Great Lost Bands Of The 90's: The Flys

As a musician myself, I fully admit being too damn busy with my own pursuit of "the dream" to listen to every great band around me. Part of that was out of self-preservation, a fear that if I heard anything too good, it would lead me to sell my own gear out of anguish and tear at my own flesh and clothes like one of those dudes in the Bible: "I'll never write a middle-eight that fucking bodacious!"

Okay, in truth, I was mostly too broke to buy a lot of music when it was new, but I vaguely remember encountering an album by The Flys sitting in the bins, beckoning to me, but I just never heard the call until many years later when it could be had for a penny.

That's right, I found a near-mint promo copy of The Flys' 1998 album Holiday Man for a penny at a Goodwill store. Having no change on my person, and not finding anything else in the store even remotely interesting, I gave the cashier a dollar and told her to keep the change because I didn't want 99 cents jingling around in my pocket on the jog home.

When's the last time you paid 100 times the asking price for music?

Upon listening to the album, I was immediately reunited with an enjoyable song I recalled hearing on the radio back in '98 called "Got You Where I Want You". At the time, I vaguely recall thinking it might be Soundgarden, but that the singer was just a tad more tolerable than Chris Cornell.

Turned out the band had not one, but TWO singers, Adam and Joshua Paskowitz, sons of the legendary physician-turned-surf enthusiast Doc Paskowitz, who fathered nine children with his third wife, Juliette, and spent the better part of 25 years traveling in a tiny camper and taking "bohemian" lifestyle to all new extremes.

The life and times of the "first family of surfing" was captured in the 2008 film "Surfwise".

As for the Flys, after the release of their second album for Trauma Records (best known as the label that gave us No Doubt, Bush, and Shaquille O'Neal rap albums), Outta My Way, fizzled, so did the band.

These days, Adam lives on the Cook Island of Raratonga while Joshua is an artist based in the San Clemente area. One of his current projects in the establishment of the Aloha Doc gallery in San Clemente, for which an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign has been launched.