American Hard-rock band DARK MILE released their 2nd album earlier this year titled Freight Train. The band consists of guitarists Tracy G (ex Dio) and Paul Alfery, along with bass player Randy Oviedo, and singer Mark Huff (ex Quiet Riot). Freight Train is a solid follow up to the band’s excellent debut, with plenty of heavy riffs and guitar rockers & anthems, and a ballad, for a change of pace.

When the first Dark Mile album came out in 2024 I’d interviewed Tracy G and Mark Huff (both elsewhere at this site), and with this album I recently spoke with guitarist,songwriter, engineer, Paul Alfery. I’d not recognized Paul before Dark Mile, but in digging up a bit of his past, Paul was a part of the LA scene in the ’80s, and has been recorded a number of albums with various bands over the years, a few of which are discussed here. He also discusses Freight Train, picks a few favorite albums, and shares a few stories from the old days.

*Check out Freight Train either on Youtube or Bandcamp. And check out the links at the end!.

The CD is just the cover art and the card, so I’m assuming you guys have done this all independently.

Yeah, we did it independently this time, Kevin, only because the last one …because obviously the label does what the label does. But these days it seems like labels give you kind of a 30-day window where they do a little bit of social media promotion, and then it’s kind of on to the next thing.

So, it’s hard to commit to a two, three year kind of tying up that record when you’re going to get 30 days or so of promotion. And, beyond that, it doesn’t seem like a whole lot’s happening. And truthfully, as much as I hate to say it, we didn’t sell as many CDs this time, but we made more money this time doing it on our own. And we’re not really doing this for the money. One of the interesting things, lately is a few people have called me about, Eddie Trunk talking about how, if you’re a band doing 80s hard rock and you didn’t have a hit in the 80s, you are wasting your time and spinning your wheels. Here’s my thing with that, so if guys like us just stop doing it completely and a bunch of other people join in, well, then this type of music just dies. And we still love this kind of music. We still like making this kind of music. I think you have to do it out of passion, rather than because – let’s face it, at this point in our lives, do we think there’s a chance that a major label deal and a giant tour and all that kind of stuff? Yeah. Pretty unlikely, obviously. But, still, there’s a core audience that loves this kind of music. We go on the Monsters of Rock Cruise every year, and that’s a great example of a really dedicated fan base that still loves this kind of music, and they turn out for that.

As a rock fan, I like it because I like the older bands that are still doing something new as opposed to those that haven’t done an album in 20 years and they’re still just kind of milking it. So, for me, I’m going to be honest, I initially picked up on this because I stumbled across you guys and the mentions of Tracy, because I know my Dio stuff and that.

Sure.

…And Mark from Quiet Riot. So, I thought the name association alone would have been a little more, I would have seen a little more out there.

Yeah, we thought the label would kind of run with that. To be honest with you. And for whatever reason, they didn’t.

I don’t think that we’ve ruled out the possibility of doing another label thing, I mean maybe for us it’s just not a good fit and that’s not necessarily the labels fault. The other thing is the label’s in Germany, we’re obviously over here. The other thing I guess would be, we’re not a touring band at the moment, and that’s obviously that’s a part of it – bands that are out there and slugging it out and trying to tour. What’s interesting to me is, I see people talking about how, well, the music business has changed, Spotify doesn’t pay, and people stream music these days, but then I also find people talking about how tours are extremely difficult because it’s so expensive to tour. So, what do you do to try to find the sweet-spot where you can still do this.

But we’re working on another record right now, because we all still love doing this and it’s a great bunch of guys. That’s the other side of this thing is, Tracy and I have been friends for many many years, Randy the bass player, I’ve known him for a long long time as well. Mark obviously for just the length of the time we’ve done the Dark Mile thing, but he’s also a great guy.  So, it really makes this an easy project to work on because it’s doing what you like to do with a bunch of friends.

Have you guys done any shows? I know Mark kind of lives far from you guys correct!?  

He does, and this may be my hang up more than anybody else’s because we’ve talked about it, but you know obviously with Tracy having done the DIO years and toured on that level, and Mark too to a certain extent, it’s hard to start from scratch again, and, go out and do little clubs and try to draw people. And I guess I look at it like “man those guys paid their dues and they played big shows”, and so I’ve tried to look for opportunities. I mentioned that Monsters of Rock for example, that’s a cool situation because it’s a built-in crowd. People go on that cruise because there are a bunch of bands on there.  And the truth is, there’s a band called ‘Midnight City’, that is also a Pride and Joy band. So, actually, they were on the cruise last year; they’re on the cruise again this year. So, there is that side of it, and that would be a great opportunity to play a show like that because there’s a built-in crowd for it.

