, how to do it. But I was like, nice from this, sing this.

Okay. It's a song. And I started writing songs and that's when it kind of twisted into, I think I want to do this as much as I want to do theater.

So I started playing some gigs down in college, like guitar teacher used to occasionally on a Sunday night, have a little show and he'd let some students come up and play a couple of songs. And that kind of put me on stage as a musician, as opposed to being an actor. And so then once I got out of college, I was back in Chicago acting, but again, I was going out and playing open stage and I was hanging out with some, you know, when my friend's bands were just hanging and kind of being bands, but not really, but they'd be like, let's get together and jam Friday night and have some drinks.

Okay. And I'd go play with them. So I got to get some experience and then kept writing songs and then started trying to get bands together.

So where was college? College was Illinois state. Okay. Oh, okay.

Loomington. Both my kids are there. My brother's recording studio in Bloomington.

Now he ended up moving there to take over a front of our studio. The guy I knew from there that he ended up meeting and we were down there recording with the band that I was doing the demos for and sound for and all that. And then he's like, when do you guys want to come run my studio? I don't have time to run it all the time.

And I'm like, I am not moving back here. I want to be there. My brother's like, I could do that.

So my brother moved down there and he has a recording studio. I do a lot of my records with the band there. Some of my solo stuff I've done with him and the rest of my soul stuff.

I tend to just do alone at home. Right. Right.

I see you got a new album out. Yes. Last year we put out an album called a problematic opera that we recorded in Bloomington at my brother's place over a couple of years.

And then over a couple of years of pandemic of not finishing it because of the circumstance we were all in. Right. And then eventually, yeah, we got back in to mix it with him.

And then after that, I spent a little time trying to see if someone would put it out for me and figuring out what we wanted to call it and do the art. We had ideas, but they kind of had to come together. And then we last year finally got it pressed and out to the world and we went out doing shows around that.

Nice. You write all the songs for that? Yes. So basically what was the impetus for the album? We were at a time we had done a single in like, I don't know, 2016, maybe 17.

We had gone to New York and recorded a single there, like a seven inch, two songs on it, a third song that we put online. And we hit like 19 and I'm like, I got a bunch of songs. I'm like, we should get in a studio.

So two or three of them we had started doing live. So we already had that kind of in place, pretty much how we want to play them, or at least how we're going to do them live, let alone, you know, you change it up in the studio a little bit. And I had a bunch of other songs, but I had three other ones that I thought hung together with those where I just kind of got this vision.

I'm like these six songs and we'll do it on 10 inch vinyl. So it's three songs aside, because I like the format of 10 inch where it's like, it's not a single. To me, it's a record.

It's like, it's cohesive. And I wanted these six together and knew what order I wanted them in and what I wanted to do with it. So it's an album, but people call it an EP because it's not as long.

But I knew what I wanted and I wanted to do, I like 10 inch records, they're fun, you know, and they're odd. So I'm like, let's do these six. I'm like this, let's learn these other three and get in there and do it.

So we spent like a couple of years doing it just a couple of years means time. It doesn't mean in the studio, right? In the studio, it's a week and a half worth of time over a couple of years. Again, we drove to Bloomington for a weekend.

A year later, we drove to Bloomington again for a weekend. Later that year, me and Lauren, who's the other singer in the band, drove down to finish vocals. And like I said, then three months later when we were supposed to mix, the world shut down.

So we didn't actually get it mixed. And then we, my brother mixed it. And then we said, let's all meet and tweak it together.

Did that and finally got it together. You know, an amazing thing happened over COVID because I have, I have a, I've quite a few friends that are session players. Ever since COVID, they have not gone back into a studio.

Once I'm talking about guys that are doing something every single week for some artist somewhere and just doing it at home. Yep. Send them, send them an email.

Here's the, here's the track. Put your track down there. Email it back to us.

I mean, no, it's studios or studios are just completely virtual nowadays. Yeah. A lot of it is digital.

That's a set. My brother has a studio, but he also started doing that because he's a professional drummer also. Right.

