At the risk of getting really repetitive, thank you ALL very much again, especially Ryan. I was touched by what you wrote, got a bit emotional reading it, thank you for taking the time to write up all of that. Honestly, all these tributes seem surreal to me - it's the sort of thing I'm used to reading about somebody else, never thinking it could be about my bandmates and me. I still can't really process that we've had this impact on such wonderful musicians, many of whom are friends and whose own talents I greatly respect. I'm very grateful again to Jake for starting this in the first place and to all who have written here, this has meant the world to me.
All these nice things people have been writing got me a bit nostalgic and thinking back to that '98-'00 period, so I hope you don't mind if I share my memories of those years.
WARNING: EPICLY LONG POST AHEAD - I really got carried away - SORRY!
My memory is that the first time I held a Tsar Wars CD in my hands was when we did a 3-date California 'tour' in late March of '00. We were invited to play the Rendezvous Ballroom Reunion show with DD, the Chantays, the Belairs, the Lively Ones, the Nocturnes, Jon & the Nightriders, and the Eliminators (what a lineup!!!) at the Galaxy Concert Theater in Santa Ana, CA (I believe we were invited by John Blair himself), to which we said "ABSOLUTELY!" That show was on a Sunday, so we also played two other shows: Friday at the Pitcher House in Hermosa Beach with Jon & the Nightriders, Slacktone, and Pollo del Mar, and Saturday at the Tiki House in San Diego with Pollo del Mar. Both of those shows were a BLAST! But I'm not sure if we had the CDs for sale at those two shows - I don't think we did, as the first memory I have of us selling the new CDs was at Sunday's big show, having FINALLY just arrived from the pressing plant to Art B.'s house on Saturday after we had to leave for San Diego, if I remember correctly. And though there were something like a 1000 people there at the big show, my memory was that we sold fewer than 10 copies! Boy, that was a big disappointment. We had been toiling away on this album for the better part of two years, and we thought we had something really special on our hands and were so excited to finally have it available for people - and then almost nobody bought it! Doh!!! 
Well, honestly, we didn't really play that great that day. We were rusty, not having played live in nearly a year and a half before that weekend's shows, so maybe it's not surprising that people weren't interested in buying the CD! 
But it was an amazing day nonetheless, and a huge honor to be invited - if you're reading this, HUGE thanks, John! (We only played one more show after that weekend - in Arlington, VA in July of '00, and that was it until the reunion shows of 2010.)
Tsar Wars was a bit of a Frankenstein as half of it was recorded in August of '98, shortly before I moved to Indianapolis from Washington, DC, and the other half the following summer, a year later. The songs recorded in '98 were: the three covers ("The Crusher", "Cossack Rocket Patrol", "Space Race"), "The Defector", "Departure", "The Jewel of Duende", "Fiesta del Cossacapulco", and "Escape from Gulag 17". It was only a few weeks after we had returned from our 2-week West Coast tour, and I remember being kinda burned out on loud, fast music - thus "The Jewel of Duende" and "Cossacapulco". We had been practicing these songs for a few months in '98 - basically as soon as Interstellar Stomp was out in '98, we were already working on the next batch of songs. Those two years, '96-'98, were just crazy, we were gigging and writing and recording new material constantly. Anyway, the atmosphere in the studio for that first session was phenomenal, the best of any recording session the Cossacks ever had. Somebody actually shot some home video footage of us in the studio (I think Mark's then-girlfriend, now-wife). I think I still have that tape. I should get it transferred and posted on YouTube. Lots of cool stuff on there, such as us recording all the whooping and yelling for "Cossacapulco", which is pretty funny.
And after that I was off to Indiana. For the next year, I worked very hard on the remaining seven songs for the album and I flew (or did I drive? I don't remember) back to DC a couple of times so we could practice them. Several of the songs were written by people outside of the group - Art gave me a tape with him singing the melodies (a la Joe Meek ) to two songs, and asked me if I could do something with them. Those two songs became "Exolumina" and "Sea of Tranquility". Jim Frias of the Nocturnes also sent me a tape of a song he was working on titled "Beyond the Third Star", and asked us if we'd want to record it, to which we said, "YES, PLEASE!" Jim wrote a great song, and "Third Star to the Left" was a huge song for us (which is why it opened the Interstellar Stomp album), so to have the 'sequel' to it was pretty special. I worked pretty hard on those three songs, as well as Catherine's "Tradewinds", arranging them and adding parts here and there. I was also working on the title track, but it didn't have a bridge, and it definitely seemed incomplete. During one of the band practices, Mark played me a chord progression that he thought sounded "Cossack-y", and asked me if I could do something with it, turn it into a song. A light bulb went off, and I asked him, 'how about if we use that as the bridge to "Tsar Wars"'? He said let's try it, and it was freakin' perfect! He also brought in "Tsunami Tsurprise", and I think he had the whole song completely worked out on his demo, I think I just copied his lead. I also brought in "The Apes of Wrath", and those were the seven songs that remained to be recorded.
