Do you have a lot of material ready for the new album?
Yeah, we are all ready musically and we did a pre-production right before this tour for a few weeks and put all the music together and we handed it to Phil Lewis (L.A. Guns singer) and he takes it out on the road with him and he has his own little studio and he can work on all of the lyrics and melody lines then we'll go back and he'll have a jump on it. It's a nice little system we have setup. He can work we just the music for a little bit on his own.

"Man In The Moon" is the first album since 1992 with Phil?
With Phil yes. We actually did a couple of things with Phil before "Man In The Moon" in like 99' with Cleopatra Records we did a live album. The original five of us got together and we did a greatest hits for them also. They were nothing like working on a whole album with Phil, that was great! Having him back in the band was great!

How did you get back together with Phil?
Yeah know, we love each other and we worked so much together from 87' to 92' those six years we worked so much and it's just like anything else everybody wanted to try something else, everybody had a wealth of material they wanted to do that didn't fit L.A. Guns. It was never a real bad break between us it was more or less getting a lot out of our systems. Traci and I did this real heavy album and got so much out of our systems because we just wanted to do an album like that, "American Hard-core", that was without Phil and it was great. We did it. We wanted to do a Pantera / Sabbath type of thing and we knew it wouldn't fit Phil's thing so we would never bring that type of material to Phil. We do more L.A. Guns traditional straight out rock with Phil.

How does recording today compare to when you recorded your first self title album?
Just the knowledge. Because of the way everything is now it has turned into a live situation for bands. The studio thing is not so overlooked by record companies anymore and not looking at every song seeing if they can place it as if this could be a video and this could be a single. That's not happening any more. Right now the studio is like a free for all. It's great, you can do what ever you want to do. You can do the arrangements and the type of production you want to do. It's a catch 22 because now you have the freedom in the studio but very little backing from record companies. That's the main difference is that we have a lot of freedom right now in the studio as with the first album all of that was written before the band was signed but when they brought it in I think the band might have produced it differently if they had their own way of doing it.

When L.A. Guns first started hitting the club scene, what was the reaction like from the crowd?
Back in 87' or now?

In 87'.
Oh! That was insane! We never were really like any of the other bands that came out in the 80's or from L.A. We had a darker more mysterious thing going on about us and we didn't break so big that we got over exposed at all so we had like a little cultish following. When we hit the road in 87' it was wild. We went over really well and we got on a lot of big tours as well. We opened up for Madien, Kiss and everybody.

What was one of the wildest things you have seen on tour?
Yeah know I was with WASP and we use to cut up the meat and throw it at people, yeah know Blackie use to throw the meat at people. We were in Finland and he was throwing the meat out and Chris Holmes ( WASP guitarist) was standing there and out of the audience came a frozen leg of lamb or something and it hit Chris in the head so they were trying to throw the meat back and it was the funniest thing I have ever seen. (Laughing) Because you saw it coming slowly through the fog and it hit Chris and he went down (Laughing), It was one of the wildest things I ever saw.

Now you guys have one guitar player now?
Yeah yeah. Mick Cripps is the rhythm guitar player and keyboard player. He played on some of "Man in the Moon". He is sort of like in and out of the band right now. Kelly Knickles stopped playing all together. We're still very good friends all of us but Kelly stopped. With Mick it's sort of in and out. Right now he can't come out on the road with us cause he had to take care of some personal stuff. It sounds great. Traci is just that much more open. He is playing lead and rhythm. It just sounds killer.

As a band was is a song that you are most proud of?
I think Ballad of Jane was a really well well written song. The way it came together that song was probably why it was our most popular song. It was just well written and had a great hook and we're big admirers of great song writing. That was probably the song.

Are there any songs you wish you never wrote?
Yes and they made a video of it, "I Wanna Be Your Man".

You don't like that one?
No! We didn't want it to be a video either and they pushed it on us. But we did right the song so we are partly to blame (Laughing).

Well Steve, that's about it. Is there anything you want to add?
Yeah. We are going to be on tour all year and our new album is coming out in September. We're going to be on tour all year with this big package of 80's band like Ratt, Warrant, Dokken and us and we'll be all over the place so just to let people know we will be out all summer they can see us.

Are you playing arenas again?
Yeah, all the big amphitheaters and stuff.

OK. Thanks Steve?
Right on brother, Thank you.