And so when that shut down, he had already was kind of doing that, but he set himself up with a business and a website. And not only does he run a studio, but he also records drums for people all over the country who find him and say, I got this song. It's like, it's this much that like, okay.

It's like, and you get a completely professional quality studio because he owns a studio and he's a great drummer. So he does that. I'm making a record right now in my house.

I started a couple of years. I started in COVID probably, you know, everyone did. I made BP right at the beginning of COVID at home, put that out.

And then I had a bunch of other songs or a bunch more. So I started recording. And at first it was like, oh, okay.

I'll do some kind of folky and where I can just play guitar and maybe a little keyboards on it and little extras. And then I started expanding. I was just like, we got to a point where I was out and about seeing people and I'm just, I started asking friends to play on it.

Right. And nine out of 10 friends that are playing on it have recorded their tracks at home. Oh yeah.

Right. You know, you know, my brother's on one track, but most other people, buddy of mine just sent me something today and he's got a home studio and we've done a couple of songs there in the past with him, a couple of singles with him. And I did a solo single with him and he's real helpful to me just because good friend and he knows a lot and he's close so we can go hang out and talk about things.

But yeah, almost everyone on the record has done it in their home studio other than a drummer friend of mine who's now in the band. But I asked him before we asked him to be in the band. Uh, we went out to my friend Tony's studio in the suburbs of Chicago and I, my brother with my friend, uh, he's the only one who hasn't recorded his own track.

Okay. You know, it was like me and him with my buddy at his own studio, everyone else. I'm just like, send me something.

I'm like, can you do this? Like, yeah, I can record at home. I'm like, yeah, I'm like this one, you know, I want you to play guitar. I want you to play bass.

I want you to play keyboards. Yeah. Send it to me.

We'll talk about it. If it needs to be revised, you do it. So I'm in the process of making a record like that right now while still doing band stuff and hoping to start teaching new songs to the band so we can get in the studio later this year.

Yeah. So it's always kind of ping pong back and forth and it's, it's, it's a little unfocused, but focused, but you're busy though. So that's good.

Everything you do is all original for the most part. I mean, we do a couple of covers live. I didn't like Lauren who sings in the band with me.

She and I years ago had a duet. Then we stopped for a few years. She got busy and had some things going on, even though we were still doing the band, but we kind of stopped going out the two of us a couple of years ago.

We kind of refreshed that again. And that is like half covers just because like years ago where she met some woman who owns a bar in Galena and she's like, she invited us to come out and play. I'm like, okay, cool.

And then like three weeks before she's like, Oh, by the way, she just called me. We got to do three sets. I'm like, we don't have three sets.

I'm like, we don't have that many songs. We're going to play proud Mary 12 times. So we ended up learning like, you know, 20 covers to make sure we can cover three sets, mixing with our own songs.

And so we do a lot just, she and I, when we play shows, we end up playing a lot of things where they're like, we come in and play a couple of sets. So we mix it up between our songs and covers, but the band really, other than the record we did in 2007, we did a New York dolls cover on it. That's the only cover we've ever recorded.

Wow. I don't think I've ever heard anybody say we do a New York dolls cover before. Wow.

That'd be a hell of a tribute band. We've toyed with it. And then we did, we did, we did one other cover.

We did a Tom Petty song for Tom Petty tribute record. But other than that, everything we record is live and the bulk of our show is my songs. Right, right.

So you made the transition when you were in college, you were a theater major at ICU. And then you just kind of made the whole transition over into music. I mean, are you more of a musician than, than theater nowadays? Yeah.

At this point, like by the mid nineties, when I was developing this name and trying to put a band together, the theater company I was with was fading. And we eventually called it a day because there's no money in it and we were broke and all the, all the things that always happen with us. And at that point I was playing a lot of music.

Like I was playing solo, I was recording stuff at home. Um, we had had a band at the theater. I had been part of a musical and I wasn't in initially, but then they started doing shows that were not the theater, the theater piece music.

