Myke Todd

I have a drawer full of certifications. Belts and uniforms hang in a closet. And all I want to do is Skate. There is a skatepark two miles from my house. I spend my mornings there instead of doom scrolling and drinking too much coffee.

 I have certifications that say I'm capable of destroying anything I touch. I have some that say I can rebuild anything that was destroyed. I have many that satisfy the micro managing needs of some middle management type or the state. I have a few that declare me the winner of something. I have certifications in weapons and in training my body as a weapon. I have certificates that say I'm a holy person; as if the certification bestows enlightenment. I have some that say I can rescue and treat injury. I have some that make me the final arbiter of what a restaurant or beverage establishment can serve legally. A couple of them tell me with my eyes what my ears have known forever; I'm a musical creative. Or was. I have taken a break from the creative aspect of sound to focus on cleanup. I've kept bad or sloppy records. My filing system makes me want to gouge out my eyes sometimes. The pictures I have taken over the years are too massive in quantity to go through. I tell myself that I measure successes as experiences.

The world has become a weird place. Any move in every direction leads to some purity test that I'm just not designed for. Am I a shit bag for saying that or doing that or having differing ideas about that? Probably. This is why I skate. Skateboarding was my first outlet as a kid in the eighties. It was the most pure thing I can think of. I moved my body and adjusted my balance and my board responded. I wasn't concerned with it becoming anything other that free self expression. 

I've made myself less and less available and more and more expensive. I don't see that trend decreasing. For the uninitiated that is. Many things I do for free or because I care about the person I'm doing the task for. People have taken care of me in equal measure; and for that I am eternally grateful.

 Stay curious my friends. The world is fascinating even with all of the dipshits that abound. 

No music or pictures this post. Sometimes a typed word is enough. 

MYKE

Hi all. I am in the process of doing multiple things so everything is dragging very slowly. I've pulled down some of the music and I will be pulling down and adding back what is currently up. There are several songs I'm not entirely happy with and In the spirit of George Lucas, I want everything to sound like it does in my head. I stopped trying to repair things using AI and moved back to using my studio tools as it gives me more control and hallucinates only when I adjust the wrong value somewhere. Not to mention all the legal and moral melodrama nonsense that everyone seems to be having these days. 

I will have mean 13 stickers soon and I''ll start looking for bands soon to sign to my label. 

I'm working on skateboard decks as well as T-shirts. I've started taking my health a lot more seriously and have made some really positive changes to help with my longevity. I don't want to live forever. Just long enough to learn a McTwist on a skateboard. That was always my golden trick; The goal when I was a young skater. Then I got hurt a couple of times on a ramp and I caught the fear. So, yea. I'll write a post later about what I've been doing in the world other than finishing music and skateboarding. It's all clown shoes silliness. 

Panic the Animals…………what can I say about this outfit. 

I wanted to be in a band with my best friends and there was a brief window when none of us were playing in any bands. So…Panic the Animals was born. Panic the Animals was Me, Josh Smeltzer, Jeremy Stockslager, and Scott Carter and his magical healing foot. This band happened prior to his injury. 

We spent months doing studio work and recording and re-recording everything. We changed the compositions on some songs so often that I had a real struggle trying to decide which versions to pick. This is the case for all of the old music I possess, however in this case, it was exceptionally dense and bad.

This was also the only time in my recording history before or since that I recorded over 100 channels on several of the songs. It was unnecessary to record that way but I wanted to do it. I learned a ton about phase and how tracks sit in the mix through this process.

  The band morphed into Cult of the Centipede but at that point I was on the road a lot with other bands and Josh was working on his art career and he was also working on the Jimmy Neutron movie. None of this stuff got the attention it deserved. Most of my stuff is oddly precient. Who knew that in 2026 that shape shifting lizard people and techno- psychedilcism would be mainstream. We just wrote songs based on the books we were reading at the time; Holographic mind, Behold a pale horse, Carlos Casteneda and David Icke stuff….etc. We had hoped it was all nonsense. Little did I know that I would get caught up in the nonsense….. 

 Without further ado…

Panic the Animals

Album art and the logo were all done by Josh Smeltzer.

