Our friend Eddie Clark provided these photos of 13 from what he said was the group’s second to last tour of the Netherlands and Belgium in February 1998. “We had left Sneek, NL and had to go way north to the Nordzee to get back to Amsterdam,” Clark wrote. “That is a massive dike we are on and the North Sea behind us.”
These photos have been posted on other sites for years, but these are all-new scans from the original hard copy pictures. It’s interesting to see what the band — Lester Butler, Alex Schultz, Mike Hightower and Clark — did on a day off.
They started from a jam, so it makes sense they would return at a jam, under the cover of darkness, unannounced and just as powerful as when they burst on the national stage with “King King” in 1992.
Lead guitarist Paul “The Kid” Size was playing the fest with Big Pete Sunday afternoon, and later that evening found himself reunited on stage at the Grand Vista Hotel with drummer Bill Bateman, bassist Jonny Ray Bartel and rhythm guitarist Dave Lee Bartel. By our count, this was the first time the four had been on stage since at least the middle of 1993.
Filling the all-important harmonica role was nofightin.com friend Johnny Mastro, who evoked the classic Red Devils sound. We all wondered how it would sound if it would happen, and who would be breathing into the bullet mic when it did. Now we know.
Johnny sent us an email this week telling us how it all went down:
Well it was pretty cool as the whole original band had not played together in a long, long time. It was not really planned and [Jonny Ray] kinda casually asked me to go up to Simi Valley after I played a 5 hour gig all day in Long Beach! Thank god my wife was kind enough to drive me and we had a blast.