It was the singer songwriters stuff. And I was a guest on that at some point. He's like, would you just be the bass player with the bass player left town? And you've already played bass on a couple of songs.

Cause that's, and so I became a bass player at that point because I'm a guitar player, but he's like, you play bass on a couple songs. You want to do this all the time with us? I'm like, yes. It's funny how that works.

Yeah. Especially when you're getting paid to do it. Did that for a few years.

And as the theater company faded, we did that for a little bit and that faded away. And at that point I just went all music. Yeah.

Right. Well, I have an idea as to what I think you're going to sound like, but no, because only because, well, there's a, there's a young man by the name of Justin Watt. Justin, if you're listening, shout out who plays in my band on occasion.

And, uh, he's very heavily involved in theater, media arts and the whole bit. In fact, he just, um, they shut down his major at the university of Nebraska and he's now attending, he's going to be starting ISU this, this, and this coming fall. So, and he plays in my band, um, on occasion and he's got a very distinct sound when he writes a song in the home because he's got this kind of theater influence in everything that he does.

I have an, I have an idea. It comes out and that's, that's why the band is a glam rock band. I mean, I grew up with that stuff in the seventies, like I'm just old.

I like, I missed it as a being able to go see the early seventies glam rock. Right. But I have a distinct memory.

Like I said, came to music because my parents like music a lot and they have wide variety of tastes and somewhere there's a box of 45s at my parents' house that I'd need to find that I used to play on my little record player and the Beatles were in there that I always remember. I want to hold your hand and sweet ballroom blitz. Oh yeah.

I don't know where that came into my parents' collection. Again, they have very taste, but I didn't know where that one showed up. But there's a 45 of that buried at my parents' house that I remember as a kid.

And I think it was on the radio a little bit at the time. Um, you know, cause it was like 72, 73. So I was like seven years old maybe, but I always remember that song.

So I've always, and David Bowie being on the radio always hit me. So once I got into playing in bands, I always wanted it to have some presentation about it. And again, I went to theater school, so there's a thing there where you want to perform and dress up and put on a show.

So when I really kind of got going with under this name, I'm like, when I put this together, it's going to be glam rock, but in the seventies vein, not the eighties LA thing. It's the New York and the English flashy theatrical. Well, I think it's time to hear.

I think it's time. So let him get his stuff together and we'll be right back. You're listening to the rock and roll Chicago podcast.

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Here's Vince. Your situation What is there to fear? It should be obvious. But now you see it.

No one ever tells you you have all that you need. Looking to find some truth. You'll never know how easy it was all handed to you.

True. You'll never know how easy it was all handed to you when it was all handed to you. All right.

I'm hearing a lot of David Bowie in there. David Bowie and shades of Elvis Costello. Yeah, exactly.

I got the Elvis Costello. Yeah, I got that too. Yeah.

Before before I got the Bowie. Yeah. So we nailed it, right? We nailed it.

We got it. You're on it. You're on it.

And we advance to the next round. Yeah. Yeah.

We've done this enough where I think we can start to pick out the influences. That's right. A little bit.

Oh, yeah. No, I like that. Let me guess.

I don't think you wrote that recently. Couple of well, it's on the last record. That was a single from the problematic opera.

So and again, we started that one and probably we started recording in like 2017, 2018. Okay. So I wrote it around then.

Okay. It's a few years old, but I was listening to the flipping through magazine pages. And do they even sell magazines? Yeah.

I mean, but then again, yeah, that is a dated thing. But that just shows that I'm old. But yeah, I'm right there with you.

I'm an old man who still reads magazines. So do I. I'm a newspaper guy. I got to hold that paper in my hand.

I prefer to hold stuff, you know, so there's certain references I'm finding over the years now. There's things I bring into songs that I'm sure are not going to be brought in by someone under 30 or 40 even because I'm of a certain age and I remember certain things that some people are like, what are you talking about? Yeah. You can always rerecord it and remix it and, you know, turning the pages on my iPad.

Yeah. I like to stay old. I'm good with the old.

