Upon returning to L.A., Jason managed to book studio time without the label knowing and record the whole record playing all of the parts in just nine days (this after Ro Sham Bo took at least four months). What I didn’t know was that the night that the Grays split up on tour, their main A&R man at Epic Records had said he’d look into letting Jason record a covers record by himself. At some point in the middle of 1996, I got word that Jason Falkner was putting out his first solo album on Elektra Records. Within a few months, I was overwhelmed with news, bootlegs and an avalanche of pop nerd emails. As soon as we got up to speed, I started a personal page for fun and thought I’d write about things I knew best. Once Vintage Parts 411 (later the Garden of Speedin’) became more of a publishing company that made directories for the vintage car world, we needed to be online. Within a few months, I was back out of the music biz loop and returned to sweet home San Diego to start a family business helping people find old auto parts because the only thing I knew about cars was “this thing steers it”. I probably heard about the Grays’ demise sometime that summer. I remember listening to an advanced cassette of Roger’s Moog Cookbook album with some friends on Sunset Blvd after a show, when I saw Luke walking down the street and pulled him over to giggle with us. Between their singer Luke Tierney and another friend of mine who was working for Imperial Drag’s management, I was getting plenty of insider info. At my short-lived job at a management company in Hollywood in the summer of ’95, their label was courting a band called Silverjet that was friendly with Roger Manning and his new glam-pop band, Imperial Drag. How did we hear about these things before the world wide web? I do not recall. I’m not sure when I heard that the band broke up. Of course, it didn’t help when the Russians got involved…. The animated duo called them “like a cross between Stone Temple Pilots and Nelson” (among other body parts) in this video from the show’s fifth season.
Hey, why won’t you talk to me?” It’s that timely quarter-beard that might’ve help prompt the third main cause of their demise: MTV music critics Beavis & Butthead. “The worst thing is the photos from that era, it’s so grotesque and there’s things in it, bits of food. “My god what was that doing? It was kind of like a chin strap,” he confessed in a 2008 Art Into Dust interview. Maybe if they’d sung about puppies, kitties and rainbows, things would’ve been different. Hell, Jon alone brought “Not Long For This World”, “Nothing Between Us”, “No One Can Hurt Me” and “Not Ready Yet” to the pity party.
Singing songs with titles like “Nothing”, “Oh Well Maybe” and “Oh Nevermind” is not a recipe for success. Why did the Grays split up so soon? Artistic differences? Personality clashes? Did the band really leave Jon asleep in a restaurant while on tour? Who knows? Several things sure couldn’t have helped.