40 years ago, when the world was younger and bigger, I did an LP record album with two other people. For several years I had played music and written songs with Eddie Eanes, and after he graduated from high school and left the area for work, I continued some of the ideas we'd worked on. With Larry Janney playing drums, and providing the recording studio (on the back porch of his home in Christiansburg) and Mike Campbell (an English professor at Virginia Tech) playing lead guitar, we recorded 10 songs in late 1971 under the group name of VIRGIL CAINE, from the song by the Band "The Night They Drove Old DIxie Down".

I sent the finished tap to Capital Records and paid them $2,000 to custom press 1,000 copies. They called back, saying the sound needed to be cleaned up, did I want to pay an extra $25/hour for that? Um, no, go with it like it is...

Over the next year or so we struggled to break even on the project, and after a while wrote it off as one of those projects that didn't meet expectations. The album was largely forgotten until several years ago, when I got a call from a guy in California: he had found a copy of the album at a used record store in Youngstown, Ohio, thought it was great and wanted to re-release it and help us go on a revival tour. Nothing ever came of his proposal; then about a year later, I heard from Nemo Bidstrup of Time-Lag Records in Maine. He'd come across the album and wanted to re-release it. He had a website and a proven track record for dealing with obscurities. He bought a few of the old copies, sent me a contract, and the rest is history, Chapter 2.

Nemo did a limited issue release of 500 copies in late 2011, and got a good response. He's already sent a royalty check, and copies of the album have already shown up on eBay. Some of the songs (but no videos) have been posted on Youtube. Once that happens, you live on, if only in infamy. Some of the songs make me wince today, but the lead track, "The Great Lunar Oil Strike, 1976," about discovering oil on the moon, still seems timely today, after the Exxon Valdez and Deepwater Horizon incidents.

I was surprised to find the original album had an impact beyond what we expected. There have been message board discussions (best album of the century) and an entry in Acid Archives (sounds like a bunch of inbred hillbillies drunk on moonshine). For a low-fi DIY effort, I guess it was somewhere in the middle of those extremes. In the spirit of Mickey Dolenz, defending the Monkees when someone called them a "fifth rate band"  "We're not a fifth rate band, we're a third rate band!"

Well, it took 40 years but it finally made a (modest) profit.