Michael Cole SCJ01 CD

Mike was joined by Keyboardist Scott Combs who immediately added depth to the music with his individual style and input on arrangements.

She has performed all across the country from intimate cafes in Arkansas, large performance halls in Minnesota, to outdoor rallies in Seattle. She possesses a charmingly shy stage presence, and when Janie closes her eyes and strums her first notes, her listeners become captivated by the passion and sincerity of her gift.

She is a natural.

net myspace /jcrain myspace /thestiffjoints myspace /rooseveltbandGuitarist, vocalist, songwriter and visual artist John Crain, a Charleston-based quizzical thirtysomething, has been playing in a variety of bands and writing songs since he was in high school in South Carolina. He recently put his songwriting talent on display with the release of a riff-filled new solo rock album titled Unsolicited (recorded at Fusion 5 Studios in Mt. Pleasant, S.C.)."I kept writing and playing original music for years, but I eventually got a day job outside of music and quit writing," he says. "This did not stop the ideas from coming, however. I kept hearing jingles in my head. I kept singing in the shower. I kept writing down passages that meant something to me or had a ring to it. After about a decade of this, I figured I wanted something to show for it. If I died tomorrow, I'd like this collection of songs to represent what's been going on inside of my head and what essentially makes me tick."In his college days in the idyllic university town of Athens, Georgia, Crain made a name for himself as the bassist and co-frontman of power trio Roosevelt, one of a pile of heavy hitting rock bands who kicked up some post-jangle dust in the early-'90s. Roosevelt played hard, loud and fast and had elements of the blues-rock of ZZ Top and Zeppelin, the ambling country sounds of Neil Young and Johnny Cash, the prog tendencies of King Crimson and the quirky punk of Meat Puppets. As the three guys grew older, the band matured musically, developing an accomplished instrumental technique and moving closer to the prog-rock complexities that were always underneath its punk. But Roosevelt never quite abandoned its classic rock roots, no matter how tangled.

Crain and guitarist Daniel Pruitt were longhaired UGA students who had already put a year or so into the prog-rock trio I.S.S. (or "Independent Skyleague Section") with drummer Isaac McCalla. After the band broke up in 1989, Crain and Pruitt enlisted drummer Ballard Lesemann and officially formed Roosevelt in 1990. The band independently released its vinyl-only full-length titled Shingle in 1991 and extensively toured the Southeast behind it. In 1992, the band recorded a vinyl-only, four-song EP titled Person and contributed three songs to the seven-band compilation album Fuel: Seven bands From Athens, Ga.