There's a ton of songs out there, you know, like putting a dime in the phone booth phone, you know, it's stuff like that. I mean, it's really dated, but yeah, no, it's, but it's fun. Like I have a song like from a solo record I did a few years ago where it's an acoustic record.

And one of the lines is about pay phone call, collect, pick, collect, call, pay phone calls. Like it's about a girl running away and calling her father that way. And it's one of my favorite things I've written.

And the line is really good, but I'm sure there are younger people listen to it and go, what's he talking about? Collect, call, collect. And what's a pay phone? Where have you seen a pay phone? Yeah, exactly. They're like, what is that? Because it says collect, call, pay phone advice.

If you do see a pay phone and pick it up though, they will still have dial tones. I'm sure they will. Once in a while you see them.

I haven't, I don't know where they are. I don't, I cannot remember. I can't remember seeing one at Disney world when I was there last year and I was like, wow, it's still a pay phone.

They still have them at old gas stations, like gas stations that have been there for years and years and years. Cause it's actually more expensive for them to, you know, they used to have them like right on the curb or over by the, over by the air. Right.

It's more expensive for them to rip that out than it is you guys leave it there. Just leave it there. Sometimes you just pull the phone off and leave it to stand there.

I remember traveling back in the day and when you'd get to where you were at, you'd call back home and you'd call collect and they'd say, Oh, there's a call here. And they'd say, would you accept charges? They'd just say no. So they knew you were safe.

I used to do that in college. I went to college in the eighties. There was no cell phone.

You know, I was in a dorm where I couldn't, you had to call out and use a, you know, phone card to make long distance AT&T phone call Chicago. So I'd either go to a pay phone or have to have that kind of number. And at the end that's fading away.

Like I, I work with children in high school and like, when I mentioned things like this, like, what are you talking about? Or they see it in a movie, we show them and they're like, what is that thing? Like payphone. Yeah. When I was, when I was a kid, we didn't even make long distance calls cause it was way too expensive.

Oh yeah. No way. Yeah.

We used to, my parents and I used to have a code where I would call and, you know, will you accept the, you know, the collect call and they just say no. And they'd hang up. That means, okay, I got to go pick him up.

He's at the mall that we had a code. That's what we did. That's what we did.

And then you'd call your friends, make plans, meet you at seven. And that was it. You didn't hear from him again until seven o'clock.

Yeah. Or there was that one time where it was. Yes, we have a collect call from Iroquois County jail.

Yeah. That one, you kind of got to think about it. Sorry, mom and dad.

Yeah. That wasn't my fault. It wasn't.

So no, interesting. I, that's a, no, I, I enjoyed that song. I was listening to a lot of references that, uh, yeah, that's old people like us recognized right away.

So that was pretty good. That was pretty good. What was the premise of that song there then? Just, um, honestly, I don't know, like songs come and go.

I probably wrote down the line flipping through magazine pages one day. Cause that's what I do. I just write a lot of lines down things that come to my head.

They're either type them into my phone or into my songbook that I write in my journal. And then when I have the urge to write something, I start finding lines to base it around. Or once in a while, it's like I sing something in my head and I'm like, Oh, give me a guitar.

Cause I just sang this, this idea came to my mind. So somewhere along the lines, I probably wrote down flipping through magazine pages. Yeah.

Right. And then either grabbing a guitar that day or later when I was grabbing a guitar to write one day, I'm like, well, that was a pretty good line. What can I do with that? Yeah.

And are you a lyrics first guy or melody? Um, or just what kind of all at once. It's like, like I said, I'm writing down a lot of words that maybe don't have a melody to start with, but they're like, I think it's a good line that I'm like, I'm making a chorus or that would start the song off and give me a direction of what the story is going to be. And then I write it or I'm sitting with a guitar and I'm like, uh, flipping around and I pick out a couple of things.

I'm like, uh, you know, comes to me and I'm like, what lines would go with that? And then I start throwing it all together at that point. So it's like the little of both and every song is a little different. Like my approach is a little different, but it's in the end, it all kind of comes together at once, but it starts either with a line of words or I have a basic melodic idea.

