Band History: The Wandering Years
Like all polished entertainers, Jon and Julie spent many years crossing their T's and polishing their Mt Fuji's before emerging butterfly-like as the smooth, smooth performers they are today.
After the bitter "Why I oughta!" breakup of '87, both sojourned forth to establish solo careers -- with varying degrees of success; days forever recalled as "The Wandering Years".
Julie
struck first, casting her edgy folk roots aside to pursue a softer sound.
She lovingly described it as, "music to worm your cat by, like Linda
Rondstadt, only less ethnic..."
After middling success with her first offering "Bippy Bippy Boo Dee Doo: Something smells in the Lazy Susan", she struck gold with "Happy Songs for Sad Clowns". The single "My steak isn't done in the middle" broke big in the midwest, and spawned a successful tour of area Ponderosa and Sizzler steak houses.
But just as things seemed about to explode nationally, 'Po Folks' went bankrupt, and Julie's dreams of a national tour went out with the potato skins...
During this time, Jon wasn't sitting on his hands, (or much of anything else for that matter!) as he too had hearkened to the call of the open road.
Always a shrewd observer of popular culture, Jon attempted to catch thunder in a bottle by capitalizing on the John Stamos fueled mullet hair explosion of the day. His new band "Mullet Over" combined funky beats with down-home homilies served on the side, ala carte -- described by one critic as "Chicken fried steak for the soul, but much worse."
Their first album "Party in the Back" spawned the hits "My House, He Has Wheels", "Blue Light Spectacle" and "My Dear Kentucky Waterfall".
But dark clouds were forming: Jon soon clashed with his new manager Joe Joe "The Sarge" LeSarge, who encouraged Jon to "add a little beef to the cake" by forcing him to go shirtless at most public appearances. Jon was never comfortable with this, especially at raffles and car dealerships, eventually using a sharpy to scrawl "Oppressed" on his chest, thus rendering it unusable. It made little difference: with the cancellation of "Full House" the band was sent to the barber.
Emerging from her steak house malaise a wounded and somewhat bitter woman, Julie organized massive casting calls to construct her all-girl band WyldFlower. It proved to be one of Julie's rare missteps, however, as the band's sound, an awkward blend of Disney-style sing alongs and lewd hair metal, never caught on.
The bands first two albums "We all met in high school, answering an ad by Julie" and "Motor City Mad Tarts", both transparently desperate attempts to establish street cred, sank without a trace.
Julie eventually fired the entire band, but was forced to use previously created art for the bands final album "And then there was Me" - but her basic 'glass half full' attitude shined out in the end, renaming the effort's lone single to "So Fresh Feeling" from it's 'glass half empty' original nom-de-plume.
Jon doesn't like to talk about his follow-up to Mullet Over, and we respect his feelings.
In the end, we're all lucky that fate's fickle fancy didn't fall on Jon or Julie during their wandering years, or m2 might never have come to be.
It's wise for each of us to remember that from fertilizer doth the mighty redwood grow. Julie and Jon's wanderings forced them to realize that only together could they scale that lofty mountain called success. Only together could they craft songs of such subtle perky loveliness. Only together could they afford to print CD's.