My apologies for releasing things out of order. I have a ton of stuff and it's pretty overwhelming and daunting sometimes. I also need to get with people and get their permissions to share some stuff. I'm still trying to track down the original Dead Society and Peggy Lynnfield and the Castaways tapes and CDs. Suckbutton came about through disillusion with Nates' death and a fear of aging out. The music business had changed drastically and was still changing. A close friend and former drummer from other bands I had played with was without a band and I had written two songs while trying to win a barista competition in Seattle ( yea, I won some stuff and I am a lot of things; not only a musician). When I came back to Dallas I played the songs for my friend, Scott Carter, he liked the music but the drumming wasn't to his caliber( I did the drums on those demos). We knew a guy that we had met while recording my friend Fabian's demo, a really talented multi instrumentalist named Brandon Elwood. We added a really funny guy that I worked with at the coffee shop named Brian Covert. Brandon, Scott, and Brian could have been a comedic troupe and I don't think I have ever laughed as hard as I did when those cats would get together. The only other band I laughed that hard in was The Hellions(TX). Those guys are super funny as well.  With that we set out to conquer the world. Through a friend of a friend I was put in touch with Stefen Egerton from ALL/Descendents. He had time to record our debut full length ( we had an e.p. that I had butchered) so we went to his new studio in Tulsa Ok. We had two weeks booked and planned to finish it. We never finished it. A lot of things happened during those two weeks. Brian would forget songs and would become upset with the situation; and himself. And probably me as well. I was a slave driving dismissive dick back in those days and I regret being that way.  I sprained my ankle falling out of our van. We almost got caught up in a Swat raid on a drug den that was right next door to the taco truck that we had all walked to get lunch ;on a break from the session, etc. 

So we tracked 10 songs and had Stefen do the bass parts that Brian couldn't, and we had him also jump in on a couple of leads. He was/is, one of my favorite guitar players and people. 

I think we fired Brian, and Brandon knew a guy named(oddly) Nate that was willing to learn our songs and style. Brandon moved to bass and Nate came in as a dueling lead guitar. Brandon also knew almost everyone in the metal scene at the time. So he would go out on tour with metal bands while I was touring with the Burden Brothers and the Toadies. 

Well Brandon knew of a party one night that was happening at some friends house that were hosting the bands from Ozzfest that year. Well( I believe it was the 4th of July) at some point everyone started climbing onto the roof to gawk at fireworks. I started to climb up there and I heard a voice distinctly in my head say “Get down.” So i did. I blew it off though as my imagination. At that time the guys and girls started climbing down from the roof and egging each other on to jump off the roof. I watched as our drummer started to jump, second guess his decision, and hit the ground with his ankle at an unnatural angle. It was definitely broken. Brandon rushed over to the situation and to help our friend and drummer, Scott. As I pulled his sock down and his pant leg up, the sock swallowed his foot. It was only attached by skin. I worked to assess the situation and Brandon and I worked to keep Scott from trying to get up and we tried to keep him calm. To this day he says he didn't know how bad it was because we were so calm and he was in shock. The metal bands started coming out to look and some saw, and started to vomit. We asked them to go inside and then the paramedics arrived. Even the EMTs would see the injury, and start to gag. The contents of Scott's leg was laying on the grass. He had quite a number of surgeries and now he is doing quite well.I left to go on tour with the OLD97s the next day and I had to drive across country to pick them up from a Willie Nelson tour that they were on. The whole drive all I could replay were the events of the night before. We played a show a couple of weeks after it happened. The band didn't last much longer after that. 

Hi Friends.

