JPT SCARE BAND

The JPT SCARE BAND belongs to those legendary well-hidden under-underground bands from the early 70's, which never released any official album in this time, but thanks to Monster Records, who have discovered some old tapes of the JPT SCARE BAND and released them to all our pleasure. The music of the Scare Band was/is filled with loud and roaring guitar-jams, heaviest blues-laden power chords and a very jam-like atmosphere. To speak the truth, most of the old songs were jams. Much wilder and harder than the Blue Cheer ever performed their stuff. So, Rolf and Kendrik compiled some interesting questions and I've sent them over to drummer Jeff Littrell. Here's the final result, so check out the past and present of the re-activated JPT SCARE BAND.

Hi Jeff, how are you? What are you doing?

I'm doing great, living in Destin, Florida and enjoying life.

When you look back to the early days of the band, how were those days? When and where did you met Paul and Terry and when did you decided to form the band?

I have known Terry since we were both about 12 years old. We went all the way through public school together and then attended the same university. We both played in rock bands in high school, though not in the same band. We met Paul through friends at another school in the early university days. In 1973, Terry and I were playing in a country rock band, backing up a female singer named Carol Cruise.

The bass player quit and Paul joined the band. The three of us, along with another friend, Greg Gassman, moved into a big old house in Kansas City, Missouri which we called the Electric House on Manheim. Luckily for us, Greg was a recording engineer. At some point, we separated from Carol and became the JPT Scare Band. Our lives totally revolved around our music and Greg recorded a lot of the jams from the Electric House on Manheim and the Stone House on Crooked Road. Those days were full of music and fun, wild women and cosmic adventures.

Which bands have inspired you?

There were many influences and you can hear them when you listen to our 1970s recordings. Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, Frank Zappa, Cream, Ozzy and Black Sabbath, Pink Floyd, Grateful Dead, Mountain, Steve Miller Band, Deep Purple, Jeff Beck, Steely Dan and lots of blues guys with the last name of King, like Albert King, BB King and Freddie King. Modern influences include jam bands such as Phish, Govt Mule and Widespread Panic.

With which bands have you shared the stage or done a tour?

The main focus of JPT has never been playing gigs or touring. We mostly did home recordings of jams among ourselves and our friends. We used to play concerts at Volker Park in Kansas City. Back in the 1970s, they had hippie love-ins at the park every Sunday and thousands of freaks would show up to party and listen to the music. In the late 70s, early 80s, we went out on the road in various versions of the band and in those lineups we opened for Budgie, Krokus, REO Speedwagon, Savoy Brown.

Do you have a close contact with other bands?

We are pretty good friends with a young alternative rock band out of Blountstown, Florida called Socialburn. They are very young, but they write good tunes and rock hard. They just got a deal with Elektra and are starting to get some serious FM radio airplay here in the USA. The guys in Socialburn like JPT and often wear their Scare Band t-shirts on stage at their concerts.

How is the contact with your fans?

We have always been a somewhat obscure band, but we love the feedback we get from our fans. We get quite a bit of email to our web site and we to try to send some of those people a t-shirt. The people we hear from seem to really love our music and we are very happy to hear from them. Actually, we seem to hear from more people in Germany, France, Italy and the rest of Europe than we do from the USA!

Tell us something about the new album?

The new CD is going to be called "Jamm Vapours". We started recording it in 2001 and we are still working on it. We hope to get the final mix finished and get it released in 2003. In 1993, we recorded some tunes at a modern recording studio that some of our fans thought were too produced, too polished. Two of those tunes are on the "Past Is Prologue" CD, "I've Been Waiting" and "Wino."

For our latest effort, we tried to go back to our roots a bit, back to the basement. The "Jamm Vapours" sessions were recorded live in Paul's basement on a Yamaha AW-4416 digital 16 track hard disk recorder. We had to redo some of the vocals, but the instrumental tracks are all totally live. It looks like we actually have enough material to do two 60 minute "Jamm Vapours" CDs. There are some great tunes on the new record. I really like one tune that is called, "Right Mind." To me, it sounds like Pink Floyd meets Steely Dan.

What kind of music are you listening to nowadays?

I mostly listen to JPT music, old and new. There is still a lot of unreleased material from the 1970s recordings. There is a 24 minute jam called "Theme From The Monsters Holiday" that is one of our absolute best recordings. I like to listen to the new CD from our friends, Socialburn. The CD is called "Where You Are" and it just got released in February on Elektra. It was produced by John Kurzweg and it rocks!

How did you get together with Monster Records?

Phil Baker from Monster Records called me on the phone at my apartment in KC in 1992. Phone call totally out of the blue. He said, "Hi, I'm Phil Baker and I'm a record producer." I said, "Yeah, right." I didn't believe him! Phil and Dennis Bergeron had obtained one of our old albums in a used record store in Indianapolis. It was from a version of the band that we called Prisoner. We recorded an album which was released in 1980. It had a JPT Scare Band tune on it, "Burn In Hell," and Phil wanted to know if we had anything else on tape like that.

I told him that was actually a JPT tune and that I had a whole box of reel to reels. He asked me to play something over the phone to him. I think I played about 45 seconds of "Acid Acetate Excursion," with the phone held up to one of the stereo speakers in my living room, and he told me to put everything I had on cassette and send it to him and Dennis Bergeron in San Antonio. It took a little while to work out a deal with Phil and Dennis. We eventually worked out a pretty good deal and the first vinyl LP, "Acid Acetate Excursion" was released by Monster Records in 1994.