Van trouble forced the Voodoo Glow Skulls and the Groovie Ghoulies to share cramped quarters as they made their way to Iowa. But no worries. They made an appointment with the Maintenance Shop on Monday.

Nothing else has halted the Glow Skulls in the last 13 years -this isn’t going to faze the group much anyway.

The six hard-working boys from California will be making their way to the M-Shop in support of their latest album, “Steady as She Goes,” and the tour has been sailing along as scheduled, up until the transportation trouble.

“We’ve been looking forward to going to Canada especially. We did a week in Canada and a week in the states. We’ve played a lot of places we haven’t had a chance to go to that much,” says guitarist Eddie Casillas.

The band has been touring for about 10 years, and though it has spent time opening for bands such as the Mighty Mighty Bosstones, the Reverend Horton Heat and the Offspring, Casillas says Voodoo usually does tours its own way. This time around, inviting the Groovie Ghoulies to join in was not a hard decision.

“Their last LP is great,” he says. “It’s one of our favorite records right now. It’s sort of like pop punk meets the Ramones type style. I haven’t been into that stuff in a while, and I caught onto their record and I thought it was the coolest thing I’ve heard in years.”

The Glow Skulls, on the other hand, have had years to cultivate a unique sound between hardcore and ska. The four founding members have stuck to each other like brothers for most of their lives, in part because three of them are.

“It’s my two brothers [vocalist Frank and bassist Jorge] and I that formed this band along with our drummer [Jerry O’Neill]. I mean we have been around for like 20 years now – we are childhood friends,” Casillas says. “We really don’t know how to do anything else and don’t want to do anything else.”

What they do know how to do is use their experiences to make something new, and as each album released has shown, their upbringing has brought about an array of influences; from Cheech and Chong to the Spanish channel, and from rap to Ozzie Osbourne.

“We grew up on everything, from hip hop to punk rock to metal. We liked it all,” Casillas says. “We just thought, `Why not take the best of Fishbone, like ska, and add to that the hardcore and punk rock like Black Flag and Bad Brains, and then add to that some skill level like Iron Maiden or something.'”

The method has paid off so far, with hundreds of thousands of albums sold and even a stint on the main stage of the 1998 Warped Tour. Times still change, however, and the Voodoo Glow Skulls recently decided it was time to split a long relationship with Epitaph Records.

“We basically left Epitaph because we felt we weren’t getting the attention and the push we deserved,” Casillas says. “I mean, we’ve been surviving off of records that have been out for six years. It’s hard to be in a town on the road with kids going `Well, we didn’t know you guys had a new record.’ “

Up-and-coming Victory Records, a label most known for its hardcore and emo acts, went out on a limb and signed a band very unlike any other in its catalogue.

The Glow Skulls released its first Victory album in July, and since then the band has seen the label’s efforts to push the sales, as well as work on getting the band’s video onto national music channel rotation.

“It feels like we’re a new band again,” Casillas says. “It feels like there is a fresh amount of excitement again. When a small label can get your video played on a big video show, that shows that they are trying.”

The album was another first for the group as well, as the production credits on “Steady as She Goes” go directly to the band, who knows better than anyone what the music should sound like.

“It seemed like at that point it was sort of a risky venture when you are leaving a big label like Epitaph, so we figured we’d go all the way and produce our own album,” Casillas says. “We figured it was time and we had the skills enough to take things into our own hands and take the plunge. Who better than to trust yourself.”

He says the future could hold more self-produced releases, but the band is going to keep focused on the tour and the mission of the band.

“We want to show everybody that we can rock, that we’re Latin American and that we can appeal to everybody too,” Casillas says.