Here I am listening to my transistor radio, Three Dog Night, CCR, Marmalade, the Sweet, Elton John, Bay City Rollers and all of a sudden I'm hit smack in the face by Joey, Johnny, Dee Dee and Tommy/Marky, holy crap what's this? Around the same time I stumble on the Dictators Blood Brothers and I'm hooked on punk rock forever! A few years later I'm in my favorite local record store Record Revolution looking through the small but impressive punk rock section and over my shoulder a voice says that the LP I'm looking at kicks ass. I continue to converse with the punk telling me how great the Circle Jerks are, I agree and buy "Wild In The Streets". I end up giving my new friend a ride to the neighboring town while we talk about our admiration for music, especially punk rock and he says “I'm a bass player” which just happens to work out that the current group of guys I'm playing with have the same mindset about punk, especially the drummer, Dan. Dan is teaching me the guitar to "The Prisoner" by DOA while sitting behind his Rogers drum kit (same one used by the Ramones). I tell Dan that I met a guy at Record Rev that was into the same stuff we were. We called Scotty to join us on some covers as well as songs we were working on. The one I specifically remember was called "Blood for Love", music was mine, and words were Dan’s, which is exactly how our future would thrive, all of us working as one band. Bringing us to the birth of Ring 13.
Dan drums, Scotty bass, and Bruce guitar, we all sang both lead and backing vocals. Our songs came rather quickly, we’d just sit down and come up with ideas. Dan would say I have this as an idea and I would come up with one myself that would fit together almost like only one of us did it alone. Around this time another local band just recorded some of their songs in a real studio, so we thought we should do the same. We rehearsed the songs that we had in preparation for our venture in a real studio. All three of us still in our teens had 0 experience at such a thing, not to mention money to pay for it. On the way to the studio in a Chicago suburb, we still were unclear of a set list and words to some of the songs. We had this goof song called heavy fucking metal that Dan thought we should not record because he said that our parents were going to hear this when were done, so that did not make the cut that day. We also had a song called “husker bob” which after recording the music, Scotty was handed words that he wrote to change the song to what became the title track of the release "Nothing New Nothing Learned". I don’t think I've laughed so hard in my life when Scotty sang his own words over Dan's music, and if you listen to the end of the song, Scotty asks for “one more time”…no way! Dan and I were laughing so hard there was no way Scotty was going to top his one and only take. In fact, almost this whole release was done in one take. We recorded the music first, all three of us at once and vocals later, with the exception of "Bargain Hunter" and "Puff"…which were done vocally and musically together. One other change is Scotty and Dan switched instruments for these two recordings. I think Dan did a hi-hat overdub for "Bargain Hunter", but the rest is all Scotty. It just seemed everything we did that day worked. Dan brought his guitar that I never played before and I ended up using it on every song we recorded that day. We ended up recording and mixing all 14 songs in the span of either two or four hours, I can’t really remember which. Sure there are many mistakes, but we were having so much fun recording our songs. In retrospect we could have taken more time to do it right, but we were laughing so hard (even Mark the engineer) and having so much fun I don’t think any one of us really noticed nor cared to improve on what we did that day.