True Believers wasn't the last time Mike "Rep" Hummel and Tommy Jay played and recorded together, not by a very long shot. This article at Newcity Music from 2013 digs into their history, here's a snippet:
The music whizzing around Rep and Tommy Jay eventually found itself synthesized in scores of recordings—the overwhelming majority of which remain unreleased. What got set to tape during those formative explorations didn’t become immediately available.
And when “Rocket to Nowhere” showed up in 1977, it seemed like no one was listening.
“We were more influenced by our isolation than by being part of a scene, pre-’78,” the multi-instrumentalist says of his first few years tinkering with recorded songcraft.
Rep, though, was undeterred and continued recording at a prodigious rate, woodshedding in basements, goofing off with his friends but only emerging later in the decade as a member of the True Believers—a group orchestrated by Tommy Jay.
The band issued its lone recording, “Accept It” on Rep’s fledgling New Age imprint. It was 1980. The three songs toss off a surprising range of music, considering the players seemed wrapped up in punk concerns. Even the title track reveals a gentle melodicism alongside the genre’s quick pacings.
Rep, again deferring to Tommy Jay’s talents, says the album ranks as an UR-recording and that his companion’s recognition is usually glossed over by virtue of the Quotas using Rep’s surname.
By the time the True Believers were kicking around, though, Rep says a concerted scene had begun to coalesce around groups like Ron House’s Twisted Shouts and Jim Shepard’s Vertical Slit. There were even a few venues daring enough to host performances. Rep and Tommy Jay persisted, this new enclave serving as proof that what they were blindly pursuing had pent-up meaning. And someone cared, somewhere.
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