The More Things Change (Cola Moon, 1999)

(cover art to come!)

It's downright rare for one band with the dreaded (or coveted?) "lost bands" tag to have two posts, but Cola Moon has achieved the honor! To get the story up to this point, check out this older post about their debut EP Welcome to the Paradox. This is the second EP and together you can safely consider them to be the band's sole complete, albeit short, album.

Each of the three songs here are somewhat more complex than the four from the previous EP. Each song has quiet and rocking sections and overall there is an added complexity in arrangements and instrumentation. The opener and title track is probably the most straightforward, but just to show that nothing is completely simple, the verses have a ska feel to them. The second track, "Photographs" is a quieter number, but not entirely so. Probably the best of the three is "Last Dollar", which also seems to be a quieter song, but actually delivers some of the most intense moments of the entire set, complete with a flute accompaniment that I'm sure would make Ian Anderson proud.

Now, as the tag indicates, this is a "lost band" - you won't turn up a whole heck of a lot if you google them. Usually a warning sign is if this blog post shows up in your top ten search results! As with many young bands, life intervenes and the rock and roll life was not to be the destiny of Cola Moon. As friends have told me, it's an all or nothing game and those who desire it have to give 100% and risk a lifetime working at McDonald's if they can't hack it. For the rest of us (which is almost everybody) plan B soon becomes plan A, and while not (overtly) glamorous is probably a far less treacherous way of living. I have no idea what became of these fine lads (who, I will repeat, are in the 30's now), but I hope from time to time they break out one of their old EP's and think of the good old days.

Best of Semisonic (2003)

Semisonic is one of the more high-profile flameout acts of the 1990's. They enjoyed some justified local success in the mid-1990's, which was enough to parlay into a major record deal that yielded one huge album with one very huge song, "Closing Time", which will be forever burned into the zeitgeist of modern American culture. Sadly, it never got any better than that for Semisonic, and the hotly-anticipated following album was a crushing disappointment, placing the band on a permanent hiatus that exists to this day.

I hadn't heard any of the other songs here other than the ones from Feeling Strangely Fine, of which "Closing Time" is actually one of the weaker ones. The earlier stuff still stands the test of time, with a little wisp of grunge apparent in songs like "The Prize", while stuff like "Across the Great Divide" deserve a lot more attention than they ever got. It isn't hard to see why the later stuff didn't catch on with the fans, feeling very lackadaisical and lethargic in places.

Usually these Millennium Collection discs are too thin to be of much interest to anyone other than the most casual fans, but I feel like this disc is all the Semisonic I need for the foreseeable future.

Phones Calling (Getaway Cruiser, 1997)

This is a pretty weird one. Getaway Cruiser broke big in 1998 and promptly cracked up soon after. They had been around in some form or another most of the decade with minor releases such as WhirlingRoad (recorded under that name) and Instrumentals. Nothing really explosive beyond the Ann Arbor/Detroit scene, though. Phones Calling throws in some past elements alongside what was to come. Three of the songs would be somewhat/heavily reworked and re-released in their 1998 eponymous album. Another four are 1-2 minute mini-instrumentals, much in the spirit of their earlier experimental efforts. Finally, two of the tracks don't appear anywhere else, and one of them sports a substantially different lineup.

Not long after their following full-length album, the band announced the sacking of lead singer Dina Harrison and the band soon folded, then reorganized as Six Clips, which I know nothing about. There is little substantial information about the band beyond what was written around 1998 and they still don't have a Wikipedia article to at least eulogize them. From what I can deduce, the Peters Bros. were more involved in the production side of the business, which I think included some early involvement with Kid Rock for whatever that's worth. One of the Peters brothers and the bassist on most of this EP (Mark Dundon) adopted requisite silly pseudonyms and joined the Electric Six for a little while. Beyond this, everything is pretty much a big question mark.

