After opium had dulled the pain of Avalanche's demise, and my breakup with Patti, some facts had become clear. I was no longer enjoying the company of a woman in my life for the first time in many years. I began to see Katherine again, the female vocalist I had performed with and with whom I had a solid friendship and an occasional but intense sexual relationship with. She was responsible for creating the logo for Avalanche, and was a very talented artist and singer, as well as a person I felt very comfortable spending time with...she was intelligent, articulate, funny, sarcastic, politically aware, spiritual, and loyal...another fellow citizen of Woodstock Nation...and whether we were just talking, or partying, or having sex together...and often, it was all three...she made me feel special. She had witnessed all of the events of the past three years from a close vantage point, and was very sympathetic to my pain...and my need for someone I could count on. I was glad to be able to have her back in my life on a deeper level. Although I think she would have been very receptive to a serious relationship with me, I was too shut down from all the pain that the women in my life had seemingly created over the past few months to have the willingness to go there with anyone...and Katherine was never a person who would push me to do anything I didn't want to, which had a great deal to do with why we were so close. She was always very understanding, and is still a very close friend of mine today.
I also recognized that I was saving an incredible amount of money...opium was cheap...and although I was still doing cocaine, there was no longer ten people in my life sharing my drugs and being paid salaries...and I still had a lot of money coming in from my business. I also remembered that I had personally written more than half of Avalanche's original music, and had co-authored much of the rest, and that the public had always responded very enthusiastically to all of it. I decided that the songs were just too good to give up on, and that I had the money, the equipment, the material, and the time, to try again...with one difference. This time, it would be an album. A solo album. In the six months since the band split, my relationships with Charles, Mark, and Barry had become distant, even though I had suggested to them many times that we should get back together. With no response from them, I knew that wasn't going to happen...there were still unhealed wounds there. I believed if I could salary studio musicians to play the drums and the bass parts...I could duplicate most of the other music well enough for the essence of the original band to come through on new recordings. I knew the process would be very time-consuming and expensive, since I would have to lay down the other musical parts in layers, a track at a time, to create a finished product. I knew that the end product wouldn't be exactly the same, but I felt that the window of opportunity for this music would soon close...and that if I didn't act immediately, it would be too late. I would have much preferred to have gone back into the studio with all the original guys, after all, this was exactly what we had been working towards. It would have been better, faster, cheaper, and very healing. Unfortunately, they weren't having any of it...so I decided to try again as a solo artist...doing Avalanche music. Katherine was very supportive of the whole idea...which I needed to hear from someone other than myself. I really missed playing, and the direction the band had brought to my life, so I began selecting the musicians for the sessions. "Going For Broke" was a lot more than just the name I decided on for the album...with all I had invested in Avalanche, it was exactly how I felt...
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