Ironically, THE...VERS never did an album of their own (although they did one low-budget 45 rpm single on their own "Ignorus" label, selling about 500 copies). Having enough top rate original material to fill at least three albums, they were certain that they would eventually sign a major recording contract, and, based on their experience with the Yancy Derringer "Openers" LP, didn't want to waste any of their great songs on anything less than a top quality, first rate production and marketing by a major label. They were smart not to... they just never got the record contract. Perhaps making a low budget LP would have gotten into important hands, and attracted the right attention, but that's just "monday morning quarterbacking" now.
In retrospect, it appears that the band was so busy playing all the dates they had, week-in and week-out, all over the midwest, never taking a vacation, that they never got properly marketed to the right people on either coast, where the record companies are. While their management helped solidify the band's financial base, and booked them well locally, they came up short in the basic reason for their existence; namely, getting the band a record contract, apparently confident that the record companies would inevitably come to them. That never happened. A textbook case of "winning every battle and losing the war."
Record company executives do their work in plush offices on upper floors of expensive buildings in Los Angeles and New York. They are business professionals who market specialized pieces of plastic. Occaisionally, they make decisions regarding what specific product they are going to spend a very large sum of money on to produce, manufacture, and sell, and these decisions are not made lightly. Apart from that, they spend a good part of their day trying to figure out ways to AVOID all the hoards of wanna-be's who are trying to give them CD's and tapes and enable them to become stars.
Record execs don't have the time to listen to a fraction of the stuff that arrives on their doorstep, in fact, they rather resent having to rent the dumpster that gets filled with all these hopes and dreams of unknown people every day, so they decide fairly early in their career that they're going to be pretty darn callous about it; that it's just not going to bother them, or they wouldn't be able to do their job at all. It's just that simple. And, in case you hadn't guessed, they don't travel one or two thousand miles to hear some band in a bar in the midwest. They just don't do that. You wouldn't, either. And they didn't in this case.
To this day, I can't tell you what it takes to get a record contract. It's not even enough to know the right people, because the right people don't make their decisions based on what their friends would like them to do. A couple years ago, a good friend of Zoid's told him that he did business regularly with Pamela Anderson's brother, and was certain he could get a CD into the hands of Kid Rock. Zoid quickly provided him with a CD full of original songs. When it was offered, Kid Rock put up his hands and refused it, saying, "Sorry, man, I can't listen to anybody's else's stuff. The risk is too great that, if I come up with something in one of my own songs, later, that's even remotely like something I recently heard by somebody else, me and my record company could get sued, bigtime. It doesn't even have to be true; if their lawyers can make any kind of a case, we'd probably have to pay them off, just to save the money it would cost to contest it. So, sorry, man, I just can't do it."
| Years after the band broke up, Mondo was diagnosed as being severely bipolar manic-depressive, a condition that has no known cure, and can only be moderated with medication, although control by this means usually has limited success. He and Zoid performed as a music duo with midi backing sequences, written by Zoid, hundreds of times between 1995 and 2000 as theXpairOmentals, breaking up and getting back together numerous times. Ever the entertaining showman onstage, Mondo was a bit more difficult, offstage.
That collaboration finally ended for good in the parking lot of a club after a gig on September 23, 2000, when Jimmy C. Hall, Jr., lost control, and attacked Boyd C. Williamson with a guitar stand, fracturing Zoid's skull and breaking the middle finger of his left hand. |
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Mondo and Zoid, "theXpairOmentals"
at Noah's Ark, Wis. Dells (left), and Sharkey's, Venice, FL (right) |
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The court gave Mondo two years probation for Substantial Battery, ordered him to stay on his medication, stay away from Zoid, regularly attend his psychological counciling sessions, and pay Zoid restitution for medical bills through his probation agent. He eventually apologised to Zoid, and, despite the court order, was constantly begging him to get back together again, when a massive, fatal heart attack took Mondo on August 22nd, 2001.
Over the years, Mondo and Zoid had performed professionally together probably a couple thousand times.
Was he a genius, or insane? Without much debate, the answer is "yes." But with no argument from anyone, he was a truly great artist. Working with him day to day was alternately heaven and hell, but never dull. A dual-edged sword that cut both ways.
| THE...VERS / today:
Charlie, after years as a booking agent and playing accordian and keys in a zydeco flavored band called Hat Trick out of Milwaukee, now manages a marina on the gulf coast of Florida and plays squeezebox and keys for The Yard Dogs; While they are all friendly with each other, there never was a full reunion. A reunion was held in which the band played, in the late '80's at Brother-In-Laws, a dance club at Wisconsin Dells that Charlie managed at the time, with Lynn Gnatzig and several other old friends and members of past bands Birth and Atlantic Ocean, but without Jim Stein. |
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Charlie, Gabe, Mondo, and Zoid
meet at Gabe's house in 2000 |
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