Friday, February 28, 2014

Surfing Moses: Could Someone Please Help Me Here?

I've mentioned this before, but it's been a few years so I'll try again.

There used to be a New York City based band called Surfing Moses. (no, not the band you'll find on Youtube, which seems to have formed in 2010 and sounds nothing like the previously so named band).

How do I know about the 1990s Surfing Moses? Because I saw them perform at a festival at the Shrine Mosque in Springfield, Missouri in 1997, after having heard their alt-radio hit "Let's Go Bowling" (not the ska song, a punk/metal kind of ditty) in heavy rotation on a local station. The only other band that I can immediately recall performing at that festival is Sister Hazel, who are still around and still rockin'.

If you believe the Internet, I'm one of only three people who ever knew Surfing Moses existed. The other two are Fallout guitarist John Campos and someone named Bret Reilly, who seems to also be a musician and who registered the name as a service mark in 1995.

So anyway, like an idiot, I didn't snap up their album at the time. And it seems to have disappeared. As an old-time music lover, I've been around the track a few times with digging through cutout bins in the back rooms of used record stores to find rare 45 rpm singles and that kind of thing ... I mean this band has really, truly, honest to God disappeared.

I've searched iTunes. I've searched Grooveshark. I've searched every "bazillions of used CDs" site on Earth. I've trolled the various fan sites for anything resembling this kind of music. Every time I see a stack of used CDs at a thrift store or a garage sale, I dive into it like a buzzard into a steaming pile of road kill, and this is what I'm looking for when I do that.

Yes. It is an obsession. I want that album. Or a CD single of their kinda-sorta-"hit." Or an MP3 or collection thereof.

Or something, maybe even just a comment reassuring me that I didn't just imagine that band. Because this is starting to look like one of those "we live in the Matrix and the programmers' memory cleanup routines must have missed a spot" situations, and those kinds of situations freak me out.

Little help here?

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