California (Scott Thomas Band, 1998)

The sole release of the Scott Thomas Band, California is a tidy document of the world of music in 1998. Scott Thomas additionally has a couple of solo (no "Band" in the artist field) albums, one released before and one after this one. Although I haven't heard either of those albums, it seems like Thomas was keen on making an album that emphasized he was playing with a band, venturing (somewhat) out of singer-songwriter territory. Although remarkably filler-free, the three standout tracks are the title/opening track, "Never Coming Home", and "Black Valentine" (an especially good document of the era). Apparently, I'm not alone in believing this, as all three tracks were pulled into a promotional EP (The "High Fiber" EP). That EP also had a bonus track, "Dying Chair", which I took the liberty of grafting on to this album as a bonus track.

Unlike many of the "lost bands" featured here, Scott Thomas is still musically active, in a band called Ringside. However, the Scott Thomas Band is, for all practical purposes, on indefinite hiatus.

Apartment #635 (DAG, 1998)

I'm behind on everything, so it must be November. This weekend must have been some kind of Throwback Tribute themed event, between the Lords of Altamont and now DAG. DAG is just another one of those discs that fell into my orbit during the crazy college radio days of 1998. They combine a careful study of 1970's funk and soul with some really clever lyrics. Add an involved producer (John Custer) and you get a pretty sharp album. It's hard not to like the stuff here, right from the get go. I mean, who can resist a song titled "Our Love Would Be Much Better (If I Gave a Damn About You)"? The grooves are tight and funky, culminating in the bass-heavy "Worldspinning" (still my favorite cut from the album), and it's hard to believe a song like "You Make Me Feel" wasn't getting airplay across the USA.

Alas, DAG, a North Carolina phenomenon, was already in decline by this album. Their debut, Righteous, was already four years in the rear-view mirror and pretty much all of the buzz had wore off long ago, so rather than building on a good thing, the band was pretty much back to square one with Apartment #635, no matter how good the songs were. An attempt to bring together songs from both albums on to an EP later in the year went nowhere and the band ceased in 1999, a true Lost Band from the 1990's, unable to get out of the decade alive.

Driftwood (1998)

We've run the gamut here of "lost bands" of the 1990's. Some were bands everybody knew that just flamed out (The Soup Dragons), others just faded away (???), and some were always obscure. Among the "always obscure" Driftwood's self-titled album may win the award for most obscure. For the longest time I couldn't locate any cover art whatsoever. Also, Driftwood is completely innocent of putting more work into the liner notes in the music...because there are no liner notes. They also had no label. I'm not even sure what mechanism of distribution allowed this disc to wend its way to my radio station and into my collective.

So what can I say about Driftwood? They sort of fall into the alt-country spectrum, but not every song fits that description. The first song is actually quite good, working off a really good riff. The others are catchy as well, but some of the material meanders into Hootie territory at times (hey it was 1998).

Probably their closest relatives among the "lost bands" label are the Naildrivers, which I ruminated on back in January. Both bands are trios, nominally fronted by their guitarist. Both kicked off around 1995, though it seems that Driftwood was less productive, with only this album and a follow-up EP called Out of Place. All of the extant literature I found on the web reveals no pretenses in their music. It's just straight-up originals with no studio trickery. Sometimes I think bands struggling for recognition really ought to follow the process of working in some cover material. However, I'm not sure that fame and glory was really what Driftwood was striving toward. Again, it's rootsy stuff, take it or leave it.

Hotwired (The Soup Dragons, 1992)

Back in the 1990's, while I was listening to decidedly uncool Iron Maiden and other similar bands, I let my sister handle the trendy of-the-moment stuff. Consequently, as I piled up more and more music, she would go through routine purges as those cool bands eroded into yesterday's news. Figuring this would be a good way to acquire some music I only so-so cared about without having to pay for it, I convinced her to just give them all to me. This was one of them!

