We’re celebrating three years of the Classic Interview Player monthly online magazine at DaveLawrenceOnline.com with a cool two-month party. July marked three years of presenting a fresh interview to digest each month, and we featured something from the vaults: Rush’s Alex Lifeson. We doubled the length of the originally aired interview, making it twice as long with previously unheard material from the original interview session back in 2003, and throwing down ten classic live Rush tracks on video, showcasing the band live through the years on some blistering tracks, much of it rarely seen film and video.

Now, making it sort of a “Then & Now” two-month celebration, we flash forward to 2011, and a brand new interview with Puddle of Mudd. This was recorded just two weeks ago when they were in town for Bayfest at the Marine Corps Base in Kaneohe. It was their first-ever show in Hawaii, and this long-form video interview follows up a long telephone chat recorded earlier in July and featured on HPR. Leader Wes Scantlin and I spoke on the phone, and this video chat features Wes and Paul Phillips of the Mudd sitting down pre-show for a fun yet revealing convo. This very fresh, just-out-of-the-oven interview is special as it’s a parallel feature to a new entry in my HPR DL New Release Blog, which will be posted soon with the audio portion of the new interview… Here in the Classic Interview Player, you can watch the same interview, seeing how it all went down, and enjoy ten live POM videos shot through the years. Check out the last two for both a wailing jam from the Bayfest show, and also see them play their new single, Gimmie Shelter from the Re(disc)covered CD of covers… shot just the other night on July 30 in Cleveland.

Enjoy the Mudd, and a big mahalo to brothers Wes and Paul for sitting down with me. I loved hanging and appreciate the kind hospitality and candor. Fun times, dudes. Be safe — aloha!