In the process, John worked through many different groups of musicians. After auditioning many guitar players, he finally settled on Sam Graci, who he knew and worked with in a former band called ROGUE. Sam fit in immediately, proving that he could master the difficult covers that they wanted to play, as well as being extremely competent at composing original music. At this point the band's name was PSYCHE 101, playing on the psychedelic nature of the band.
The same week that their bass player left, John ran into Dan Burckhalter, an old high school crony, at an Automatic Man show. After watching Dan play around on Jim Wynne's bass for a while, he told him about the project that he had going on and Dan seemed very interested. As it turned out, Dan played other instruments besides bass, i.e. keyboards, rhythm guitar and lap steel, this made the band a lot more flexible as far as what could played cover-wise and originally.
One week later, their drummer quit the band to pursue other lucrative career oppurtunities. a few days later John responded to many drummer advertisement, but was impressed by one he found at the Buffalo Drum Outlet. This is how the band met out of town drummer Mike Shinnick, who was originally from Boston, lived in the Connecticut for awhile and played in many previous bands before moving to Buffalo. Now the final lineup was set.
At this point the band changed their name to KHYBER. This is in reference to the Khyber Pass, but also in reference to the instrumental "Up the Khyber" on the More CD, by Pink Floyd. The name had an obscure and ancient meaning to the band and was adopted immediately.
Soon after the band began playing out, they established a dedicated following. At the end of spring 2000, Khyber released their first CD "Scarecrow Emotion," which they produced themselves out of their own studio, OPM Studios. They are still playing out regularly in Buffalo and the surrounding areas, and they are in the process of producing the second CD "One Cycle of the Sun", by the middle of spring of 2003.