Geocities clean-up: King Tongue

The following is from a series of posts culled from my Geocities site that I abandoned in 2001. Having finally gotten around to deleting it, I saved a few articles that I thought I'd share here. Remember, this stuff was written in '01. It's not my best, but here it is...

KING TONGUE

Few bands have enjoyed such an even mixture of notoriety and complete obscurity as the late, great KING TONGUE.
I'd be lying if I said I didn't want to be playing with these guys again, but alas, Yahweh has not seen fit to reunite the three of us.
We began playing together in 1982, with Danny Shumaker on board as "lead guitarist", as ROCK HOUSE. Our repertoire consisted mainly of an eccentric mix of new wave and rock songs.
With the departure of Shumaker we decided to carry on as a trio. We re-named ourselves NINE STORIES (years before Lisa Loeb gave that name to her backing band). We changed it soon to LITTLE AMERICA, which was an REM song and was emblazoned across the front of a light blue REM t-shirt I wore a lot back then and Charles remarked that it would be a good name for a band. A few years later some other band came along calling itself Little America, I began to think we were cursed to have our band names eventually become somewhat popular for other bands...
LITTLE AMERICA split up but within 5 years had re-united as HEAD. HEAD recorded a few songs and played around Oklahoma City & Norman, Oklahoma quite a bit and opened for several headlining groups including ECHO & THE BUNNYMEN.
HEAD lasted about a year and the group once again dispersed until they all found themselves playing together again in a cheesy dive bar band called Winter Fire. The de facto leader of Winter Fire had issues with me and tried to replace me. He wound up losing all the members of "his" band as they followed my exit from that situation into the gig that eventually became KING TONGUE (we'd even scrawled the words "King Tongue" with a picture of a gargantuan tongue on the bathroom walls of clubs we'd played as Winter Fire, that's how sure we were that the trio would win out again...).
KING TONGUE played many, many shows at a dive bar called Long Ears in Shawnee, Oklahoma in 2000 & early 2001. We got a very good reputation and I have no doubt that if we were to reunite the reception would be encouragingly enthusiastic.
These photos are pretty old, having been taken in 1992 when the band was still called HEAD, but until we can get this computer's CD-Rom fixed I can't load the scanner program and get any more recent shots up. On the day when that situation is remedied, I promise to add some more up to date shots...
King Tongue (clockwise from top)...Charles Casey (drums), Gregg Dobbs (Guitar, vocals), James Arthur Casey (Vocals, bass)

NOTE: By the time we'd had the CD-Rom fixed the Geocities site was deserted. Gregg got married, moved and, as far as I know, retired from music-making. He never worked with Charles and I again. I played in Jubal Modine with Charles for about 5 months, the chronicles of which can be found in this blog. He continues to be the drummer for that band. As for me, I am satisfied just listening to other people's music.