Honestly, I pretty much forgot about this album upon acquisition. In fact, to be able to write anything more here, some instant Internet research was required. So here's the deal. This album kind of gets lumped into the whole mess of 1990's alternative (the most loaded of words), when in fact, in 1992 it had the misfortune of going up against the signature album of the decade, Nirvana's Nevermind. In fact, the Soup Dragons, who had nothing to do with what was happening in Seattle (they were from Scotland for God's sake), had actively turned away from the fuzzy indie rock of the 1980's that in part built the "alternative" scene of the 1990's. While Nirvana harnessed all of the angst of an era, the Soups adopted a bouncy uptempo sound you could really tear up the dance floor to. No grunge-punks allowed here!

What was good enough was no good by 1994. The next album, which featured just frontman Sean Dickson with an overpriced army of session musicians, royally tanked, resulting in the "disbandment" of the Soup Dragons (which by this time meant that Dickson elected not to record any longer under that name). The various members of the band (from this album anyway) fanned out into a number of different bands in supporting roles, while Dickson launched a new band, which has been dormant since around 2001.

The Secret's Out (Tom Racer, 1998)

The sole album by Tom Racer, The Secret's Out, is cocksure and sharp, but the band ultimately did no more than than single album. According to the encyclopedia anyone can edit, they folded in 2001 when the band's founder joined the military. Perhaps it was a 9/11 thing, I don't know.

The two "hit" songs from the album, "I Don't Know" and "Never Make a Sound" are actually the really good ones here. Most of the songs are rent with distortion throughout, so if you've never heard the melodies before and you have this one on while driving, it will mostly sound like white noise. Some of the the songs veer into grunge nostalgia territory, but other than "Never Make a Sound" pretty much every song here until the last one runs between two and three and a half minutes.

About that last song. Sigh. Needless to say, it's NOT a 17-minute epic song. Why why why why why (yes, five of them) did so many bands need to put 10 minutes of silence on the last track with a not-so-hidden (except for the title) track lurking somewhere after the 10 minute mark. It may have been cool in 1988 when the whole "CD" thing was fresh and new but by 1998 (actually by 1989) it was more irritating than anything else. And if that wasn't annoying enough the hidden song ends with a feedback tone that last about as long as the entire song. Seeing that this is not a Brian Eno album, I really don't think anyone was writing thank you notes to the band about their classy avant-garde ending. The final insult is another minute of silence that rewards you with the album ending.

All in all this was a good album, but in hindsight there was nowhere left to go afterward. Sometimes this happens, when a band burps out all their best riffs and hooks in one climactic event. Then the patient dies (or goes to Afghanistan).

Songs From Suburbia (Spring Heeled Jack USA, 1998)

Third-wave ska is a curiosity to me. My theory (and I'm sticking to it) is that a bunch of hangdog punk/hardcore musicians with nothing to lose turned to a glut of horn players being pumped out of high school bands across America to help them make some kind of distinctive new sound. Ska was the most natural output, though the brief swing revival of the late 1990's stemmed from this as well.

Spring Heeled Jack USA (the USA was added for this album to avoid confusion with a British electronica band I've never heard of and probably shared exactly zero fans with their American counterparts) rode the underground movement that burst into highly successful third wave ska in New England during the 1990's which brought bands like the Mighty Mighty Bosstones to the fore. By this time, the release of their second album, they were at the top of their game. If only they knew the whole scene would crash down on their heads just two years later, with the band folding shortly thereafter.

As early as 1997 the writing was on the wall. No Doubt, which erupted from the other side of third wave ska in California (and was rapidly divesting itself of any ska-like sound), was beaten down in the charts by some new British outfit called the Spice Girls. In 2000 Moon Ska Records went bust, and a number of bands promptly disintegrated or went dormant in the wake of that genre-killing event.

According to the encyclopedia anyone can edit, all/most of the band remained in music, though none of these new ventures reached the lofty heights of the third wave. Having been in college radio during the final years of its heyday, I can say that the music was a lot of fun when immersed in the times, but these days the whole movement seems pretty much washed up.

