In 1993, Patrick Hynes, who played such memorable bass lines on the early Potatomen material, decided to take up the guitar. Within months, his skills developed to the point where it would have been a shame not to use them. So the Potatomen sound began to shift quite a bit, especially in that we began using electric instruments and started, at least part of the time, playing on stage. Although we didn’t get the Bob Dylan treatment (someone in the crowd shouting “Judas!”), we lost some old fans and gained some new ones. For this recording and the one afterward, Patrick played both bass and lead guitar, and with the help of engineer-producer Andy “Andro” Ernst, we experimented with techniques and styles that would have been difficult to imagine in our playing on the streets with a cardboard box for a drum set days. The title song, “On The Avenue,” deals with the often illusory, sometimes seductive, and occasionally deadly charms of Telegraph Avenue, which played a central role in the lives of many of us who lived in Berkeley.
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