The weather continues getting hotter and so does Strike Twice. We played a killer set in Amityville at Ollie's Point this past Saturday and we will be at Bartini's in Babylon this Friday for a PDT Entertainment Connected Rock Show. August is promising to be hotter still as we celebrate the release of our debut CD on Eonian Records, August 25th with a CD Release Party at Looney Tunes Records in West Babylon, NY. Details will be posted on the calendar soon. Of course we are also getting psyched for the Club Loaded show @ The Crazy Donkey in Farmingdale with Zebra and a return engagement at Lulu's Village Pub in Port Jefferson, a great venue in a cool town. Listen to FM 103.9 WRCN for our radio spots the week leading up to the show and also the week before the CD drops. Just added to our agenda is another PDT show, this time at the famous Jones Beach bandshell @ Field 4 on Thursday, August 20th, sponsored by FM 106.1 WBLI radio and Friendly's Restaurants. Nice!

Funny how things come around again, ain't it?

It seems like last week - well, maybe last month - that I spent most of a Summer in a dark recording studio in Deer Park, NY, watching months' worth of rehearsals and live gigs meet the ultimate test. The five guys who were in the studio working their asses off were the guys in Strike Twice, and we were recording a demo that we'd spent months preparing for. What we walked out of the studio with was a 15-minute demo, but it hardly reflected the hours and hours of work we all put into it.

They took that demo and made the rounds of record companies, only to meet the same fate of metal bands all over the world - crushed beneath the wheels of the Grunge Revolution. Shortly after that, the Strike Gang hung up their cowboy boots, and the sold out shows and the long road trips and the industry awards and everything else got thrown into a box to be remembered as souvenirs of a time when Rock ruled.

That's why I was surprised as anyone - hell, probably as surprised as the band itself - to meet up with Robbie Luv at the Crazy Donkey one night and be told that Strike Twice was playing again. After all that had happened since 1992, the band made the decision that they still had a little left in the tank and it was time to take the machine out of mothballs and down the road once more.

Of course, it's not the original band. The slots once filled by Chaz Domino and Randi Price are now in the capable hands of Craig Adams and Scott Wade, but the energy and determination that was there at the start is, surprisingly, still there. The shows I've seen show the flashes of wacky humor, the five-against-everybody attitude, and the sheer brute force of rock that the Strike Gang carried in their pocket back in the day.

And while I did my bit for the band back in the 90s by sitting behind a mixing desk or re-arranging songs, this time around I'm sitting behind a laptop. With the input and direction of Robbie, I built this shiny-new Strike Twice web site (because that's what I ended up doing after I stopped chasing a record deal). I tried to bring that sense of rock style that Strike always had an innate handle on to the design of this site, and I really hope it gets across what Strike Twice stands for and has always stood for - the power of a guitar through an amp and the release of a good gang chorus. I personally think we nailed it.

Funny how things come around again.

Donny Waller
Webmaster, striketwicerocks.com