Jason McMaster recently guested on The Decibel Geek podcast for their Albums Unleashed series. In this appearance, McMaster spoke at length about the formation of Dangerous Toys, recording the self-titled debut with producer Max Norman, the potential for new DT music, the probability of a Watchtower reunion, and more.
A few excerpts have been transcribed as follows:
How the name Dangerous Toys came to be, and how it wasn’t meant to be a serious gig:
“We got a call to do a gig, and the guy was like, 'What are you gonna call yourselves?' And we're, at Mark, the drummer's house, and it's like, you know, he's on the phone. What are we gonna call this shit? Me and Scott are over there going, "I don't know.' I saw this bumper sticker. Bad boys play with dangerous toys, or the one with the most toys wins or, and I was like, and he was like, 'I think you might be onto something that's good enough.' And we agreed, just Dangerous Toys. Just do that. We can change it later if we hate it. Well, wow, this is a filler filler name. Never got around to changing it, and we kind of didn't. Some of us were like, 'Man, it's kind of terrible.' We weren't looking to get a record deal. We weren't trying to be anything other than a bunch of Bozos playing cover songs, having a beer and making everyone smile after they got off of work that week. That's it. That's it. That's totally it.”
On a potential Watchtower reunion:
“Ironically, I rehearsed with Watchtower recently, and we're doing some festivals next year. Holy shit. Yes, just in; that's crazy news. So, you know, well, you know, maybe I let the cat out of the bag, but those are not confirmed… we have been asked to play some festivals. it's possible that we are to do some shows soon. But we have rehearsed a couple of times. And, you know, just on a sidebar, it's weird playing songs for, you know, very sporadically, because I've done reunion things with Watchtower before, but the last one was 20 years ago. The last sort of reunion thing we did we, we went to Amstill Vein, which is just Amsterdam, and played a festival over there. And we did a couple of warmup shows around Texas when we, before we got on the plane, kind of thing. And that was, that was in 2004. So that's what I was gonna say. Is like singing songs that you wrote when you 40 years ago. It's fucking crazy.”
On new Dangerous Toys music:
“It's not mixed, and, you know, it's not ready yet. And there's other new songs that are written that just haven't been recorded yet. You know, there's no budget, there's no timeline, there's no deadline… maybe I can say this, don't hold your breath. Some of us are just into the process and wanna get it. Some of us are, you know, gung ho all the time. 'Oh, that's slowing down. I'm gonna go somewhere else and use my time elsewhere.' Oh, well, then let me put it like this. No bitterness. There's no bitterness. It's just that some people go, go, go. And other people are like, um, let me think about this for about seven years.”
