YoungTurk: Train To Nowhere

We never won any awards and tours were limited as some of us were in and out of jail during our peak!!  And we loved every minute of it!

Who is YoungTurk?  We were just a fun band or so we thought trying to write the best songs we could with frankly the limited skills we had at the time!!  We had no real message at the time - we were really just writing the best we could -  it was an amazing time that at that point held endless possibilities. 

What is a YoungTurk?  YoungTurk we had read was a group of ruffians in Europe back in the day - the name seemed to fit us. 

When? Basically we all dropped out of high school to start the band. There was little going on in Miami.  Rock City Angels had moved to LA…So it was Young Turk and Nuclear Valdez (the first band to get signed out of Miami in the late eighties) that ruled the scene.

Where?  Miami!!! Miami!!! Miami!!!

Why?  It’s all we know – Rock-n-Roll…We had the world by the balls!

Our band lived together, fought together.....might have been the best days of our lives according to some! 

Do You Know Where Your Daughters Are?

Hard to believe that this album is what got our career started! We had recorded this album when I was 15 - I weighed about 100 pounds!

I packed 100 eps on a commercial flight from Miami to NYC to attend the new music seminar. Thrash didn’t exist neither did rap for all intents and purposes - both coming to a boil.

As a I was going down the escalator while attending the new music seminar I bump into Carl Canedy.  We also happened to walk into the brawl between east coast west coast that is documented in Straight Out Of Compton.

That album had been recorded in Miami with a $2,000 budget…it had five songs on it -- we were just learning how to write songs. That album scored our deal with Carl and led us to do our first full length album. The guys in the band were myself, Rick Diaz, Bill McKelvy and Monte Hess - together we made one ok musician with a huge amount of ego and a hell of a lot of balls.

Train to nowhere

This would be the album that would get us signed to Virgin Records.

We had just signed to our management team.

And were excited to start recording! So much so we showed up two months early to the beautiful Bear mountains in the town of Cortlandt. We rented a small cabin in the Bear mountains; there we would proceed to write the songs that would eventually make it to the record. We would go to the city to pick up weed and other essentials - and would trip the days away into what we turned into our own version of the 60’s. I would write the title track there on the front steps of the cottage in what would be our first local hit “Train To Nowhere”.

As the months rolled by and we finished the record we called Carl and told him we were here in Cortlandt. We had arrived a month early and hadn’t realized we were supposed to have landed in a town called Cortland not Cortlandt We were a few hundred miles away. In reality the album would end up being recorded in Utica New York.

So commenced Trian to nowhere.