And then I look for some words to go with that and I maybe already have, or I think it sounds like whatever, for whatever reason, I play two chords and I'm like, this sounds like a song about a car, you know, whatever may be pops into my head. And that's where I start running with it and whether it stays there or goes off in another direction and I lose the main idea and it becomes something else. I just run with it and refine it from there.

Right, right. And sometimes you don't have a story. It's literally just a few words that you have and it happens and it becomes whatever it was.

No, I enjoyed that because that, that, that song sounded to me like you were sitting across the table to a much younger person, basically saying, look, you don't know how good you have it kid. That's kind of what that song was. I'm sure some of that was there when I was thinking, you know, it's again, I kind of let it flow and let everyone interpret, but I'm sure there's some of that.

Cause again, I know younger people, I work with younger people. Sometimes I am saying you got it pretty easy. Yeah.

Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah.

You should take advantage of how easy you have and expand on that. Cause it's going to be good for you if you just run with it. Yeah.

The simple fact that I had to do my research for, you know, a term paper by flipping through magazines and all you have to do is go, Hey Siri. Yeah. Yeah.

You know, I had a look in the encyclopedia, go to the library or microfiche. Yeah. You know, having two kids in college, watching them write papers, you know, it's just, it just absolutely kills me.

They're writing a 10 page paper on something that they don't know anything about. And all they do is, Hey Siri, tell me about this. And Siri comes back with, here's all the info you need.

And now we have AI. You could probably go to the AI thing and say, write me a 10 page paper about, you know, that's a, you know, that, that's a song idea right there. Yeah.

For today's stuff, man. Yeah. Yeah.

It's kind of weird. So, so tell us a little bit about the band. I mean, is your basic two guitars, bass and drums, or you got any oddball instruments in there like a glockenspiel or something like that? Oddball other than Lauren, who's the other singer in the band.

We are both lead singers. I play guitar most of the songs, but I got a bunch. I can let go of it and let the other three guys handle it.

But Lauren and I are like co-lead singers. You know, we sing together a lot or in certain songs. I need to write some more like this, where we go back and forth.

Like she does line. I do a line. She does line.

I do a line. And I write a lot specifically for her and good. Once she and I, we've been seen playing together for, I figured out like 22 years now.

Wow. Well, like we started singing together in 2002 and a few months later, I brought her into the, we were doing the acoustic thing. And then I brought her into the band because I'd lost a bass player.

I had a female bass player who sang backup and it was awesome. And she was busy and went on her way. And I missed having that vocal and no, you know, the guitar player was not that I had at time.

It was an amazing guitar player, a really good friend of mine, but he was not really a singer. So he wasn't picking up on that. And as I was getting people in and out of the band, solidify who the band was going to be.

And it was always rotating. Like, would you come sing in the rock band too? Cause your voice is so good with mine and you make me sound so much better. And she's like, yeah, let's do it.

And at that point I started focusing on writing for the two of us. Again, I write a lot of different things. So sometimes like, that's why I do these solo records and stuff that doesn't fit with the band might fit with me and her might not.

So I can go off and do that. But I also can write specifically from her perspective or perspective, I think is kind of both of ours, you know, and she says things to me that sometimes spark a song and she's written lyrics to a few songs, more, more of our duet stuff, but a couple of rock songs with me. But once in a while she'll say something that I think it's funny or interesting and I can kind of run from there and I know how she thinks I can kind of write something that is about both of us or relates to both of us or is our perspective collectively.

Cause we're pretty much on the same page with most things. So yeah, so the two of us fronted and then guitar, bass and drums around us. And how long has this band been cohesively together now? And that's the thing.

It's always cohesive and never cohesive. She came in 2002, a couple of years later, I got a drummer, Brian, who's one of my best friends. He's on the record, but at the beginning of 2020, as the world was shutting down, he moved to Nashville.

Oh wow. Okay. Yeah.

He was like, I'm tired. That did happen a lot during there too. A lot of people I know, he was planning it before that happened.

