Received a message this morning that is the kind of message you don’t look forward to but you know will happen eventually.
An old friend has passed.
Yup, Fray Bentos is now with David Lynch in the unified field…permanently.
Fray was a founding member of the Wheezing Dogz out of Stratford Ontario.
I ended up putting out a LP of a hybrid version of the Dogz called The Leotard Geeks.
I will paste below the liner notes from that album that tells the story of how I found him and became fast friends.
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Stratford, Ontario… You know, Canada. They have the Shakespearean festival there. This is where the story begins.
A friend of mine went to the festival one year and returned with an obscure seven inch record titled, “THE WHEEZING DOGZ – Modern Snacks FOR MODERN Lovers”. He played it for me and I saw visions of Godlike proportions. I knew what my destiny was, to find the Dogz and get a copy of that EP.
I wrote everyone! No one had even heard of them, let alone knew where they were. I was crushed. I spent the next four years with Leonard Nimoy in search of… Still no luck. I offered my friend large sums of cash for his copy as he stated in a casual tone, “Oh…there’s an address on the inside”. “What!”, I said, “I spent four years of my wee sproutness and three quarters of my inheritance trying to find it and all along there was an address”! Needless to say I wrote a letter that night.
A few weeks passed as I wore a trench in the dorm floor from pacing twenty four hours a day. Then, one lone night in a popular Midwest University dorm room, the phone rang. A delirious, baggy eyed cretin answered and it was the Dogz! Soon after that a package came with, not one, but five copies of the origianl EP plus five copies of the unreleased second EP and posters and a T-shirt! My quest was at an end… or was it.
About a year later I received a letter at the Midwest Office of Gravelvoice Global Corporate Communications. The letter said, “We are now the Leotard Geeks and we want to do an album”. I was in intensive care for five days. We then pooled our resources and sold some of our conglomerate stock to give you what you now hold in your hands.
I give the world the Leotard Geeks – Dog Food on a String. The product of a five year grueling battle with the golden Faffi of our founder Moe Bandy. So buy it, build a small vigil, place it on your turntable (from which it will never leave) and share in this Holy Divinity that is the Leotard Geeks.
Scott Colburn
Rosehill Plot #21
August 1986
