Live music and touring are on lockdown right now and fans as well as artists are going through withdrawals. We wanted to come up with something fun to help bridge that distance between fans and artists right now. What we came up with is  something called The Lockdown Lowdown and it’s a Q&A session with fun questions for artists to answer. They’re not your typical interview questions, so it gives you a peek inside of the artists themselves. We’re big music nerds here at I’m Music Magazine and we love learning things like this about the artists that we love. We’re pretty sure that you’ll get a kick out of these, so we hope you’ll take the time to read them. In this installment, we spoke with Chigger, bassist for hard rockers Rahway! 

How have you been doing during the pandemic and how are you spending your time? Have you been working on new music?

I have been doing my best to keep my family safe. My wife and I have a one-year-old at home, so we stayed home and quarantined from March until July when I started a new job. While quarantining, me and guitarist David Cardenas came up with this idea to shoot a quarantine video for our new single “Sugar” off of our upcoming new EP Slumlords of NJ. Each band member filmed themselves performing the song from the privacy of their own homes. Then we enlisted a bunch of our music friends like Don Jamieson from That Metal Show, PJ Farley from Trixter, RA and FOZZY, John Kosco from Dropbox, Saint Caine and Revel at Dusk, as well as other fellow Jersey musicians and fans of the band to lip-sync the chorus of the song. The video became an instant hit capturing over 20 thousand views instantly. During the pandemic, we’ve just been trying to put out as much content as possible.

5 albums that changed your life

1. Too Fast For Love – Motley Crue

2. Appetite For Destruction – Guns ‘N’ Roses

3. Stay Hungry -Twisted Sister

4. Skid Row – Skid Row

5. Cowboys from Hell – Pantera

5 artists that influenced you as a musician.

1. Nikki Sixx

2. Duff McKagan

3. Gene Simmons

4. Rex Brown

5. Rachel Bolan

Your 5 favorite live albums

1. Alive! –Kiss

2. Carnival of Sins Live – Motley Crue

3. Live After Death – Iron Maiden

4. Operation Livecrime ­– Queensryche

5. At Folsom Prison – Johnny Cash

Life on the road; 5 of your craziest/funniest/scariest tour stories

1. We ended up opening for Greta Van Fleet up at the F.M. Kirby Center in Wilkes-Barre, PA and got to hang with the guys before the show. After listening to them warm up in the dressing room next door to ours, I knew these kids were the real deal even though they were often compared to Zeppelin. I thought they were talented as hell. We went up and tore the roof off of that place. It might have been one of the best shows I’ve played with Rahway to date. As we walked off stage and made our way to our dressing room, the Greta Van Fleet guys came to their door way and applauded us and said, “That was pretty amazing!” We earned their respect that night along with many new fans in Wilkes-Barre. We chalked that up for a road win!

2. Checking into a Motel 6 in Chicopee, MA, and seeing blood stains and bugs on the bed covers. I itched for weeks.

3. I remember one of the first road shows I ever played, we were in Detroit. I was so excited to play out of Jersey. I ended up getting sick and sleeping in the hotel the whole trip while the band went out and partied and banged all these chicks in our hotel room, while I laid there sick as a dog! I copped a couple of feels though, so it wasn’t all terrible!

4. I remember performing at a college frat house when one of my bands first started touring on the college circuit, and some chick came on stage when we were setting up. She said that I reminded her of her best friend and she stuck her tongue down my throat. I was like, “Her best friend is lucky if this is the way he gets greeted by her all the time!” Never saw the girl again after that. It was nuts!

5. We were setting up for some Halloween show when some dude came walking into the venue with no shirt on swinging around a machete screaming a bunch of nonsense in Spanish. We were like “What the fuck?” They evacuated the venue and the cops went in with rifles and ended up pepper spraying the guy when he wouldn’t put the machete down. Luckily, no one was hurt except for our eyes, which were burning from the pepper spray after the cops left.

5 favorite movies

1. The Godfather 1-3

2. The Dirt

3. Star Wars Episode IV-VI

4. Back To The Future 1-3

5. Dumb and Dumber