Heyhey INROCKERS, first off I'd like to say welcome to The Lobby and secondly, I hope your New Year has been amazing so far! It's been a very strange start to the New Year for me with some pretty exciting as well as some unexpected things happening all at the same time.

For many years in the 80s and 90s my band had recorded with, and become close friends with, a very special performer named Lance Diamond who was very well known here in our hometown of Buffalo, NY as an R&B vocalist since we were kids. He had become, in his 40 years of entertaining people in town, a staple in the music scene and in our community in general. Our band's musical relationship with Lance began in 1986, he was truly unique as he was an African American man, at least 20 years older than us and he was known for many years as performing R&B classics in lounges around the area and at the time GGDS were a scrappy young punk rock band, traveling the country in a van and playing clubs such as CBGBs in NYC. But the energy we made together was massive, and over the years we learned a lot from each other, about music and about life.

Lance passed away on January 4th due to heart complications. With his family, some close friends and trusted associates, we planned a memorial performance featuring Lance's ''Diamond Band'' fronted by local singers whom Lance had worked with over the years as well many friends coming and sharing stories and memories about things that happened in his colorful career and equally colorful life. GGDS performed as well, my partner Johnny flew in for the funeral and we performed an acoustic duo version of our song ''Name'' which was dedicated to Lance. There were many speakers, videos and performances, and the night ended with a crazy funk jam with All Stars of the Buffalo Funk / Gospel scene singing and jamming together in a medley of Rick James songs as people danced, laughed and clapped. People were having a blast and wanting more, just like our friend Lance Diamond always wanted always wanted to see them.

My family had a great Christmas time with our little girl Hana opening many gifts and enjoying Holiday sweets, spending tie with our family here in the US and just being a kid. New Years eve was fun too, pretty low key actually, with GGDS choosing to take the year off, we stayed home, watched the''NHK Kohaku Utagassen,''ate''Kuromame,''Nimono''and also grilled up some sausages and other Eastern European foods in an attempt to celebrate both of our cultures, it was actually pretty good! Oh And of course, on New years day we enjoyed some Mochi and just relaxed!

I began an exciting new project this month with a band called ''The Tins'' from the NY area. They had recorded an EP at our GCR Audio recording studios with engineer Justin Rose a couple of years ago and during that time I began to talk to them about producing a few songs for them. That turned into doing a full EP, and we are now well into the production of a 6 song EP! Iﾕll keep you posted on the progress and I'll try to remember to give you some links to some music when we're at that point!

All right, I have a GGDS show this weekend, some more recording to do next month with The Tins and more to come with our Japanese Good Charamel bands as we begin mixing tracks from MOLICE and Pinky Doodle Poodle in the studio next month for a single release in!

It's going to be a great year, I know it, oh, and if you're on twitter, instagram, facebook or anything else really, look me up @robbytakac .have a great month, and talk soon!!!!

Peace

Robby