I talked to those guys previously, after the first album came out they had said you guys were already writing for the second album. So how fast do the albums come about for you guys?

We usually finish something within a year, and sometimes a little sooner. It was funny, the first record we finished Tracy said, “Well do we have to stop?” And I said “No, we can keep going Tracy”. So, we started working on stuff right away, and in that instance Tracy still had a fair amount of material from a project that he had worked on a few years back, and I heard some of that material thought it was really cool, so we started working on that.

This third one, at least so far – I probably have written a few more tunes, and so I guess the one thing about that is the way Tracy writes and the way I write are kind of two different things, so we’re not making the same record over and over again. Bands sometimes, I think have a difficult time, obviously you don’t want to strike too far away because you don’t want to alienate fans of your music; at the same time, nobody wants to hear the same record, two or three times in a row.

Yeah, I get a bit of a bit of differences in this one. The first one to me seemed to more 80s, almost a little more radio friendly in places. This (2^nd) one, I get a little more heavier, but you have the ballad on here, which was something you didn’t have on the first album.

Which is interesting because one of the things we got a knock on the first record was “Well there’s no ballad”. So, we did it on this one, and then of course somebody came out and said, “I don’t really like the ballad”. You know what you can’t make all the people happy all the time.

It’s funny because in the ‘80s bands did ballads because that was their way to get on the radio.  

There’s the other side of it is getting on the radio. What a tough deal that is! I’m trying to think…so, on the cruise last year, one of the XM Hair Nation DJs was on there, and my brother got stuck with him at the airport, and they got delayed. So, Dangerous Darren, I think is the guy who he goes by. Anyways, so my brother spent a couple of hours talking to this guy, so when they saw each other on the cruise my brother said, “Hey, let me introduce you to Dangerous Darren”. And I said, “I don’t have XM radio anymore because Hair Nation plays the same songs that are 35 years old, over and over and over again”. And he said, “Yeah, I know what you’re saying .”..I said “Is there any opportunity for new music?” I mean bands like Whitesnake have made good new records since ”Here I Go Again, which they play, on repeat forever. And he said, “We’re pretty much tied to a pretty strict playlist, and it’s the hits.” And of course that’s the truth with classic rock across the country here – pretty much it’s, Zeppelin, Skynyrd, 38 Special. Great bands, obviously, but all bands that have been around for 40 years. You’ll never hear, Eclipse, if you’re familiar, is a band from Sweden.

Yeah, I’ve got a few of their CDs.

Great band. Eric is a strong songwriter and I’ve talked to him a bunch on the cruise because they’re on there every other year. They’re doing great as a band, but obviously don’t get played over here. So, the reason they do the cruise is it gives them some sort of exposure in the United States that they really don’t get through radio, because radio just doesn’t play their stuff.

There’s a lot of good bands over there. All the post-reunion Europe albums have been heavier and rockier.  I saw them when they played over here in Niagara Falls, New York at the casino and in 2016 when War of Kings came out. It was a 450-seat theater and it was like just over half full.

Yeah, it’s just tougher these days. Music competes with a lot of stuff these days too. I mean, that’s the other side of it, is that there’s so much stuff to do these days and music competes with all of it.

Can you tell me a bit about some of the songs, kind of how you guys develop them. and was Mark in on the writing on the first album or was it was all kind of done before he joined?

Most of it was done and for the most part, lyrics and all that stuff are usually either Tracy or I. Mark’s a great singer; he’s got super great character to his voice. But he’s still exploring the whole lyric writing and vocal melody thing on his end, so we’ve tried our best to try to kind of give him some guidance there, and we just absolutely love the tone of his voice. I mean that’s just one thing, it doesn’t matter how well you sing – if you don’t have that cool character to your voice, and he’s got that.

On this one, on the title track “Freight Train”, I kind of had more (I guess) to do with that particular one. I just was reading a book at that point, and it’s basically about a loner guy who shows up in these cities and runs into trouble and, takes care of things. So, it seemed like a good subject to write about. We’re always trying to write songs that are, a little deeper than kegger parties and Camaros, which, as you know, the 80s is so full of…or hot women or… It’s tough and it’s not like we want to get too deep and philosophical but we’re certainly trying to write a little more mature in that sense.

