I've never made a secret of my love for live albums. Even the polished, touched-up works have that close-up authenticity where the guitars are right in your ear with no gloss and no overdubs (Punch-ins, maybe, but not overdubs), where the spontaneity and live-in-the-moment flights of fancy are captured and preserved. Not like proper-setting portrait photography, but those candid snapshots that decorate Flickr or Instagram.

Anyway, the date happened to work out well as a tribute to Ryan "Ramrod" Weiss. In retrospect I wish we'd done a Chemikiller cover live as well, but I think including the song he wrote for us was fitting, and sharing the vocals on that was the best we could think of for making it a shared tribute on the part of everyone involved.

Anyway, I made a point to rehearse with the guys to include as much of my favorite things about my past favorite live albums and performances as I could, from Ace Frehley's off-the-cuff witticism to some of the best stage banter from the best stage banterers around (from Jim Morrison to Paul Baloff and many points in between) to spontaneous, if not jams, at least semi-rehearsed off-the-cuff renditions.

I worked with our sound-man and head roadie Paul on a recording method for capturing all of this multitracked from a computer on side-stage - the house soundman could have dumped a quick soundboard tape, but I wanted to be able to mix it later since I'd had a history of the Masquerade soundman just using the house mix - all drums and vox, no guitars or bass. We had cobbled together a couple of submixers and put them into a portable multi-input audio device that we had firewired into a spare laptop that I had. Paul had it in the car with him when it was totalled later that night, on the way back home from the gig. It took us weeks to even get to the car to empty our stuff out, and then the laptop was busted pretty badly and it took a while to export the wave files off of the hard drive. And, since I was using a different recording platform from the version on the laptop, I had to convert the wave files, IDENTIFY them (the laptop software used proprietary naming that was apparently random), and then sync them up in my Sonar platform in the studio. Paul got put back together much more quickly than the album did, though. Anyway, it's done and out now, so enjoy.