Hoping to Revive a Recording Career

Epitaph Records, the nation’s flagship punk-rock specialty label, hopes to disinter T.S.O.L.’s recording career and help the recently reunited original lineup expand on its 16-year-old corpus of work.

“We think T.S.O.L. is going to do a record this fall when they get back from touring,” said Jason Henry, an artist development staffer at the label who works with T.S.O.L. singer Jack Grisham in his solo career, and who hopes to work with the band as a whole. “It’s not a done deal, but everything we’ve been talking about is moving forward.”

Band members Grisham, Mike Roche and Ron Emory are taking a wait-and-see approach toward any commitments beyond their current tour. But Henry, whose label reissued T.S.O.L.’s most popular album, “Dance With Me,” in 1996, says he has heard live versions of three new songs the band wrote. “They’re great, classic T.S.O.L. songs. The potential is there.”

One business obstacle that could keep T.S.O.L. from recording is that the original members long ago lost the rights to the band name. It belongs to Joe Wood, the singer who took over as front man in 1984 after Grisham left.

Wood, who happens to be Grisham’s brother-in-law, objected bitterly when the four original band members reunited as T.S.O.L. for periodic shows from late 1989 to early 1991; he prevented them from using the name T.S.O.L. for some of the shows. A 1991 live album had to be credited to Grisham, Roche, Emory and Todd Barnes (the original drummer not currently part of the reunion) rather than to T.S.O.L. Wood, who has played under his own name or as Cisco Poison in recent years, resurrected the T.S.O.L. name briefly in 1997 and 1998 for a few shows.

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But he has given the original members his blessing to use it on their current reunion tour. Wood would have to give them the same permission to place the band name on any recording. He was working this week as part of the production crew for the Woodstock festival in upstate New York, and could not be reached for comment.

If T.S.O.L. does record for Epitaph, Henry said, the label would face a “quandary” over what to do with two as-yet unreleased solo albums Grisham made in 1998. The second features production and guitar work from Epitaph’s owner, Brett Gurewitz.

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Grisham’s records, to be released under his new performing moniker, Gentleman Jack Grisham, follow the aggressive but pop-melodic slant of the three albums he released on Epitaph in 1995-97 with his band, the Joykiller.

“They’re vastly different from what he’s going to be doing with T.S.O.L.,” Henry said. “The material on these Gentleman Jack Grisham records is so good that when we put them out, we want to be able to go after radio play and put a big push behind it. It’s so poppy and immediately accessible.”

And, Henry readily acknowledged, the original T.S.O.L.’s situation is volatile because Roche and Emory are still in the early stages of recovering from heroin addiction.

“It’s got the potential to be such a great thing for all those guys. Let’s hope they can hold it together.”