Five or so years ago, I talked about one of my favorite bands that hasn’t released new music together in something like 22 years. They were on small record labels, some of which don’t exist any more. They have three albums, a 12” EP, and three 7” singles. 

That band was Lost Goat. Members have since appeared in other bands, one of which (Sanhedrin) is actively touring and recording albums, and I featured an interview with the singer of both bands, Erica Stoltz. I even saw Erica when they rolled through Chicago in 2022! 

I’m at an age where collecting things has lost its luster, for a variety of reasons. One is, I just don’t have the space, even though my apartment is pretty big. If I’m not rereading comic books, why am I keeping them around? I’m not even reselling them on eBay. I end up giving them away, including books I find interesting in back issue bins, once I read them. My reasoning there is that I’ve been pretty invested in making my own comic art and printing the comic strips you see on this site for various shows I’ve been allowed to table at.  

And there’s bands I love that have changed my life. I was collecting Pelican vinyl records, giant expensive slabs of plastic that haven’t had a lot of purpose since I gave away my record player many years ago and replaced it with a cheapie that broke recently. I sold those Pelican albums during a period when I was underemployed and broke. My favorite band, Corrosion Of Conformity, has a lot of 12” and album vinyl versions I didn’t have money for back in the day. I’m in a better place these days, and some of their albums have been reissued, and I bought in on those – but I haven’t played these records of which I’ve owned multiple copies on CD since their release(s). 

So, knock on wood, I’ve been in a better financial place, even after weathering ups and downs at the day job since the pandemic, with the possibility of some tough days ahead. I can now look for an original pressing of CoC’s Deliverance on vinyl, which looks to be in the $200-300 range…but I know I don’t need it. 

But something happened at the beginning of the pandemic that sent me, like a lot of people, down various rabbit holes to do SOMETHING with money not spent on toilet paper. Or at least with the time hidden away in my apartment from an airborne virus. See, well after that Lost Goat retrospective, I looked in my copy of LG’s first full length, Trapped On Earth, to pull a giant poster it included, and post it up somewhere in the apartment to give the place a little heavy metal color. I know I had it up in a place I lived in briefly a couple moves before my current place. But…the poster wasn’t in the record sleeve! 

I panicked – my precious copy was incomplete! I got on Discogs, and found a promised complete-with-poster copy for a reasonable price. But prior to the record’s arrival, I found the original poster in a folder in a box with other posters and artwork that had been displayed in previous apartments. When the new copy arrived, I opened it and looked at the new poster: it was a SLIGHTLY DIFFERENT COLOR. 

My brain triggered. Was this stark red color a misprint from the orange gradient from my original copy? I emailed Erica and she confirmed that they printed the posters with different colors – she didn’t say how many, such as if there’s an existing rainbow of these posters from this obscure band’s first release that only I will now be hunting like a maniac. 

Because that’s what I did next. I went all-in on creating as much of a complete Lost Goat collection that I could. 

It should be easy enough – like I said earlier, there’s literally 7 total releases. I already had both vinyl and CD releases of their first two albums, Trapped on Earth and Equator. Now I was scouring Discogs and eBay for copies of Trapped on Earth, emailing the sellers if there was a poster included, and if the price wasn’t way out there, I ordered. Another copy arrived: red poster. Later, another with a more solid orange instead of the various shades. It was unlikely there was a rainbow. 

Perhaps the universe wanted to connect me (the universe is an eBay seller), because for a time I was finding more stuff on these sites. A t-shirt with their simple goat logo design, which was drawn by a late friend of theirs. It was too small for me to wear, but I bought it. A promo copy of Equator with black & white artwork and different text on the back. And then, in looking at the 7” and EP on Discogs, comparing them to my copies at home. I didn’t have a lyric sheet for the 12” EP. The split 7”, “Lost Goat and Towel Get Married,” listed stickers. I didn’t have those stickers! What else was there? 

Copies started arriving. I ordered the EP from people who confirmed that an extra piece of paper was included. It was just a xeroxed lyric sheet. Not exactly high quality. But now the 12” EP was complete. “…Get Married” came with a small card with a list of releases by the small record label, Poverty (the label I bought the pizza box collection from back in 1999), and two “Poverty Records” stickers that are something like 2” x .5”. Extras that weren’t exactly Lost Goat centric, but I guess it’s complete. 

