October and is available for pre-order now, as well as another show on Spike, Hungry Investors, which is set to debut next spring.

But way before he was a pop culture touchstone, Taffer was a music man. He played drums with a band called Hollywood Joe so long ago it’s next to impossible to find more than grainy press photos or whispers of reverence and secondhand tales of their Sunset Strip days. Vanyaland caught up with Taffer at his home in Las Vegas last week, just before he was about to go out on the road to film more Bar Rescue episodes, with a fourth season beginning this fall. We talked about the role music plays in bars, a genius patent that Taffer has taken out, and what hebelieves to be the real reason Van Halen and Sammy Hagar went their separate ways.

Michael Christopher: How does music play into where you’ve come from and what you do today?

Jon Taffer: Years ago, I was a musician; I took nine years of drum lessons and moved to Los Angeles to pursue a music career. Onstage, playing in places like the Troubadour, the Whisky, the Roxy and all those places, I got to feel the energy music had on environments – and it was very profound for me. Years later, the Knack played the Troubadour, and they had a song called “My Sharona.” When they played that song, I had never seen anything like it in my life – to this day. People stood on tables [mimics the iconic