(Kind of a crappy way to start off, but that's what you get for being anonymous) Hi, Brendan Jones here, former front man of the musikal phantasy troupe known as Zsu-Zsu's Petals (only due to a tragic misspelling which has haunted me lo these many years). I was scooting around search engines recently in an attempt to stave off a wave of brutal boredom, when I discovered that someone - besides myself - had actually bothered to post mention of my old band on this new-fangled contraption dubbed the "Inter-Net"! Imagine my surprise! No, really - go right ahead and imagine - I'll wait....

Anyway, I just wanted to say that I was really flattered and pleased. Judging from the pretty obscure stuff you were able to cull for the site, you must have been pretty close to our little circle. I don't even have a lot of this crap! (Not one second of video or audio from our live shows do I own - which means I really wish I could download "Sir Rockalot" and "Just A Reminder"!) But I do have some fliers and miscellany you don't which I will attach. I'll also let Patrick and the boys know about your site so that they might contribute as well.

I appreciated greatly your analysis of the band and I agree with your summation of our appeal (such as it was). We had shitloads of fun (scientists have struggled for ages to accurately quantify the measurement "shitload", recently deciding it must rest somewhere between "butt-ton" and "a fuck of a lot" ) but we didn't all agree on where we were going. Pat's a really funny guy and appreciates silliness on a sublime level, but he is first and foremost a serious musician and composer (the man's god is Frank Zappa). I have always been a bit bi-polar - I enjoy entertaining people, but can only seem to do so through comic self-deprecation (a very theatrical form of insecurity). We had some disagreements about the skit comedy versus the sonic assault aspects of our presentation. But, really, I think those weren't the main problems. Mostly we just realized that our crowd wasn't growing, that no one in the press or music industry seemed too interested, and that we had become a band who couldn't support weekly gigging (as our last month of shows - in Nov. of '92 - proved). We were, at best, a novelty act that folks might see once a month. An event band!

(You're mistaken, by the way, about us never recording. We went in [various] studios a total of three times - each time sounding a bit better and coming out with a decent product - but also running out of money each time before affording a proper final mix. What we have represents us fairly well, but still needed one more go at the mixing board. If you're interested, I'll try and send you a tape of the stuff.)

Something else you may not know is that we re-formed (kinda) in 1997 in San Francisco as What Fresh Hell (from a Dorothy Parker quote as she entered a particularly awful party, "What fresh hell is this?"). I had been there about a year when Patrick and Scott moved out there too. We got a bass player and a second guitarist (Patrick had matured a lot by then and didn't mind sharing the spotlight) and no keyboards this time around. The sound was different, slicker, and the comedy wasn't so pronounced. We were great - for all three of our performances! (Scott decided one day, after we'd finished recording four tracks of a demo tape, that he no longer wanted to be a drummer. Instead of seeking out a replacement, we just took it as a sign and folded up our tent. I'll slap those songs on a tape for you too. Good stuff, if I do say so myself.) (And I do.)

Anyway, this e-mail is long enough, but we can talk again later. I just wanted to set you - and any other unlikely soul who stumbles across your site - straight on "what happened to the greatest (unsigned) band of the 20th century?". Looking over it now, it seems terribly anti-climactic. Instead, why don't you just tell everybody we broke up due to Patrick's dependence on cough suppressants and transcendental meditation, Scott's statutory rape charges, and my increasing fascination with Lite Satanism and firearms. Maybe toss in a cryptic sentence or two about Jerry's 1996 disappearance in Malaysia while on tour with a Christian pop group called "Sonburst". Maybe it would have been better if we had sold out and gotten some one-hit novelty video played on MTV, sold a few thousand cds of our first and only album, and vanished into obscurity (or played state fairs) - but this was more fun.

All graphics, sounds, and feelings, unless otherwise indicated, are the Copyrighted materials of Zsu-Zsu's Petals.
I can use this stuff *myself* because it's in loving tribute, right?
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