The Joslyns - "Rusty Space Station"

At the beginning of this video, you can hear some of "My Turn", one of the last songs the band did. I quite liked it; it's unfortunate the band didn't keep going. It would have been fun to see how we further developed as a unit. I particularly like the group vocals at the very end of the song. Most of this video though is of my favorite song we did: "Rusty Space Station". Ryan wrote most of this if I remember correctly. I probably just added my guitar parts, which for this number were nice and spooky given the romantic if desolate subject matter. Does metal rust in space? Well, it depends and is certainly a matter of debate. For this song, we'll just chalk it up to poetic license and enjoy the music. We were playing with two of our favorite local bands of that period: The Twilight and The Atomic Crash. One of The Twilight guys died shortly after this show, which is why Ryan ended up joining them later on. It was some sort of tragic accident. We were all sort of shocked by it since we had just met Matt (if my memory serves correctly), and he seemed like a cool dude whom we were looking forward to getting to know better. Sadly, that didn't happen. I don't know what became of the other guys in that band. They had some sort of breakup that ended up with only Tony, the singer, remaining, and basically a new band, including Ryan, accompanying him. Tony still plays today in a Beatles cover band from what I heard. Derek from The Atomic Crash also still plays. I did a couple of open mics with him a couple of years back. I don't know what became of the other members. Both bands were fun to play shows with. So, I guess if you have a local band you like, then go see them while you can because they generally don't last too long. None of the acts on this bill exist today certainly. All we have is this grimy video and the memories if you were there live. The squealy guitar parts I did using a beer bottle (at least that's what it looks like; I can't tell for sure, and I don't remember exactly). That trick is always fun to break out if a song fits it. During the part where the band starts rocking out, I always visualize the space station falling back to Earth, which Ray, our bass player, provided an interpretive dance version of by invading the audience space. Well, this is the last Joslyns video, and I think I only had the one tape. If I find any other cool performances though as I go through the remainder of the VHS tapes, then I will post them here.

The Joslyns - "My Man Frank"

At the beginning of this video, you can hear us play "The Dreamwheel", another one of our songs. I like the guitarline and arrangement on that. After "The Dreamwheel", we kick into "My Man Frank", an older song of mine. I think I wrote this when I was doing Yeast? solo. It would have been in 1992 since it riffs on Ross Perot ("I didn't throw the party; I just clean the room") and his presidential run that year. I never imagined that a decade later, the song would still be relevant and another Bush would be president (this one even worse than the first). It's a fun song to play. It's not in my current setlist, but I can imagine it popping up again, though with luck no third Bush for president. Trump may be an awful president, but he did spare us the horror of a Jeb Bush presidency. I think this is the only Joslyns song I sang lead on. I don't even know how it ended up in the set. We were probably jamming on it one day in practice, and we decided to play it. It would carry over to the next band Ray, the bassist, and I played in, Team Fright, which just played my tunes. Team Fright was basically the Wred Fright solo act with a backing band, and they were a pretty great backing band. Ryan, the drummer, went on to play in The Twilight, whom we were playing this show with. Tony, the keyboardist, was playing in a bunch of bands already, so he carried on with that. I don't know that Ursula, the other keyboardist, played in any more bands after The Joslyns. Basically, we got too busy with our other gigs and retired the band. The title of the song comes from drunk people thinking my name is Frank, which is always amusing. This might be the best version of this song due to the nifty 1960s keyboard accents.

The Joslyns - "Victory Red"

I played in The Joslyns for a couple of years right after I moved to Lakewood, Ohio USA. Ryan, the drummer and band leader, and I knew one another from playing in bands in Kent, Ohio USA, and so it was natural to finally form a band together when the opportunity arose. We got Ryan's work buddy, Ray, on bass, and then added a few more members over the next year or so. The lineup in this video is the original three augmented with keyboardists Tony and Ursula. We were wearing hairnets because I worked the second shift at Bonne Bell where the hairnet was mandatory. This is one of the bands where I mainly played guitar, though I also sang on a couple of songs. The music was a little gothy. My favorite description of us was "a drunk Joy Division". My "speech" in the middle of the song is a bit of political satire aimed at then Secretary Of Defense (er, War), Donald Rumsfeld, who was leading us off to another disaster overseas in Iraq then, but at least provided us with some silly statements while doing so.