Bands of the Lost

When I go out looking for music, movies, and art, I'm really only interested in things I've never heard of before. If it's something that looks familiar, I probably don't care. It's not that music that's become well-known or popular is bad or anything, but it's too easy. I want a challenge.

When you start to dig deep, you find out that it's amazing how much information and media has been uncatalogued, lost, or forgotten, even in the age of infinite information.

It really started in three places : a thrift store, a college radio station, and a dumpster. This is where I found three of my favorite albums. I didn't realize that they were unusual at the time, but I'd eventually come to realize that they'd all gone largely unnoticed by a larger audience. It became my mission to make sure they got the attention they deserved, but I didn't really know how when I started. There would be a day when someone else would seek out information about the moments of art captured in these albums, and I didn't want them to find nothing, like I did. For their sake, and for the great artists who made these things.

Tell Me How to Live by Wazmo Nariz, found at a Goodwill.

Have Landed by The Gazillions, found while I was a DJ at my college radio station.

Maestro of the Guitar by Rudi Vannelli, found in a dumpster outside of a library.

There were obstacles, though : two of the albums were recorded under pseudonyms, and the last guy was dead. Obstacles, not problems. Exciting challenges. Off and on, I spent the better part of ten years chipping away at the mysteries, losing hope that they'd ever come together. But some nights, after work, I'd spend hours trying to figure out new leads. They paid off.

I found the widow and friends of Rudi Vannelli, a man who had died at the age of 41, decades ago, after recording a single album, and I was able to write a small biography for him. It's the only one that exists, that I know of.

I talked to the far-flung fans of Wazmo Nariz, until I accidentally found someone who was friends with him, and a wonderful correspondence began with the man behind the band. For him, too, I was able to create a short chronicle of where the band had come from, why they fell apart, and where he was now.

The same thing happened for The Gazillions, a one-album band recorded under a dense cloud of pseudonyms. Through a lineage of loosely-associated bands, friends, and record labels, I found the man behind the music, and once again, I published a short history of the band, and in doing so, helped bring life to the band's second unreleased, lost album, 20 years after the first had been released.

My mini-biographies on all three of these artists became first-page Google results, so it became clear that I was filling in some missing spaces… in the event that anyone ever wanted to look.

There are a thousand reasons why these apparently unimportant things are important. The weirdo '90s kids movie Creating Rem Lezar. The unknown cover artist for a specific 1970s edition of A Wrinkle in Time. The composer of an '80s toy commercial jingle. These moments of art are important, and I'm deeply motivated to find the answers to questions nobody's really realized they may have been asking. Every artist deserves appreciation, and the stories of art and artists who have tried, successful or not, deserve to be recorded. The story of a life expands from these talismans, when you notice them.

It's something I do for fun, as a hobby, as a writing exercise, and as a reason to force myself out of an anxious, shy shell. But I really do it as an artist trying to understand how to define success, through the lens of other artists who have existed just outside of the traditional definition of success, even though they're some of the best creators I've encountered.

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The perfect extension of this, the kind that becomes a reliable income, has a lot of moving parts; reissuing and remastering albums that never had a modern release for a larger audience, conducting video interviews with artists, finding a bigger audience to share this forgotten art with, but most importantly, working with artists to show them appreciation, and help them find closure and compensation whenever possible, or needed. It's not about some vague, overdone idea that art unites the world. It's about the very big meaning hidden in very small things, and making sure that those things are not lost.

It's almost crass to monetize this kind of thing. Ads that run against these biographies earn a few cents a month at most, and definitely not enough to sustain web hosting fees. I don't know how one would sell membership to a peepshow into someone else's life, and to an interviewee's gracious volunteering to take time to answer my questions. It's not something to get rich off of, but evolving into a bizarro, fun re-release record label feels like it would be the ultimate conclusion of this process. Like everyone else says, when it comes to something they're dedicated to, it's not about the money. But money sure helps sustain the creation of positive things.

There's so much out there left to find, and that's exciting.