NEWS   January 2010

Howdy, welcome to the world of Just West of Hell!

We're glad you're here. JWoH was a project / idea that started between Tony Miller and Keith Duke while in college, back in 1983. We recorded pretty solidly, had various other artistic contributors, took a couple of breaks courtesy of life, ex-wives, and such, but TM & KD really started back strong in 2000. We were both divorced, (although Tone had remarried at that point). I was still recovering from my divorce and had a lot of "issues" that I'm certain were quite irritating for Tony to deal with, but true friend that he was, he helped every way that he could. The first song we did when we got together after our break was "Release" - a rather dark and somewhat disturbing song about choices. For me, it was like lancing a particularly painful emotional boil. Ugly, disgusting, and necessary. Playing with Tony again was literally a lifesaver for me - an emotional outlet where I didn't
have to filter, hold back, or even care if it made sense outside of my own current context. Vastly - vastly - relieving. Plus it was good to just crank up the amps and wail away on whatever musical idea had seized our attention at the moment. We played like that for a couple of years, and then we added our long term friend Paul Haggard as a remote contributor while he was living in Hollywood, and then more later when he would occasionally come for a visit and to record.

Funny, I can remember when we had a scheduled session in '03, and of course we had a power outage! It was frustrating as hell being there with no way to record and feeling the time we had just slip away... But, that was the session where we eventually recorded "Darktown", "My Wife Was A
Stripper (Back When She Was A Man)" and 5-6 others. That was the session where we knew that the inclusion of Paul was the absolute right thing to do. Eventually Paul left Hollyweird and the California lifestyle and traveled back here. Our output of material went waaay up. It was a great time for us artistically. Tony would send these obscure/obscene/obnoxious text messages that were just really funny and really wrong. And of course, we'd all reply with something else just as funny and wrong - it was entertaining as hell, and lead to literally dozens of new songs.

But, all things must end, and since Tony passed away in January 2009 from surgical complications, Just West of Hell has been a "closed" project, in that there aren't any more original recordings being made. (Sort of, see below!)

Which is not to say that there isn't stuff that's new to *Soundclick* isn't making it's way here - in fact there are a whole lot of songs that have never been released at all. Last count I did, there are more than 250 songs we wrote/recorded as JWoH. Some (like "Mom's Song", recorded the day that Tony's mom passed away as a way of helping him deal with his grief) were both intensely personal, very long, and only relevant to us. Some songs were explorations of decidedly un-PC points of view, that once done, *we* weren't comfortable with - a couple of songs ("Islamic Vinegar", "Justice") are good examples.
Other pieces were sonic sketches, never fully completed, or were concept pieces (like the 60 min improv to "Dr. Strangelove") that were intended to be sort of explorations in translating from one medim to the other. But even so, there are still another 100 or so songs that could reasonably go here on Soundclick.

Paul & I have been toying with the idea of changing our mastering recording methods/technology, and have started sorting thru the truly mountainous pile of digital backups. There are multiple hundreds of CD's with digital backup information, but it's seriously slow going. Frankly it's also very
emotionally wearing for both of us, listening to those tracks for extended periods. It tends to drive home in a very intense way the loss of our friend.

It's not all gloom n' doom, of course, but ... we're working on it as fast as we can.

Anyway, there's quite a lot of stuff that we've identified as needing to be posted. We especially want to put up some early funny / twisted stuff, just as soon as it gets either (re)mastered or at least re-EQ'd. But because some of the early recordings were done on 4 track cassettes, then later on 4 track reel to reel, the sound quality is kind of sucky - especially the cassette stuff... Noisy!

There is one project we've agreed on, which is a sort of "tribute album" of acoustic versions of Tony's favorite JWoH songs. We're supposed to start working on this in the spring, with a live recording session either late spring or early summer 2010. It's going to be quite a bit of work, and it's kind of intimidating to be doing a truly 'live album', but it's *oh* so very JWoH to take some chances and deal with it regardless. It won't be perfect, but it will be us!