Bela Blog: Monster Truck Five & Jack Taylor

Because of the short existence of Monster Truck Five (or 005), there is hardly anything written about the band, and coming up with articles was a tough get this week. However, Bela of Anyway Records has an eloquent and stark recollection of High Street in the 1990s, and wrote several times on the band, including the short life or Richard "Jack Taylor" Violet. Here's a bit of that:

A great deal of the decorating was done on several spastic afternoons by Jack Taylor (birth name Richard Violet), who was fired and rehired by Dan Dow. Jack, like the décor of Used Kids was a living example of a life half finished, this is not just for the fact that Ritchie (as I first knew him as) died young in an unremarkable fashion. While giving up the lures of the city, Richie moved home to lonesome Urbana, Ohio and got a job at a local United Dairy Farmers convenient store. A long drop from the coolness of playing CBGB’s and getting name checked on an Unsane record. It was there in the vast flatness of western Ohio that Richie took a shot of dope too deep for his veins and died behind the UDF store, proving that heroin can be found everywhere.  Richie, was a cross between  Bluto from “Animal House” and a tarnished flannel shirt, he could be devastatingly charming and brilliant on one hand and on the other he could stab you with an insult that could bring the worst of high school back in a flutter of embarrassed red cheeks. He was the first member of Monster Truck 005 to die.