Some more tales. BES was a band that evolved out of Cult of the Centipede which evolved out of Panic the Animals. Suckbutton (yea, I hate some of the band names of the bands I played with but we were not mature) evolved out of Bright eyed Suicides. The name also became a problem because the band Bright eyes got super popular. So there is that. I shopped these songs quite hard. I had a friend who was a major label guy tell me," you guys are my new favorite band, but we can't sign you because we aren't signing bands like yours at this time". The band consisted of Myself, Zach Busby, Aaron Lyons, and our singer Nate Kelly. These guys are all amazing people and awesome musicians. If they are still playing. I have been kind of out of touch with everyone for a while. Well, everyone is awesome except Nate. Nate passed away while we were trying to put the finishing touches on these songs. When he died ,I didn't think I wanted to play anymore. I felt like I was out of music. I was also pretty jaded and very snobby about other styles of music other than hard, driving stuff. I have a different understanding with music now. This band started with a lot of other musicians before the line up became solidified. The usual names and faces…

Michael “Patty” Evans, Josh Smeltzer, Jeremy Stockslager….there may have been more. Let me know if there is anyone I forgot if you were a part of this time period of my life. Nate left a grieving widow and three young daughters. They are all grown women now. Here is a picture of Nate. I'm not sure who took the photo but I'm happy to extend credit to that person.

The name of this group came from being a gang of nerds….. In Madagascar there is a species of lemur that gets high from biting the exoskeleton of a group of centipedes. Hence the name…..

 In the early 2000s I was running a studio poorly; when I wasn't on the road or playing in one of the many bands I played with. The people that played on this are people that I respect immensely. I was honored to have captured these two songs from that time. There were a lot of people involved with a lot of moving pieces. If I forgot anyone then let me know…

This was recorded at my former home studio in Richardson Tx. 

I feel like I've been nothing but a bummer here lately. So I'll give out some happiness for a change. I'm generally happy, believe it or not. I do feel like a realist in spite of all of the doctored photos showing me with aliens and sasquatch. I want that stuff to be true. I don't necessarily think that it is though. I've seen some things I can't explain but those are just things I can't explain. In many thousands of hours spent in the backcountry on three continents and the millions of miles walked, I have never seen bigfoot. But in all honesty, if I could stay hidden I would do it. I know from experience that nature will fight back if threatened. I once had a wild pig chase me onto the top of my suv and wouldn't let me down for quite awhile. Look at me trying to wash my hands of their dirtiness. I planned on murdering this pig. For food, I thought.  So I shot it. And it just angered the pig. I can only speculate what happened to the round I fired. I didn't seem to wound it but I did indeed anger it. 

I learned a lot of really important lessons that day. Don't hunt an animal that can become aggressive, alone. Make sure you have the shot. Keep extra ammo on your person always. Pigs are smarter than we give them credit for. Pigs are faster than you are on a straight run. You can't muscle your way out of being a dumbass. I'm still trying to do that through my illness. 

 Gatekeeper is up and posted. Let me know if there are any problems. I'll start posting earlier albums soon. Maybe as soon as today. 

More honest talk….yay for you. I have been sick for several years now. I was diagnosed with a terminal illness. 

On my best days there is a nagging feeling; on my worst days I am a corpse. There is very little relief from it. I'm exhausted from it all. Today has been a bad day. It's why I didn't wait to release this till later. It's  concerning but I'm still here. 

So, I'll be releasing older things now as I don't want to create anything else for the time being. It's funny I chose a picture of me smoking. Don't smoke. It could kill you. I speak from first hand experience.

 So, in having an honest conversation about what you are listening to and hearing, there is a level of disclosure I feel like I need to have. Is this A.I? And the first answer I can give you is No. It's also the easy answer and a less than honest one. At various stages of needing to repair files I had to use AI. All of the parts were played by humans. The engineer at the helm when this stuff was originally tracked was green and inexperienced. Not to mention he likes to needle forever and makes nearly everything unlistenable from over-production. Relax. I'm not bashing someone. That person was me. 

The three little 8 song records were  recorded in Animas, Nm. There isn't a facility there that I'm aware of, so I had to use borrowed equipment. I had the hand drums, a cajon, a djembe and some shakers and microphones, and  a couple of acoustic guitars when I arrived. There is a small artist/ retirement/ RV/ tiny home community out there and most of this was recorded there. I was mourning the loss of several dear friends and a family member when I wrote these songs. I was also experimenting in two styles of music that I was inexperienced in. I've been a punk or metal guitarist and vocalist my whole life. Except for that time I ran off to become an action hero, but that is a different story for another day….