Kanzler: All right! Well, it´s good to have you here again! Wino: It´s a pleasure to be back! You know I always love coming to the fatherland. Kanzler: The last thing was a tour for the 2nd album… Wino: …with Alan .. and then overlapped with ‘Ostinato’ . Right… Kanzler: That was still with Dave, Dave was still in double duty, Dave was playing with Ostinato and then you guys jumped right in. Wino: Yeeah, that was cool… Kanzler: That was kind of a, I wouldn´t say weird, but kind of an unexpected combination, you guys and ‘Ostinato’, and it basically came down to that you recruited Dave from ‘Ostinato’ to play drums with ‘The Hidden Hand’. How did that come across? Wino: ‘Ostinato’ recorded with Bruce. So Bruce you know, Bruce knew ‘Ostinato’ before me and him started jamming. So he would always, at one point in the recording session, I guess Dave you know, they took a break and whatever, and Dave sat down behind the drum set and just started playing, and Bruce just said;” I didn´t know you played drums!”, and Dave says; ”I can´t!”. Bruce says;” Wow! If you can´t play drums you´re playing pretty good.”. And he ended up recruiting Dave basically. And first he got David to play in this, I don´t know how to describe them, but to play in another band Bruce was in called ‘The Field Machine’, and then after that, he didn´t suggest Dave for ‘The Hidden Hand’ right away. The first drummer we jammed with, this is a really weird story man, the first drummer we jammed with was a dead ringer. You know what that means? That means he looked exactly like the second drummer of ‘The Obsessed’ Eddie Gulli. Kanzler: All right. Wino: He looked just like him. He played like him, too. And, I´ve got to tell you, it was a little bit weird. It took me, I mean Eddie is a good guy, but it took me back kind of in a bad way, and the jam didn´t work, and Bruce was like;” OK, that wasn´t the guy!”, and he goes;” I´m gonna ask Dave if he wants to come and, you know, have a go.”. And I was like;” Well, who´s Dave?”, and he´s like:” Well, he´s the drummer from ‘The Field Machine’. And I was still a little bit confused about Dave´s role, and Dave showed up and the very first time we jammed with Dave, we had a phenomenal, phenomenal jam, and we were desensitised, pretty much on the spot. Kanzler: I mean, it´s kinda like, it surprised a lot of people, not only that you played with a guy like Dave, it was also the whole style that came across with ’The Hidden Hand’, that was so different to what you have done before. I mean, most of the people know that you have been involved in ‘Saint Vitus’ and that you have been involved in ‘The Obsessed’ and that you´ve been considered that, kind of like, what they call a Doom legend, that guy that took the whole ‘Black Sabbath’ thing into the next century and added something to it, and kind of, was part of the creation of a completely new style of Doom Rock, and after you have been away for so long, you came back with a band of a completely different, that is, to my opinion, that is also able to create a completely new style, in terms of attitude as well as in terms of how you approach music. And it was kind of a logical step when you see it from this perspective, but haven´t you been worried about, like, your fans… Wino: …well, to be honest with you, after ‘Spirit Caravan’ imploded, I was pretty mad actually. I was pretty angry because I really tried really hard to make that band work, you know. You know, just like trying every time really hard of saying, you know, slow down, slow down, we wanna play… I got so tired of being this person that was always, you know, telling somebody “Don´t do this and don´t do that!”. The last thing I want to do is to tell somebody what to do because I don´t like to be told what to do. So I was pretty pissed off. And I decided that I wasn´t ready to quit, that I still wanted to play, but at the same time I wanted to have a Punk Rock jam, I wanted just to hook up with somebody that wasn´t born and raised on the same like ‘Black Sabbath’ kind of mold. You know what I mean, I wanted to jam with some different people. I didn´t want to call somebody for a jam and play songs of ‘Volume lV of Masters of Reality`, that´s not what I wanted to do. So Bruce had been this engineer, we´ve done some work with him with ‘Spirit Caravan’, we´ve done some sounds and he picked up the bass, and we realized he was a pretty damn good bass player. And the thing is, we started to have these conversations, and I noticed he had this very extensive library, in studio, like, it´s the entire back studio wall just lined with books. And he was really interested in the song that we recorded that was called ’The Departure’. The Meso-American myth of the departure of Quetzalcoatl. So that kind of got him a little bit intrigued, and he later told me that he actually went to his books for a little reference and all. You know, I just really enjoyed the talks with him, and I kind of, I´m not trying to talk down about any body, but, a little intellectuality finally was like a fresh air, you know, so it was just logical that I called him up. “Hey you, …!” Yeah, the whole thing about Bruce… when I left ‘Spirit Caravan’, I said the next band I´m in, when I look around on the stage who´s playing with me, I just want them to blow me away. You know, and when you read his lyrics, and when we worked on his song ideas, I really… really it is nice to be part of something. So ‘The Hidden Hand’ became not just a wonder project, it became a real band, and I thought, yeah, it was good. I´m not saying ‘Spirit Caravan’ wasn´t like that because Sherman wrote some pretty great songs… Kanzler: Yeah, definitely…