Johnny mastro & mama's boys

TIME STAMP: New Orleans end of July 2014.

2 sweaty days in the lower garden district recording live for the new release. The Music Shed  was an ideal place and provided an old school live sound. No headphones, isolation, or fancy or dirty tricks...Just 4 guys (and a few cases of the Original) getting together in a big room and playing some music while Ben Lorio and his boys record the results. The sound at the Music Shed was wide-open and fat with the harmonica bouncing all around the place, The band hit…Read more

Living in the 9th ward shows a whole other side to the city I fell for and things can get pretty sketchy with serious issues day to day with race, guns, crime, poverty and weather,  Really a few of the local bands saved me from going crazy for the first 6 months. Chris Polacek and his Hubcap Kings started hiring me as a sideman and we were really busy for my first year here. Not once did I hear the guys in the band gripe about the light money getting even lighter with me joining the band. Not once.  I…Read more

In the Spring of 2014 we traveled to LA Spice studios in Lafayette to record some new songs and help studio owner Mark Anzalone work out some technical issues.  He had recently bought a new board and wanted to have a live band play and check out the process.  The initial goal on our end was to get a few songs for an EP. What ended up happening was we worked out some of the new material and this session was really a demo session for the new record.  I could hear where some of the songs needed to be punched…Read more

Sometimes just going into the studio COLD is fruitful and spontaneous, but it can also be an expensive experiment gone awry if things don't go well.  We almost always record live and like this last record, no isolation or fixes which adds to the rolling of the dice effect.  It is very possible to have musicians lose it, computers constantly crashing, engineers with crazy ideas, bad headphone mixes, and sometimes the band (or is it me) just sounds off.  Nowadays we try to prepare and "feel out" those…Read more

Living in New Orleans is like living in another world in a lot of ways. It's kinda isolated down here and very european for an american city. There is a lot of love and magic here and things just "seem to happen" more than in any place I have ever seen.  It also reminds me of a 3rd world country in some respects with its roads, poverty and challenged infrastructure.  But like all things in life, to have all the good, there has to be some bad to balance it out.  The bad is not on the surface and living here…Read more

This is one loud and wild place!  People drive kinda wild, the neighborhood kids are wild, the streets are missing a lot of signs, the weather is wild and people blast hiphop at unbelievable low frequency decibels. Furthermore, there are all kinds of subtropic insects and spiders and there are the roosters.

I never thought about roosters much until I moved into the 9th ward,  They live under the house, roost in our tree in the backyard, and devour any food left for Checkers the feral cat we inherited with…Read more

I'd been coming to New Orleans since 1989 when the French Quarter Festival was just one or two stages! Like a lot of natural relationships, I didn't like New Orleans right away.  But over time I did become seduced by the city. This was mainly due to the beautiful people, street culture, European feel and overall vibe of the city. I started to picture New Orleans as an exotic experienced woman, waiting to be discovered, Before Katrina, I got married here on the Mississippi River and had Treme Brass Band…Read more