Aside From Me (Kaluka Bone, 1998)

They say to write what you know and in this case this is the probably the only instance here (for now) where I actually know somebody in this band and have met most of them. So this actually makes this post a bit more awkward since it's easy to wax on about this band and that band from a healthy distance, like a critic, but considerably harder when you have a personal link to the band.

In this case I know this band from being friends with the bass player since high school. I've met the two guitarists/singers briefly, and I don't think I had the honor of ever meeting the drummer. In 1998 it seemed pretty natural that since they were in a band and I was at a radio station we could help each other out. It was a good debut album, showcasing a bunch of different styles and probably resembling something of what their live set would sound like. The influences are fairly well-studied, with more than a little nod to the post-grunge sound that was starting to dissipate in the music scene around this time. Everyone had a favorite around the radio station, but it was probably "The Waiting" that carried the most traction of any of the songs ("Body vs. Mind" was a personal favorite of mine though).

If I remember my history correctly, the band was formed by Rich and Paul after being let go from some other band (Clockwise?). Ben and Dave were brought aboard for their new band. I think a few more songs were recorded after the album, but I'm not aware of any other album. Dave left the band and a few years ago was seen on national TV behind the drumkit of a performance by Sondre Lerche and is a regular in the band Jupiter One. They added a third guitarist and Ben left the band at some point. They sort of re-formed under the moniker "Mrs. Grundy" a few years later and there's some mention of an outfit called the Border Cops that I know nothing about. These days, other than Dave, it seems like the Kaluka Bone guys are settling down in life, which most people do in their thirties (I'm raising my hand here). I had one of those moments this morning thinking that it's been 16 years, which is the same amount of time between the Beatles appearing on Ed Sullivan and John Lennon's assassination. That seemed like a really long time for that period, but 1998-2014 still seems like a blink of the eye in a lot of ways.

Next time I see Ben, I'll try to fill in the blanks. I don't have the cover handy, so you're getting an awesome picture from their Google Plus site. Of course there's always the comments box if anyone dares to go there...

Welcome to the Paradox (Cola Moon, 1998)

Sometimes these "lost bands of the 1990's" are downright invisible. I can't even find any cover art! A preliminary Google search turned up a lot of conspiracy theories (note to self: do not use "moon" and "paradox" in the same search). With the power of quotation marks, I found a few scraps, two of which were left by yours truly. I spun a couple songs from this EP back in my radio days and one of the stations aggressively archives all playlists. Even playlists that are over 15 years old.

I will tell you what I do know. Back in the mid-1990's I had a very Web 1.0 website hosted by my college. Somehow it managed to get indexed by every pre-Google search engine, something I was probably cool with because the notion of spam hadn't crossed my radar yet. Consequently I would get e-mails saying "ah, I see you like such-and-such" and interesting conversations would ensue. I struck up a friendship with a gentleman in Manchester over our mutual admiration for the early Glenn Hughes band Trapeze (for what it's worth we are now Facebook friends). Anyhow, noticing my involvement in college radio, he mentioned a new band he was helping promote in the UK called Cola Moon and sent over a copy of their debut EP. I figured "what the hell" and gave it a listen - pretty good for a bunch of high school kids (note: they are now in their 30's). We gave them a lot of airplay in 1998 (even reported them to CMJ, their first press in the USA) and I carried them back to California, and that's where those Google search results came from.

It was very enjoyable to listen to the four songs of Welcome to the Paradox. I have to say that they still hold up after all of these years. Over time, my "favorite song" opinion has shifted from "Tangerine Tower", through "Route One", to "Robber's Dog", an aggressive rocker that has stuck with me through the years. I'm not sure what the lads of Cola Moon are up to these days, but they can take comfort that somebody out there is still playing their music and enjoying it!