There’s a compilation CD by another small label of punk bands doing metal covers. LG’s contribution was a cover of Twisted Sister’s Burn In Hell. Nearly everything else on this comp is pretty unlistenable. (There are label compilations that include songs already released on LG’s albums – I decided to skip these, because I didn’t want to risk spending way more money for one LG song and repeat the awful quality of the other bands.)

In clicking around the Lost Goat info page, there’s guest appearances and other band releases by the members. Is it complete? I don’t think so – because on eBay I found a pre-LG project on cassette, TNT, which is an acronym for members of the band, which includes LG’s drummer Tina Gordon. It was not listed in connection with LG on Discogs. I don’t have a cassette player, so, I haven’t heard it yet. Guitarist Eric Peterson was in a band from Madison WI called Natural Cause – through Discogs I was able to pick up two 7”s, one of which was a split. While in San Francisco, when I was vaccinated and able to travel, I managed to pick up a copy of Love Songs For Phantom Limbs by Frisco, a more recent band he’s appeared in. And Erica had been pretty busy – she had a guest appearance with a stoner hard rock type band called Witch Mountain that she sang one song on. 

A full length by Night After Night, a band featuring Eric & Tina, was recorded but never released – until I happened upon it uploaded on YouTube. It’s not an official release, so I don’t know the proper track listing. I had to come up with my own. (I may have talked about this in a previous music review post.) 

I was close, but not quite done. A cassette of LG’s 1995 demo, of which material was used for the first 7” and EP, was still out there. I had the MP3s, and they rock pretty hard. But I am now on a quest to be a completionist. Who do I call? Write to? I’ve dropped the band members a line but other than Erica they probably don’t remember me, or live on social media like I do. All I could do was click on the “want” button and hope I get a notice. 

Which, I didn’t, but in December 2022, I refreshed Discogs one evening, and there it was: the tape. I bought it without any scrutiny. It arrived three weeks later, quite a wait, but maybe the seller was on vacation and not sending anything at that time. I wondered of the possibility that the seller maybe was copying demos like these and selling them. The tape’s j-card looked fresh, and the printing looked like a poorly rasterized pixelated copy, like they had a low-res DPI version on hand. Was that the case? Is there someone, some organization of tape traders, monitoring the market for obscure bands’ demo tapes, and creating them when the demand is high? Inserted in the tape case was a flyer for a show, and someone had written in blue ink on the back describing one of the other bands (Thunder Chimp, a member of which was the owner of Poverty Records in SF). I think the tape is real and just held together well. Since this purchase, another copy appeared on Discogs…for DOUBLE the price I paid, and hasn’t come down since I saw it appear over a year ago. 

What else could I be missing, at this point? When I got the pizza box way back when, there was a clear LG sticker that went on my car bumper, and that car is long gone. I’d need to get a complete pizza box from Poverty to maybe get it again. There’s a patch pictured with LG’s first 7”, Beware Of Chupacabras, and I’ve picked up a few copies of the 7” here and there and no patch came with them. Multiple copies of it might make a nice display, the front and inside artwork & both sides of the 7”, now that I have that many. 

I shared copies of a few of the releases with a couple people – friends who like female fronted bluesy hard rock bands. It might be too much of my acquired taste. “I bought this hoping for a blue poster, which so far doesn’t exist, so please take this with its red poster, which I have a copy of already,” writes your generous but obviously INSANE friend. 

Maybe I’ll reach out to the band members again, what do you have you can part with? This collection doesn’t take up much space. I can’t go to this length with CoC, and I long sold my Metallica CD collection when CDs had value. I feel bad in hoarding copies because what if that extra copy is the album someone comes across at the used record store, and they pick it up, and it changes their life like it did mine? Heck, my CDs are just sitting in boxes in a closet, I listen to everything straight from my computer or my iPod, ways I thought I’d never listen to music. I don’t even put CDs in my car despite it having a 6 CD changer. It’s just this tiny slab of plastic that sits in a box. 

It’s because I’ve spent nearly every weekend for the last 5 years going through my dad’s stuff in my mom’s basement, I come home and think about the action figures that sit on shelves, or copies of comics I don’t reread, especially if I have multiples, and then an obsession like this for a band that’s special to me. Things that’d be hard to explain to others, especially if I’m no longer around. I don’t want it to outlast me and it’s too late to be special to someone else. 

At the very least, I hope I’ve been able to document Lost Goat’s existence a little beyond a webstore page or incomplete catalog on streaming sites.