Benjamin Miner - Vocals
Benjamin Miner was born in Baltimore, MD, home to notables such as Cass Elliot, Frank Zappa, John Waters, David Byrne, and Wild Bill Hagy, the Orioles' unofficial cheerleader and absolute madman, who completely forsook the team when a 1985 rule forbade attendees from bringing cases of beer into Memorial Stadium.
A type-B personality from birth, Benjamin tried his best to skirt the requirements of a public school education with minimal effort, eventually finding that he could hoodwink others into giving him more credit than he deserved as a fine art photographer.
This talent for misdirection landed him a substantial scholarship at the Maryland Institute College of Art, from which he dropped out within the first year, upon realizing that he was surrounded by 18 year olds with a capacity for self-delusion which outstripped his own.
From this ignominious beginning was launched a checkered resume, working variously as a coffee barista, blueberry harvester, auto parts story lackey, one hour photo lab operator (where he saw things that cannot be unseen), straw bale house builder, new age commune abductee,
and general layabout, before settling into a relatively stable cabinetry profession - a path that he also ultimately rejected, once realizing that spending years on end alone in a room making complicated boxes for the vacation homes of the disgustingly wealthy is exactly as soul-crushing as one might imagine.
Somewhere in the midst of this he managed to convince some unwary friends to start a 1960's rock and soul band, The Feldons, which played to half-empty venues across numerous western Massachusetts backwaters. The band have been hailed as "the last great hope for
rock and roll" one time by some drunk guy in a Ramones t-shirt sitting at the bar.