Some of the other songs on Tracy had, prior to the DIO gig, Don Arden was his manager. So, they had worked for a while and basically Don wanted to try to put Tracy with somebody and put something together that they could then basically shop a deal. So, Tracy worked with a few different singers at that point and so there are some songs left over from that period of time. And we kind of freshened some of those up and used those for the second one as well. So, some of those songs, they go back a ways, but we did try to freshen up a little bit.

There’s a lot of good riffs and a lot of heavy guitar, obviously throughout it with two you guys.

That’s another interesting side about Tracy is, obviously, he is kind of a heavier player. And, when we talked about doing the Dark Mile project, but he was doing much heavier sounding stuff. I was really the one that approached him and said, “Hey, what if we did something that was maybe a little more like the Dio days!?” I probably go back earlier Dio days than Angry Machines and that kind of stuff.

Tracy’s guitar playing brings a uniqueness to this because he’s just got a very unique style and a certain sound. And I think it works well because I probably represent a more, (I don’t know what’s the right word for it) I guess the more pop-metal – melodic side of things. I’ve certainly written things that probably aren’t that far away from Bon Jovi. Tracy tends to write heavier than that.

You guys only did one video. Did you guys do that all yourselves?  

No, I think that one we had a company do it for us. We’ve since found somebody who, because AI these days is all the rage and Tracy has a buddy that contacted him and did a video for Tracy. For The Tracy G group. It’s an instrumental tune, and it’s on YouTube… But anyways, really cool AI video. We’re looking into doing something in the near future on that. So, I think there’ll be something else that comes along here pretty quick.  

Can you talk a bit about a couple of the songs that kind of stand out for you? I like things like “Eye On You”, “Lost”, and “World’s Gone Mad”, which is a single, and “Reason” – the Ballad. So, kind of stands out for you as far as ‘if you guys were to do a set list’. What do you think you would have to pull from this?

It would be a combination. We would certainly pull a few songs from the second one. The first one, obviously, we probably got more traction because it was attached to a label. And some of those songs… I obviously look at Spotify and look at streaming numbers and all that kind of stuff, and certainly songs like “The Boy” has a ton of streams, comparatively speaking. But, I think you just have to go through and pull out what you think are your strongest songs and put together a set list based on that.

We would like to get it together and play live. It would be really a cool thing. We’ve certainly talked about it, and I’m certainly not ruling that out.

I want to ask a bit about your before Dark Mile. You were in Gale Force with Tracy. I’ve looked that up a few times on Discogs and I don’t see a copy of it for like under 60 bucks or something.

Which is ridiculous. So…That was a project with Michael Drive, who was the singer for Barron Cross. If you remember Barron Cross, they were like a Christian metal band, kind of at the same time Stryper was doing what Stryper was doing. And then they broke up for whatever reason. But I think they have recently gotten back together and they’re doing some shows; that kind of thing. So, it was a cool project. At the same time Michael had very definitive ideas of what he wanted to do, and I guess I had fairly definitive ideas of what I wanted to do, and they just didn’t quite line up. We’ve talked about that too. I will say one thing; Michael is incredible about the accounting aspect of it – we all get a little bit of money every quarter and, the spreadsheet he sends us, I think, man, this guy is on it. He’s really good at it. So, it’s a wonderful thing that that is a project that continues to generate a little bit of money.  It’s not, (again) not the real reason we’re doing this, but he has a pretty good fan base, and that really helped with promoting that project. And of course, Tracy’s also got a pretty good fan base and Mark has some too. So, we certainly count on that.

I did a project, I guess 2021 is when it came out, called ‘Walk the Walk’. So that was on AOR Heaven. And that record actually, as far as sheer numbers sold more than anything else. So that’s five years ago. And AOR Heaven was a really cool label. They did a really good job. I thought the promotion that they did for that record was incredible. I mean, I was really busy.  It was right in the middle of COVID, so it was a very strange time, obviously. But I did a ton of interviews and there were a ton of reviews online, and it really kind of propelled that record to do some numbers because the word got out. That’s really the key these days, when you put a record out, it’s finding the way to promote it so that it really gets noticed, and obviously, it just gets harder and harder these days. There’s obviously Facebook, there’s TikTok, there’s Instagram; there’s lots of different things. And, we’ve all talked about it would be wonderful to find somebody who had like the magic path to really getting the word out.