When the time finally came to record, I drove to DC with all my gear. We had the final practice the night before going to the studio, but unfortunately Mark and I got into some sort of an argument (I don't even remember about what), and he got so mad at me he refused to come to the studio the next day. That was a huge bummer and pretty demoralizing. But we had to finish recording the album, it was now or never, so we just got on with it. The atmosphere in the studio was not nearly as good as it was the year before, not surprisingly. But despite that, Catherine and Doug played INCREDIBLY well, I was really blown away, I do remember that. We were recording as a three-piece and I added the rhythm guitar afterwards. That's the way all of Friday went. I remember recording "Exolumina" and the song "Tsar Wars", and I had some ideas for backwards effects, which were still somewhat in flux (the ideas, that is). So, Bruce the engineer and I started working on it, and it was laborious and time consuming, since we were recording on 2" tape, 24-track deck - so, the tapes had to be physically flipped over to do this, and they're big and heavy. Also, played forward the parts sounded pretty bland, and Catherine and Doug thought I had lost my mind and was wasting expensive studio time! They went off to get some food, a bit miffed, and by the time they got back Bruce and I had done all the "Tsar Wars" effects in the middle of the song. Bruce flipped the tape the right way to play the whole song, and I remember Catherine's and Doug's frowns magically disappearing! Doug in particular had this expression of pure revelation on his face! That was a good moment. After much pleading by Art, Mark did finally agree to come in on Saturday or Sunday (I forget) to record "Tsunami Tsurprise" and "Tradewinds", so that was good, but it was still tense. And as if all that weren't enough, I remember the last song we were recording was "Sea of Tranquility", and as we were recording Bruce the engineer's health was rapidly deteriorating! We could see him turning white before our very eyes! In between takes he'd say, "I've got 30 minutes left in me." "15 minutes", etc. No pressure! And I still had to add the rhythm guitar! I don't know how we finished it, since we really weren't very comfortable with the song as we were recording it, but we somehow pulled it off. We packed up and I drove home the following day - a nice 10-hour drive. I was pretty tired after that.
I don't remember how long before we all saw each other again, could have been a while. I think I went back for the mixing some months later (though not before we had Jim Frias record a sax part on "Beyond the Third Star" in SoCal under the supervision of John Blair). As I was listening to the rough mixes of all 15 songs and working on the song order, I came up with a little narrative to tie them all together. And then it occurred to me that maybe I could have my college buddy Jamie Miles write a novella to go along with the music! He is an incredibly smart guy and deeply into creative writing, and he lived just 30-40 miles from Indy, so I contacted him and floated the idea by him, and he said yes! Unbelievable. He'd send me the drafts of each chapter, and I absolutely loved them! That was very exciting. We got the amazing Steve Blickenstaff to add illustrations for each chapter, too, which was another coup. We got the title from Larry "Moon Dawg" White, which was really cool and funny! Things were really coming together!
Finally, after getting the final master of the music from Bruce, it was time to put the whole thing together. I found a company in Indianapolis that did hi-tech media, and they combined it all and designed the entire interface - but they somehow added extra two second breaks between all the songs, which disrupted many of the segue ways between songs. And they didn't know how to fix it! So, after several tense days, they finally figured out how to correct it and the enhanced CD was ready to be manufactured in early '00 - only to have 10 people buy it the first time we had it for sale at that huge show! Once again - DOH!
That's the story of Tsar Wars, folks! At least from my perspective and my memory, which is certainly not to be trusted entirely! An interesting post-script: in '98, shortly before I moved to Indy, Art introduced me to this girl from Philadelphia that he was dating, and I thought she was pretty amazing, and told him so. They broke up some time later, but in January of '00 I got an email from her, telling me that she heard the rough version of Tsar Wars from Art some 6 months earlier, really loved it and was wondering when it was coming out. We immediately started emailing back and forth a LOT, then talking on the phone late into the night, then visiting each other, and by that June we were engaged. That girl is Christina, and we've been married for nearly 14 years now - all because of "Tsar Wars". In 2000 I also moved to Michigan, started the job that I still hold, and bought my house. And following a trip to London in May of 2000 to attend Bruce Welch's Shadowmania and see Hank Marvin in concert, my dad and I started our Shadows tribute band the Troubadours. That's also when I first started playing with Dane. Yep, that was a pretty good period of time.
I hope some of you found my ramblings at all interesting and I'm very sorry to make it so long! But I thought it would be nice to tell the story of the album. Thanks all very much again!
—
Ivan
Lords of Atlantis on Facebook
The Madeira Official Website
The Madeira on Facebook
The Blair-Pongracic Band on Facebook
The Space Cossacks on Facebook
The Madeira Channel on YouTube
Last edited: Apr 02, 2015 11:18:19
December Birthdays 
I talked to Jamie in the last couple of years about putting the whole thing online, but we haven't gotten around to it yet. We really should, though we don't know where we'd put it. Any suggestions? 
) It's 33 minutes long, and good quality - for a 17-year-old VHS tape, anyway. I just called my college's AV dept, and they said they can transfer it to digital, so I'll have them do that tomorrow and see about posting it on YouTube after that. Stay tuned! 