Batten Down the Hatches (Cheerleadr, 1998)

During my trip to New Orleans, the randomness was messing with me. When organized in artist order, John Abercrombie is at the top of the library list. So, should I be surprised that today's selection, Batten Down the Hatches by Cheerleadr, contains the first entry in my library when arranged by song title?


"A" is the opening track on what is essentially an EP, the second release by the band Cheerleadr from Boston. It's a hard rocking, fairly minimal track, and it is pretty clear these guys were heavily influenced by Nirvana. Now, there isn't anything wrong with that, but six years after the heyday of the new Rock and Roll Hall of Famers, it's almost retro to create music that sounds so eerily similar. There were a few other bands around this time trying to do the same thing, evidenced during my college radio stint, and they didn't achieve much lasting fame either.

The band changed drummers and released one additional album, Rock Album, and then they disappear from the record.

Future Signs (Warm Jets, 1997)

This was one of my favorite albums from my college radio days. Their sound sort of falls between the older Britpop bands of the early 1990's (a scene which most of the band members were a part of) and a very faint leading indicator of Coldplay and its ilk in the following decade. I really thought they were the start of the next big thing, but they were just another casualty of the artist massacre on the Island label, which suffocated many young bands while still in the cradle. Apparently having an album and two singles in the UK Top 40 do not ensure future success.

As for the album itself, the first three tracks are incredibly strong and not surprisingly were the A-sides of the three singles derived from the album. Even though the rest of the album is not nearly as great, the strength of the first tracks will let you easily coast the rest of the way.

Warm Jets is actually one of the harder bands to play the "whatever happened to" game. It seems like their nominal leader, Louis Jones, vanished into the ether. In fact, I'm not sure what happened to any of them, though there may have been some 11th-hour involvement from Alex Lee, who has played with a number of British bands. Then there is producer Glyn Johns, who is a name unto himself long before and long after Warm Jets graced the stage.

We Are Our Shadows (The Bobbies, 1997)

This is another one of those free discs from my college radio days. In spite of some buried vocals in places it all sounds very professional, but there just isn't a lot of spark here. Clearly a lot is owed to the Beatles here, with a lot of the singing sounding like John Lennon on helium and a vibe that hits more in Rutles territory, but without the directness or humor of that band.

You can learn a lot from reading the liner notes. Guitarist/singer Kennie Cruz gushes about "the music" and the Beatles and thanks about one thousand of his closest friends with all deepest sincerity. Bassist Mickey Bliss is nearly as verbose, but if you read between the lines it's all tounge-in-cheek. Finally drummer Buddy Greco only confesses he's a minimalist and leaves it there. Clearly one member of the band was deeply invested in this project and the other two not so much.

As is always fun to do with these "lost bands of the 1990's", I did a little internet archaeology. From what I can piece together the Bobbies were around from the 1980's or so and their first album (and only album other than this one that I could find) Supersongs came out in 1993. Buddy Greco (Jr.) according to a sketchy fan site is the son of the jazz piano player of the same name and his involvement in the band I don't think was consistent and there may have been some others behind the drumkit. It looks like shortly after this album Bliss and Greco split (surprise? liner notes!) and formed The Situation with Iovanna Medina. Recently a Facebook page popped up, with the URL indicating Mickey Bliss as the author so it seems like a reunion of sorts happened a little ways down the road and the band is continuing to enjoy a low-key existence, with no loss of humor.

Universal (Bim Skala Bim, 1997)

Ska is back with a vengeance this week, something to be embraced while reveling in the randomness. I was sort of on the fence about putting Bim Skala Bim in my "lost bands" category, but, although they enjoyed a much more sustained career than most of this category, I ended up bestowing the tag because their recording patterns in the 21st century were very much in line with the others in this category.