What else you did you play in prior to this; what other bands were you in, and what did you grow upon?

Tracy and I were playing around in the Southern California area, at about the same time. Ironically, and this is just a goofy story but we’ve talked about this, and I think it was when we were initially starting to talk about doing the Dark Mile thing and talking about what influenced us and all that and I told him Well, I saw Van Halen when I was 15 years old.

And he said, Yeah, I would have been some of those shows. And we started talking about the specific show because I mean the first time I saw Van Halen, it just changed my life. I was like ‘Wow!’ Such an inspirational thing, and I just thought well I got to learn how to play guitar. So, we ended up talking about it. It was in a bowling alley; cost a dollar to get in. They were doing covers for the most part. This was really early, this would have been 1975, maybe 1976, right around that time. So they’re still not signed yet, they’re just a local band. But Tracy and I are at that very first same Van Halen show – we don’t know each other yet, we haven’t met each other, but we’re at that same show, which is a kind of an interesting thing. So we’ve talked about the fact that while neither one of us plays anything like Ed, he was absolutely an influence.

And just watching those guys, do what they did and follow the path that they did. I mean it was really a cool thing to witness. Great band.

So, Tracy was playing around in a band called ‘Riff Raff’, I think, at the time, and I was in a band called Inside Out, and we were both doing the Sunset strip. And there was lots of other areas, the clubs that were off the strip but still part of that whole kind of scene. We did all that for a number of years, and of course, there was that period of time where a lot of bands are getting picked up. In some cases bands that I don’t think really deserved to get picked up but they had the look and they kind of sounded like what the whole ’80s hair metal thing was at the time. And of course you just hope that you got caught up in all that, but that didn’t happen. But Tracy, on the other hand, I did watch him. I heard through the grapevine that he had got the DIO gig. And that came about, I think, because of a band called World War Three.

That was what the guys from Dio’s band.

Yeah, Jeff Pillson was in that at one point. And I think that what happened is, Dio was looking for a guitar player and Vinnie (Appice) said, I know somebody. So Tracy got the call for that, obviously. I think at that point, I’m still in California, but I got a call from Tracy at one point, and we didn’t know each other well yet, and he said, I don’t know if you remember me, my name is Tracy Grijalva, and I said, You’re the guitar player for Dio. I know who you are. And he said, I’ve got this Roland product that I can use some help with. So we connected on that he was starting to record demos. I knew how to use the digital recorder that he had. So, he came over to the house and that is kind of the start of the friendship, all through that.

Other than Van Halen, what sort of stuff did you kind of do? Were you a regular show goer?

Oh, yeah!  I mean, pretty much on the Sunset Strip as many weekends as possible. And obviously, there was just a lot of great bands out here doing that whole thing. There were bands that I thought Why didn’t these guys make it?  It’s always such a right place, right time, stars aligned a certain way. You never know why.

There was a band out here called ‘Smile’. They did shows with Van Halen all the time. And they were certainly a different band than Van Halen; they were not like them. I would call them more of a straight-ahead rock band and not kind of the party-rock thing that Van Halen was known for at the time. But incredible band! Great front man, great guitar player, really good songs. They signed to Curve Records, put out a record, apparently went out and did a little bit of a tour, and it just didn’t go anywhere. I just thought, These guys, I felt like they had everything going for them that, in many ways Van Halen did, and it just didn’t happen.

But yeah, a lot of really, really good bands I saw. Obviously early things. I remember going to a club and seeing a band called ‘Sister’ and thinking, Well, this is certainly interesting. And of course, that ended up being Wasp eventually. So, it was kind of interesting to see certain things develop. There was kind of the musical chairs thing – you watch guys go from this band to that band and all that kind of stuff. Nikki Sixx was knocking around back then doing that band London. We were playing at a place in Pasadena, California. It was a sandwich shop in the daytime, but a club at night, and it was certainly a long ways from the Sunset Strip, but many of the bands that played the Strip would also play this place. So, I went by to pick up a check from playing the weekend before, and the booker tells me, You should stick around tonight. And I said, Why? And he said, Because there’s this band playing, I think you might find that they’re interesting. And I said, OK, who is it? And he said, well, They look a little bit like the New York Dolls. They’re called Motley Crue. And those guys walked out and… it was among their earliest, earliest shows, because I still have the single that Vince was handing out that night, which I think is “Toast Of The Town”, and some other goofy song on there. So, it’s pretty rare single these days.