Like literally he's like, I'm going to leave like six months before finally in February, they got an offer on their condo in Chicago and they're like, we're going to Nashville. And I honestly said goodbye to him the weekend, the world shut down. I had to work that night.

We're going to music venue in Chicago and I was bartending at it. He was going out to a show. They had closed down their house on Friday.

And on Sunday morning, they were driving to Nashville. When I got off work, I met him at a late night bar, him and his wife and our bass player who works with me, met us over there. And we had drinks with them and they went and crashed in a hotel and drove to Nashville the next day.

Wow. Wow. So he was with me the longest after Lauren, a couple of years later, Chris, my bass player came along, met him.

We worked together. He had just moved to Chicago, got a job where I was working, realized he played bass. I put band in.

He's like, I just moved to Chicago. I'm not going to be in a band. Perfect.

Perfect. Yeah. So he came over one night and jammed with us.

Don't suck. Brought his roommate, a guitar player who played with us for a couple of years or a year then left for a while. Then I let him come back for a while and then he stopped being in the band.

It didn't work out. So Chris has been a long time. And then around the time we were making a record, made a record in say 2010 and came out late 2011.

And as we were making that, we didn't have a lead guitar player, but the four of us, Chris and Brian and Lauren and I had a bunch of songs. We were working them up. So I'm like, let's just go in the studio.

We'll lay down what we do. We'll have some friends play lead guitar. And that's what we did.

I got a buddy of mine out in New York, who's now also in Nashville, went to New York and recorded him on a bunch of songs. And then I asked V, who is now our lead guitar player, like, we come play guitar on a song. Actually, I said, we come play keyboards on a couple of songs because he also plays keyboards and he and Chris and I were in another band together at the same time.

So I knew what he can do. And I'm like, come play keyboards on my record. We'll go down for a day.

I got these two or three songs I think would be cool to have keyboards on and you're really good at that. And he's like, yeah. And then he ended up playing one song on guitar that I hadn't finished with my buddy in New York.

And then he started playing shows with us on keyboards. So we had an extra person for a while. We had a keyboard player on top of the two guitar, bass, drums, two singer thing.

And when the other guitar player started flaking and he may not want to be in the band anymore, we went out without him and did a show or two with the mostly on keyboards and the one guitar song he knew. And then one day he walked in and just said, I know everything on guitar. Let's not find a guitar player.

Let's just do this. I'm like, okay. Cause he's a great guitar player.

So that version of the band has been together since 2012, except we lost the drummer at the beginning of 20. So since then, my buddy, Jason, who's old school, Chicago, rock guy around town, pickup gig plays every night of the week, started playing with us to help us out. And when we lost another sub and he's been with us ever since.

And another buddy of mine, Ryan subs in when he can't. So the drums a little rotating right now, but I get two really great people that are old friends who are both amazing and bring something to it. And then the four of us have been together since 2012.

Nice. Nice. How often do you guys play? Try and play every month.

And then some, okay. Depends like, you know, we're playing in April. We have nothing scheduled past that.

We're looking at dates to see if we got to the East coast this summer and play a few shows. Cause we haven't done that in a while. Right.

Right. We used to go to the East coast every year for like a long weekend and go play New York city and a couple of things in between. And we haven't since like maybe 18.

Cause I was like, let's get this record done. And then we'll go to New York with the new record. And then again, things got delayed.

So we're looking to maybe go out to the East coast this summer and do a few dates and then play some shows around Chicago and wherever else in the Midwest that we can hook up that when we're free. Cause again, as you get older, it gets harder. Like we're not making enough money that this is our job.

Right. And of course, you know, so it's like, who's free this weekend if I can get us a gig, you know, we can, if we get them early enough offer, whoever makes the time and readjust their schedule. But things like going out of town, we really have to go once a week, everyone knows they're free.

And then I started making the phone calls and the emails and the, can you get us in, can you get us in and then find a place that'll allow you to go in there and play original music all night long. Cause that's always a challenge in the city of Chicago. There's enough places in Chicago that we're regulars at that we don't have a huge problem other than the scheduling issue and that they have, you know, hundreds of bands that want to play there.

