Happy New Year! Hope y'all dig the new site.

We're kicking off the new year of gigs this Saturday at our home away from home, O'Reilly's Pub. Here's hoping y'all can come out and support.

We have some new stuff to play for you - but it's not 'new' new, as we've come to the conclusion that most new rock sucks pretty hard. So we've got some 'old' new stuff for you this time.

And there may be an addition coming to the band that you might want to know about. Once that starts rolling, we'll clue you in.

That's it for now. Stay tuned.

since we last updated, we've put together a few videos from our shows at O'Reilly's, and posted them to YouTube. In order to show them all, we've added a Video page.

Just click the 'Video' link at the top of the page. It used to just bring up the 'Blue Sky Blue' video, but now it'll bring up all of our YouTube vids. Enjoy...

Back in August (in the post below this one), I mentioned that the server our site was on was a massive pain in the ass, and that we'd be moving the site soon.

Well, soon is now. We moved to a spiffy new server today, and this one should work a whole lot better than the old one. Hell, even this blog is on the same server as the rest of the site, because things just work better with this hosting company.

So... we have some catching up to do. Lots of new gear, gigs in the works, the whole bit. Check back, because now that the site is working right, I no longer have a sense of dread about posting here.

I've been toying with the idea of moving the diesel site off of its current server and to a different hosting company.

I know that some of you find the site to be very slow, and I've got issues with the communications tools that the current host offers - for instance, it takes me 3 hours to send out our mailing list because I have to break it into thirds so I don't violate the hosting company's spam policies.

So... it won't happen today and definitely not tomorrow, but we will be moving to a newer, faster, more spacious home that will let us set up software that will contact everyone at once but won't get us accused of being spammers.

Stay tuned.

Attention, Facebook members!

We went and set up a group on Facebook to better keep the FB world informed about our carryings-on.

If you're a FB member, visit that page or do a search for us, and join the group. Thx.

I finally got my ass to work on an update of the Diesel promo kit. New pic, bio, artist list, song list and list of venues we've played. All that's left to do is burn and label the CDs.

Speaking of venues - if any of you know of a club you think we should be playing, leave the name in comments. We'll be hitting new clubs this week, so any suggestions would be quite helpful. Thanks!

I've been looking around MySpace and Facebook, and the thing that really mystifies me is that this band seems to operate in a vacuum, largely unnoticed by any of the 'scenes' out here on Long Island.

The blues guys? We're too rock. The tribute guys? We don't even register with those guys - we don't have the star power, heh heh (even though two out of three of us actually play in a couple of tribute bands). Other cover bands? We're the competition, so we don't get a whole lot of respect from other bands that play the same places we do. The reunion guys? They're too busy trying to bring their bands back to the level they were at back in the day.

So, here we are, working from the outside. Does it bug me? Maybe a little, but I've always been apart from whatever scene has been happening. Even back when I was in Snakeyed Su, we played all the same clubs as everybody else but we never really blended in with everybody else. Of course, we were the only band on the scene that got a chance to go to The Big Dance, however badly that may have ended - so maybe there's something to sitting at a different lunch table than the Cool Kids.

Sure, there are a few bands who know about us - Fullhouse, Finespun, Almost Queen and Blackmore's Night have come out to see us pretty often. But we pretty much remain a well-kept secret as far as Long Island's 'rock community' goes.

But I'll tell you what - I'll stack this band up against any band out there, any day of the week. For my money, we can hang with anybody. It'd be nice if we got a little more love from our fellow musicians, but even if we don't we'll still rock harder than most of those guys who play the bigger clubs. Bank it.

Our director Eric Harris sent me a clip of about 10 seconds worth of the computer-generated footage of the 'World Fall Down' video, and it's very cool. We are in the middle of a computer-generated storm, with rolling clouds, a churning sea in the background and driving rain.

When this video is done, a lot of you are going to be really surprised with it. Thinking back, we shot a ton of footage - all the green screen stuff, the recording of the rhythm track, and probably 10 or 12 takes on stage at O'Reilly's. We probably have enough footage to do three full videos.

I'll keep you posted as the edit goes along. It's gonna be interesting.

Jeez oh man, it's cold. I just loaded the gear into the truck for tonight's gig at Madison's, and the cold seeps right into ya bones. Hopefully, a good number of y'all will brave the cold and get your asses to East Northport.

See you at The Madhouse...

Okay, holiday's over. We're back on the rehearsal horse this week. As usual, we're planning on adding a lot more new stuff for the new year, but we're not sure just what we're going to do yet.

Any suggestions? Leave 'em in comments.

Oh - and there's a new Diesel original in the works... we've been off the originals lately, but adding new Diesel tunes is high on the list for this year.