Update: The Search for Surfing Moses

My two previous blegs (here and here) may be starting to pay off. Ask about anything for long enough and in just the right plaintive tone and the answers start coming.

First off: Proof that I didn't just imagine it at all.

I heard by email today from @Steve-O, who emceed the show I saw Surfing Moses at. It wasn't a "PointFest" after all: It was a "Dare to Care" benefit concert. Steve-O DJed at Channel Z in Springfield Missouri. Best radio channel EVAH, and I listened to it constantly as I commuted 45 minutes each way to work each day. Steve-O is with a Kansas City station now, and also has a MixCloud presence that looks fun.

So anyway, Steve-O sent me a scan of a local newspaper story on the concert. Quote of interest:

Surfing Moses -- Springfield listeners liked this New York group's single "Let's Go Bowling" so much, they made it the victor of Channel Z's "Cage Match Competition" two nights in a row.

Thanks, Steve-O!

I think I may have also tracked down the brains, brawn and beauty behind Surfing Moses. I keep seeing the name "Bret Reilly" associated with the band whenever I can find any references to them at all, and I'm at the point of being pretty sure it's this sculptor. From his bio page:

During his years in New York, Bret also pursued music. He performed more than 200 concerts in NYC clubs and has written and recorded more than 300 songs.

It's my opinion that Reilly's song "Too Much of a Good Thing," from the soundtrack of the film Dumb and Dumber (here's a Youtube grab), bears more than minor stylistic resemblances to my admittedly fragmentary, incomplete and imperfect memories of the Surfing Moses oeuvre both vocally and in the guitar department. Not as raucous, but there's just something going on there I recognize.

So I used his site's contact link to ask Reilly directly if that's him and if he can help me find the recordings in question. Just now, as a matter of fact.

The quest may be nearing its end.

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?