Luckily we have a couple that are strongholds for us. And you know, we're at this point, we're friends of the club and they help us out. And then other clubs that pick us up here and there.

And then the traveling thing, I just, you know, I call people in other cities that I know. Right. Or I, like I said, New York was a stronghold for us.

So we would just plan around that. I'd make some calls, some bands out there would hook us up and then we'd, I'd figure out where in between is a good city and start calling the clubs that I know have original music and send them music and go, Hey, can you hook us up on this date? Cause we're, it's a travel date on the way to the East coast. We're on this tour.

They're like, yeah, or no, or, you know, so I have a few places around the country that we can do that. And you know, Milwaukee, we go up, we haven't been in a couple of years now, but we were going up there semi-regularly and we need to kind of get back to that. Milwaukee is easy.

It's right. We can go with it. You can almost do it in a day.

We do. There have been shows we've played up there where they're like, we get off work, we get in the van. Yep.

We go to Milwaukee, we play the show and then we drive home and I drive everyone off. Yes. And if it's the weekend, we're lucky we get to sleep the next morning.

And if it's not, some of us have to get up and go to work the next day. You know, usually it's me. I'm the one who works the earliest during the day, but we have done nights like that where I'm like, the only way we can make this work.

Cause someone has to be at work the next morning is to just drive straight there, load in, do the thing when it's over, load out in the van, hit the gas station, grab a snack and some caffeine and drive the hour and a half home to Chicago, drop everyone off, go to sleep for a few hours and back to the normal world. Yeah. So how can people find you? You got a website and everything? Yeah.

Uh, main website is Vince rocks.com. Um, and then we're on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram is Tafka Vince. Facebook's weird. Cause there's like, I'm on there as Vince myself.

There's the artist formerly known as Vince band. If you have Facebook slash the artist formerly known as Vince. Yeah.

Or is the thing I can't remember, is that the artist formerly known as Vince or is it banned also after the slash? That's one of those two. And then there's Tafka Vince solo for my solo stuff. So we're on the Facebook, but Instagram is Tafka Vince, which is probably the easiest and Twitter and the website.

And I'm always posting stuff wherever I possibly can to let people know we're there and hoping that they will come see us and we're on band camp for selling stuff. So that's a good place. Cause it has pretty much everything we've done to the band and most of my solo stuff.

I mean, there's a couple of early things that haven't made it there. I'm like, whatever people really need that. But everything else, you know, singles we've done oddball stuff.

I just put a single out in February that was solo only because last fall, I just couldn't get everyone in a room to learn a new song. We were busy. Like we played a show last September and we didn't play the rest of the year.

Like we just were all too busy. I think we might've played like something in December, like a semi-acoustic no drummer show. I can't remember if that was December or the year before.

I'm getting old. I'm forgetting things. But I wanted to do a song last fall and put out a single in February because it was a song called February's Glare, which maybe I'll sing for you guys next.

And I thought it would work with the band. But we just couldn't get in a room to work it out. And I really wanted to get it out February 1st because of the title.

And it was about, it's kind of about Valentine's day. And I had another song that was supposed to be on the solo record I'm making called Goodbye February or February Goodbye. So I was like, well, I have two songs in February.

I should release a digital single. And when I couldn't get the band together, I just recorded it alone. Maybe someday they'll learn it because it could work with the band.

It's a rock song. It's a little mellower rock song than we normally do, but it could be like, I thought it would work. We all wanted to do it.

I just schedules were just too hard to get in the same room and make an arrangement and get it done where I can put it out February 1st. So I'm like, I'm just gonna do it myself. I want to play everything and get this out just because I want this concept single of two songs about February coming out on February 1st.

Well, I think you should pick one and do it and take us home. Take us home with that. Hey everybody, it's Ray the Roadie and this is Hollywood Mike of the Rock and Roll Chicago Podcast.