So, obviously I saw that and thought, Well, these guys look like they’ve got some money behind them. And they certainly had the image, and the songs were pretty catchy then too.

Did you see Y&T out there a lot?

Lots. Yeah!

Another band that didn’t become so big…  

Yeah, there’s a great example, right!? Why didn’t they get bigger?  They play the Monsters Rock Cruise, that I keep talking about. They’re on it a lot. And people love them and know the songs and all that. But, again, that’s a very dedicated crowd to that kind of music. Other than “Summertime Girls”, Y & T didn’t get a lot of radio play.

Yeah, that’s too bad. I have a friend up here in Canada who put out a review book on them last year.

And Dave Meniketti is the nicest guy. And sounds great. He’s a great example a guy who’s been in this business for a long, long time…And obviously, lots of us are not young guys anymore, but when Dave sings; he can belt it out and he plays guitar great.

What else do you guys got on the go, musically

So Tracy, he has another project that he’s doing, I think it’s just going out as the Tracy G Group. And there’s a new singer and they’re working on that. Mark, I think, he does some painting and so he’s busy doing that kind of stuff. I tried to kind of get out of the musical manufacturing industry, but it’s like once you’re in it, it is hard to get out of it. So, I work for an independent rep firm now, really just part-time, which is really cool. My boss is incredibly nice about it; he knows that I don’t want to do this eight hours a day, so I do it for a part of the day and then it frees up my afternoons to do the recording thing.  And of course, I’ve got multiple projects going too.

Actually, there will be a new Walk The Walk record, which is about to come out. Really, really good singer, originally from Iran of all places. His name is Hadi Kiani, great vocalist, really, really good. I did all the instruments and he did the vocals. And, we kicked that one around for a while. We approached Frontiers. Frontiers, it seems like they’re looking for little supergroups now. 

Yeah, they’ve got a lot of bands that they seem to put together and they put on an album and you never hear from them again, until they do a volume two or something.

Yeah, ever since Alessandro Del Vecchio left that label, it’s not quite the same. I mean, obviously, he was a very important part of things And, that first Dark Mile, Alessandro was still the guy at Frontiers at the time, and he got back to us and said, I like this. We might take a chance on this. It didn’t happen because somebody on the team apparently just didn’t have complete faith in it. But Alessandro was always very kind and said, I like this record. I think it should be out there. 

Can you give me five albums (roughly), from your youth? 

The first Van Halen record, Absolutely! I’ll go with the first Montrose record. That’s even further back. Rainbow Rising. I’m going to say Deep Purple Stormbringer And, this is an odd one but Accept Balls to the Wall – I Love that record! I’ve always thought the guitar tone on that song. I mean it’s just a loud Marshall, but they just somehow captured a guitar tone that I think a lot of people go, How do I get that sound?, because it’s just great.

There’s a lot of good European bands are still going; Helloween I listen to them once in a while.

Sure. And Wigwam is a band, they’ve been around a while. Absolutely love that band! And they’re still out there. They’re still slugging it out. And then, of course, the new guys, I would put, Eclipse and Heat. There’s quite a few, you know the guys are probably in their 30s, 40s, and they discovered this music and decided to give it a go. 

There’s that band called Nestor…

Great band. Love that band It’s funny you say that, the year before on the Monsters of Rock Cruise, they did not announce Nestor as being part of it. And because we’ve been on some of these cruises, we go to this meeting where they ask questions and all that, and we said, What are the chances Nestor is on the boat next year? And Larry, who runs the cruise, said, You might just want to keep an eye on things. So we knew that they were booked. They were on the cruise last year. Just great guys.

It’s really funny, too, my wife wanted to get a picture with those guys, so we were walking, down a hallway in the ship and those guys were all standing outside the bathroom. They yanked the lead singer out of the bathroom to take a picture with my wife. And I just thought, Just let the guy use the restroom, please (lol)

LINKS:

https://darkmileband.bandcamp.com/album/freight-train

https://www.facebook.com/darkmileband

https://www.instagram.com/darkmileband

https://www.youtube.com/@DarkMileBand