Around this time I met Jeff Hatcher who had moved to Toronto from Winnipeg with his band The Fuse, later renamed The Six. They wanted to 'make it' in Toronto but ended up going back to Winnipeg where they had a huge fan base. A very talented band, Jeff and Dave wrote some great songs and were really serious about their music. They would have acoustic rehearsals just so they could hear the vocals really clear and fine tune the mistakes. They were real 'Winnipeg guys' and had all this funny 'Winnipeg lingo' that only people in Winnipeg knew like 'Do you have any shacks?' Nope, they didn't do drugs; 'shacks' were sunflower seeds, which grow really huge in Manitoba - the best in the world.

They needed a bass player so I introduced them to Neil and we played this awesome gig at the Fort Gary Hotel for a week or so. It was a historic ten story stone building. At night after our gig at 3 am, I would take the elevator up to the Grand Ballroom and play the Grand Piano. It reminded me of the movie The Shining, I felt like I was in the 1920's and you could imagine the parties they must have had there. The Hatcher brothers and Dave were family guys, while Neil and I were degenerants out every night at after hours clubs and sex, drugs and rock and roll. I was a bad boy, juggling a few different girls and then fell madly in love with an Italian girl who later totally broke my heart. You can see Neil and I having a ton of fun jamming in the videos. I had this toy piano rigged up by this electronics guy I met at the Cinema Lumiere (more on that later). I had a fifty foot chord and I would jump from the stage onto the tables doing solos. Sting was in town and was also staying in our Hotel. He saw us play one night and we had a drink with him. The next day in the paper they wrote about him being at the club. There was a quote from Sting saying how he liked what the piano player called his 'chop-suey technique' when he hits the piano like a drum (I think Neil told the reporter that).

The Cinema Lumier was a repertoiry cinema across the street from me in Toronto. I worked there tearing tickets and doing the cash sometimes. Cinema Paradiso is one of my favorite movies because I was like that little boy. Every night I would sit up with the projectionist and watch classic films over and over again. I knew all the scenes by heart.

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