If you've been joining our weekly program, we have great news for you. Just tune in to Road to Rock Radio on Mondays at 7 p.m. Central time, and you can hear a rebroadcast of one of our past episodes. Then again on Thursdays at 7 p.m., you can hear our most current episode brought to you by the Illinois Rock and Roll Museum on Route 66.

So go to roadtorock.org, scroll down and click on Radio Station. That'll bring you to the Road to Rock Radio, a station committed entirely to the great music from Illinois, from Chicago blues born on Maxwell Street to today's rock and roll and everything in between. 24-7, all music with its roots in Illinois.

So this one's called February's Glare and it came out in February and it's also on the band campaign and it's on Spotify. Because we're on Spotify too, like everyone in Apple Music and all that. Either Search the Band or Artist Formally Known as Vince.

I think Spotify is both because there's the solo stuff is just Artist Formally Known as Vince, the other stuff says band. So we're on all that stuff. People can find us, it's just a mouthful and a lot of letters.

So this one's called February's Glare. I missed it. I'll get it this time.

The sound of love coming from the speakers bursts in your ears. All the hearts and pink carnations indicate the time of the year. 14 days keep shouting out, how will you show you care? Love is just a commodity February's Glare.

The taste of love comes from sugar, not from hemlock. You need pretty jewels and pieces of candy in a heart-shaped box. 14 days keep shouting out, how will you show you care? Love is just a commodity.

February's Glare. Won't you be so kind and be my valentine? I am wild about you. My dreams come true.

The smell of love comes from the flowers you bought at the store. Their sweet smell will be with you forevermore. 14 days keep shouting out, how will you show you care? Love is just a commodity.

February's Glare. 14 days keep shouting out, how will you show you care? Love is just a commodity. February's Glare.

Oh, I didn't see it. I didn't see those fans come in. Yeah, they're all here to see you.

The artist formerly known as Vince. That's right. Thanks for coming in tonight, man.

Thanks, Vince. Pleasure meeting you. Sounds great, man.

Thank you. Thanks. Well, how about that? The artist, I guess you have to say, the artist formerly known as Vince.

That's right. Yes, you have to say what you're thinking. That's pretty good, man.

That was, you know, it seems like lately we've been bringing in more and more original musicians. I know. And I like that.

That's so refreshing. It is. It is.

And you know, he sounded like, I mentioned it, he sounded like Elvis Costello to me. You heard David Bowie. I heard David Bowie.

And when you said Costello, yeah, bits of that too. Yeah, yeah. His vocals, more than anything, his vocals and his phrasing in the whole bit.

That's what reminded me of Elvis Costello. Yeah. Very interesting guy too.

I'd like to hear the whole band together, hear what they sound like. Yeah. That'd be interesting.

Yeah. To find that many people that are into that type of a sound, I bet you it's an interesting show. I bet it is.

Well, it was great talking with Vince. Glad he could make it out tonight. And as usual, thank you for listening to the Rock and Roll Chicago podcast.

And check us out every Tuesday for another exciting new episode. See you next week. Hey, it's Ray and Mike, and we got some great information for you.

Yeah, we just wanted to remind you about the fundraiser for the Illinois Rock and Roll Museum on Route 66, which is taking place on October 27th at the Renaissance Center in downtown Joliet. You'll be able to get tickets at Cadillac Groove shows. If you see Mike or myself somewhere, we'll have tickets.

You can get them at the museum. They're only $5. Also at cadillacgroove.com, you will be able to purchase them online as well.

Very good. They're going to cost you $5 a ticket. There's going to be a $10 cover charge to get in the day of the event.

And for your $10, we will give you two more additional tickets as well as some Cadillac Groove swag. And the lucky grand prize winner will win the band Cadillac Groove. And winner must be present to win.

So remember that. And Cadillac Groove will play for whatever event it is that you would like for us to play for. You know, conditions do apply.

That's true. We do have to get out there and get your tickets right away. The Rock and Roll Chicago podcast is edited by Paul Martin.

Theme song courtesy of MNR Rush. The Rock and Roll Chicago podcast does not own the rights to any of the music heard on the show. The music is used to promote the guests that are featured.