“I got a call from Frank Zappa’s wife, who told me, ‘I’ve got Terry Bozzio, Warren Cuccurullo and Terry’s wife here. They’ve just formed a band. Would you mind listening to them?’ I said, ‘Sure, send them over.’ So they came by with their boom box tape, which I listened to, and I thought it was utter shit.

“They said they didn’t play live shows, so I went to see them in rehearsal, and once again, it was awful. I don’t know what it was that kept me interested. I guess it was Terry Bozzio, who I’d seen play with Frank Zappa. I was utterly blown away by him. I must have thought, Terry can’t be in something that’s bad. So I said, ‘Let’s do some demos.’

“Frank had just had a studio built in his home, and he allowed us to use the place when he went out on the road. Knowing my reputation for finding the tiniest faults in every studio and fixing them, I can only imagine that his ulterior motive was that he could come back to his studio and have everything made perfect and ready to go.

“We got five songs done for free, tried to shop a deal, and nobody was interested. So we put out our own EP and it became the most-requested record of the year on K-Rock. We were then offered a deal by Capital, so we went in to Chateau Recorders to finish the album, which was Spring Session M. By this point, I was managing the band, as well as engineering and producing them. We did 800,000 sales straight away. The album was very successful.”