Among the third-wave ska bands, BSB isn't exactly obscure, but the further you get from Boston, the less likely you are to find their fans. I remember being a freshman in college and wondering why people were wetting themselves over the fact they were going to play a show at Colby (NB: Colby is about 1/3 Massachusetts-resident students). So sue this poor California boy who only had a faint notion of ska in the California style. Needless to say, I did enough time in college radio that BSB was unavoidable. In 1998 I devoted a fair amount of airplay to their B-sides collection The One That Got Away, which endeared me to their promoters who placed Universal in my hot little hands. What I didn't know then was that BSB was a nearly-spent force with only one more album left in them. Along with most of the third-wave ska groups they were effectively moribund in the 21st century. It has come to my attention though that a reunion album came out last year (no real surprise to a long-time classic rock fan that reunion albums are virtually inevitable).

Before I leave BSB (for good...or until I pick up another album anyway), I must posit my theory about the origins of the 3rd Wave. I think in the 1980's a huge glut of horn players came out of the schools, cast in the glory of mandatory school bands. Aspiring punk bands were looking to differentiate themselves and adopted these horn sections, just waiting around for a band, and transformed into ska and swing bands. Of course, the school band programs died in droves in the 1990's and by 2000 or so there was no fresh blood in the scene and it withered as the older bands aged away. This is my theory. Take it or leave it.

Driving Me Mad! (Dion Knibb & the Agitators, 1998)

I think I made mention of this before that I managed to collect a disproportionate amount of music from 1998 (give or take a year), featuring many bands that promptly went nowhere. Here we have the well-meaning but short-lived Dion Knibb & the Agitators, a proud part of New England's vibrant third-wave ska scene of the 1990's. Dion Knibb is the son of Skatalites drummer Lloyd Knibb and according to the fossilized remains of their website, the band is a sort-of merger between select elements of that venerable old band and some outfit called Steady Earnest. With all of the Skatalite connections, it seems only fitting that they are a bit more trad than their more punk-ish peers from the time and region.

I love that there's a track here called "Monica Lewinsky" - too bad it's an instrumental! There's a lot of instrumental work here, almost to the point of causing nervousness in the ranks of the New York Ska-Jazz Ensemble. The vocals, when present, are a little shaky in the delivery department, which may be the reason behind this, but who knows.

I can't tell from the scanty online information out there if Dion Knibb & the Agitators still exist as a performing unit, but this appears to be their only album.

Swing Is Hell (Demonspeed, 1997)

In the late 1990's, classic metal was beginning to regain its popularity, and for some reason a number of punk bands were releasing full-on swing songs. Yet only one band, composed of various members of the New York hardcore scene, had the notion that the two movements could be combined. Thanks to their bold experimentation, we have Swing Is Hell, the EP that heralded the release of full album Kill, Kill, Kill.

I first encountered this disc back in college at the radio station. I liked it enough to mail away for a copy of my very own from the long-gone Black Pumpkin Records. Songs like "Pogo" and "Green River" stood out immediately and the others didn't take long to warm up to.

Unfortunately, like the swing craze of the late 1990's, Demonspeed called it quits after their single album. In fact, in seems like the album didn't even see daylight until 2003, well after the novelty had faded (the same source also gives two different track lists for this EP, so who knows). I know the bassist Sal Villanueva would go on to work as a producer for a handful of much better known bands, but the others are a mystery. Nevertheless, this is always fun to listen to and I hope someday to track down the elusive full album!

Sweet Life (Varnaline, 1998)

I'm not a big alt-country person. I own exactly zero Wilco albums (actually, make that 0.5). However, I had little control over what kind of stuff showed up at the radio station back in 1998 and even less resistance when it came to hoarding free CD's from that period, hence I still own a bumper crop of oddball music from the late 1990's. And that brings us to Varnaline.

From my quick research notes (Allmusic is a much better source than Wikipedia when dealing in more obscure artists), Varnaline appears to be yet another band that was unable to survive the great label bloodletting that hit around 2000. They had a little clutch of albums in the late 1990's that score points with the critics, but after their label, Zero Hour, died following the release of this album, only one more release followed, and from all accounts it is primarily the solo album of frontman Anders Parker under the Varnaline moniker. Although the band is long gone, Parker continues to perform as a solo artist, still resting comfortably somewhere between Americana and alt-country. While I probably won't rush out and get any more of their albums, Sweet Life provided a nice enough soundtrack for my drive into work.

