L.A. Rock Band Marks Easter and Member’s Triumph Over Cancer

April 16, 2025 at 04:50 AM EDT

L.A. rock band The Tooners celebrate the rare overlap of Easter Sunday and 4/20, along with guitarist and cartoonist Neal Warner’s cancer recovery, with their new single “4/20 Daze,” inspired by Warner’s journey through treatment at the Disney Cancer Center.

Los Angeles, United States, April 16, 2025 -- As Baby Boomers, the members of the band The Tooners get to see this Easter Sunday falling on April 20, or 4/20, the unofficial “stoner holiday”. These Easter dates also happened in 2003 and 2014 as well as this year, 2025.

As a band, The Tooners commemorated the last time by releasing their single “I’m High.” This year they’re celebrating the occasion by releasing their single 4/20 Daze. The tune’s a metaphor for being in a perpetual state of THC intoxication by relating the lament of a man alone and adrift at sea.

The song’s co-lyricist, Neal Warner, explains that in this particular case the marijuana smoking isn’t just hedonistic but therapeutic as the character in the song is smoking weed to alleviate the side effects of cancer treatment.

Shortly before writing the lyric to accompany fellow bandmate and co-lyricist Greg Piper’s music and vocalist Richard “Buzz” Brissette, Warner was diagnosed with inoperable Stage 3 non-smoker lung cancer.

To show support for his childhood friend, Paul Keller from the Bay Area Prog band Hush and the touring guitarist for the Eighties band 3, made up of former Hush member Robert Berry along with Keith Emerson and Carl Palmer from superstars Emerson, Lake and Palmer, has recorded guitar solos for the track along with The Tooners’ guitarist Jerry Strull.

What might seem like a sad premise for a song takes a surprising turn when The Tooners’ guitarist and a professional cartoon animator who was an Animation Timing Director on the Disney Afternoon shows Ducktails, Chip & Dale’s Rescue Rangers and Tailspin was admitted into the Disney Cancer Center where a biopsy discovered he had a rare ALK+ marker on his chromosome. This rare non-hereditary genetic mutation which takes place in the womb pretty much guarantees he would one day get cancer. It tends to cause breast, brain or lung cancer. The good news, he was told, was that since 2011 there’s been “a pill for that”. A PET scan using a radioactive isotope in December showed a small malignant tumor in one lung and two infected lymph nodes, hence the “inoperable”. However, after two months of the prescribed anti-cancer drug, another PET scan in March and the biopsy of several adjacent lymph nodes showing no sign of cancer, he appeared to be cancer free. The total experience seemed very surreal to him since the MRI on his spine which revealed the lung tumor was originally meant to show the cause of limb tingling and hand and toe numbness. The cancer itself had yet to cause any symptoms whatsoever. Also, being a professional animator and former Disney employee made getting treated at the Disney Cancer Center, right across the street from the Disney Studio in Burbank, that much more unreal. Happy four-twenty indeed.

https://thetooners-rocknrollrehab.blogspot.com/

Contact Info:
Name: Neal Warner + Gregory Piper
Email: Send Email
Organization: Unsigned Records Multimedia
Address: 5805 White Oak Ave # Encino, CA 91416, Los Angeles, California 91316, United States
Website: https://unsigned-records.com/

Source: PressCable

Release ID: 89157611

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L.A. Rock Band Marks Easter and Member’s Triumph Over Cancer

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