Glow in the Dark Soul (Spectacle, 1998)

The week is moving quickly and I'm already behind, so I'm keeping things brief. Spectacle is yet another flash-in-the-pan band I discovered via college radio in 1998 (see Arnold and the Naildrivers for more on this). Although it suffers from a little bit of filler in places, plus the dreaded "let's try everything and see what works" problem, it's a nice album and I'm sorry they didn't release anything else. I dig the trumpet accompaniments on a few of the tracks and there are a few tight pop songs that really fit the breathy vocals well. However I wouldn't feel too bad for the individual members that made up Spectacle as they would mostly go on to play in much longer-lived groups, though I've never heard of any of them (Further, Medicine, Beachwood Sparks, Moving Units). Oddly enough, this album was the only one that received a major label release. Like I said, flash in the pan!

Toolbox (The Naildrivers, 1997)

In my reflections on the Hillside album by Arnold, I had mentioned that numerous bands from the late 1990's have utterly vanished. Trying to find information on these bands can be best described as "digital archaeology", executing numerous keyword searches, following leads, and making the best deductions possible.

So who were the Naildrivers? From the little bits and pieces I found on the web, the band was started in 1991 by drummer Scot Parsons and bassist Chet Harrison in Boulder, Colorado. They released three albums prior to 1997's "Toolbox" and I couldn't find names for any of them. Also along the way they shed a keyboard player and switched guitarists, adding Barefoot Geno in 1996, completing the trio. Around this time they seem to have established themselves in Delaware. In 1998, a little radio station in Maine played a bunch of stuff from the album and yours truly officially added "Toolbox" to the library as a promotional item. It doesn't appear there were any releases following "Toolbox" and it seems that the band disintegrated around 2001. R.I.P. Naildrivers.

Where are they now?
Barefoot Geno seems to have had the most success in music post-Naildrivers. Even in 1997 he was mentioned in an article as having a solo career. Sources from around 2006 indicate he was doing well as a local act in Florida. One interested tidbit is that he played in a "three man quartet" and, in addition to playing guitar, played bass with his feet. There's a lot of interesting bass lines in "Toolbox" (go no further than opening track "R-19") but I don't know if that's a factor or not.

Scot Parsons (credited as "Wyatt Parsons" on "Toolbox") stuck around the Delaware music scene, playing in a band called Trailer Park Casanovas. Their website seems to have fallen on hard times, so I'm not sure how long ago that was. His roots in Delaware seemed to be the reason a Colorado band was getting a lot of attention back east.

Chet Harrison moved to Orange County (California) and he is credited as the CEO of an app called "Nimble Chef" that helps folks at home succeed at cooking with pro tips from pro chefs (I think?). This is certainly one of the more interesting post-music careers I've stumbled on. And this has been stated by a librarian who used to be a radio DJ.

Finally, this is not the same group as Pontius Pilate & the Naildrivers, a ska band from Ireland. They are well-represented on YouTube if you are curious about them!

Here are some of the electronic breadcrumbs that helped put the story together:
Early article about the band from an Iowa newspaper in 1995:
http://www.iowastatedaily.com/article_18fdcbe1-b1d6-5265-96dd-36e9fb3eee98.html
Article from a Delaware paper when the band was about to release "Toolbox":
http://cpg.stparchive.com/Archive/CPG/CPG02211997p46.php
Update on Barefoot Geno in 2006:
http://www.marconews.com/news/2006/nov/03/band_q_marco_entertainment_icon_barefoot_geno_reco/
Trailer Park Casanovas website, for what it's worth:
http://www.tpcasanovas.com/
Nimble Chef responsible parties:
http://www.nimblechef.com/about-us