Before Bill White was the bassist of For Squirrels, before the Gainesville band had recorded any records or signed to a label, before the terrible September afternoon in 1995 that turned a rising rock saga into an epitaph, he was Jeff Carter’s close friend. Ask Jeff for one story that explains Bill, and he resists the notion that just one is enough.
Bill White attended church and high school in Pinellas County, Florida.
“Bill and I met through church,” Jeff said. “We were in the same youth group.” That humble beginning became the roots of everything Jeff still remembers: the pranks, the soundboard sessions, the home movies, the Schwarzenegger expeditions, the letters from college, the late-night laughter at Dumb and Dumber, and finally the grief that arrived through a message on his bed telling him he needed to call his parents as soon as he could.
“A Combination of Book Smart and Street Smart”
Jeff started at Clearwater High School and transferred to Dunedin High School for his senior year. His father was the youth pastor, and during the period when Bill’s parents were missionaries in China the White family stayed at the Carter house when they were home, and Bill sometimes lived there during the summer. “They were a great family,” Jeff said.
To Jeff, Bill stood out immediately because he never fit in a single category. “Bill was that rare guy who was a combination of book smart and street smart,” he said.
As a top student, Bill once traveled to Chicago for a program where famous people appeared. Noticing that no one was talking to George Lucas, he simply walked up and spoke with him for about 20 minutes.
“His knowledge of things for a high schooler was unbelievable. He took well to school but was also relatable on a totally different level. We would do stupid stuff, pull pranks, play hide and go seek in the church, just fun things like that. He was not your typical book smart, geeky, nerdy guy. It wasn’t what you’d expect.”
The Whites also understood that Bill was never just a mere innocent bystander in the teenage mischief occurring around them. “Being a youth pastor’s kid, a lot of times everyone blames you for everything when you’ve toilet papered someone’s house or any stupid stuff like that. But with the White family, they never blamed me for anything. They knew that any of the fun, stupid stuff we had done, Bill was just as involved as I was. There was no mastermind — we were all equals. I always appreciated that about them.”
He mentions a church trip to the Dominican Republic that solidified their friendship, where he remembers Bill speaking Spanish there “like he had been speaking it his whole life.” He remembers how he, Jon and Bill wanted one souvenir above all others: a bullwhip.
“We were at the market and everybody was trying to push machetes on us, but we kept saying, ‘But we only want a bull whip,’” Jeff said. “We were going from market to market and Bill was the one speaking Spanish to everyone to find us a bull whip.”
“Quest for the Lost Hemis”
When Jeff recalled Bill’s humor, he did not start with a punch line, but rather with a movie they and some friends shot over a summer in his backyard near a creek. A low-budget epic with a title that sounded like a lost VHS tape: Quest for the Lost Hemis.
“It was ridiculous and a combination of a Top Secret-type of movie and Indiana Jones,” Jeff said. “All we did in the movie was fight different bad guys we came across along the creek.”
The title was an acronym of their character’s names: Hawk, Equalizer, MacGyver, Indiana and Styles. Bill played MacGyver. The names were lifted from ‘80s movies and television, less as tribute than for convenience’s sake. They were teenagers and “didn’t want to come up with original names.”
Their comedy diet was Top Secret!, The Naked Gun, Airplane! and Seinfeld, whom Bill introduced Jeff to. “That’s honestly how Bill was with everybody,” Jeff said of Bill’s sense of humor. “Bill and I were a lot like that.”
Hasta la Vista, Baby
Bill and Jeff were also Arnold Schwarzenegger loyalists. On the Fourth of July weekend in 1991, after watching fireworks, they hurried to catch a late-night showing of Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Years later, Jeff would continue pilgrimages to see Schwarzenegger movies in theaters because of Bill.
“Red Heat was one of our favorite movies because Jim Belushi was supposed to be the comedic relief in that movie, but in our minds it was Arnold,” Jeff said. “Commando was a great movie. And the Terminator movies are great and still coming out.”
Currents of music ran through their friendship, too. “Bill loved R.E.M. and the Smashing Pumpkins.”
One time, Bill was upset that Jeff got into a sold-out Smashing Pumpkins show at The Ritz in Ybor City with their friend Travis Tooke, while he and his brother Jon had to stay back because their parents were preparing to leave for China. Jeff had no ticket until Travis, by talking circles around a man asking an exorbitant price for one, managed to snag it for $10.
Before the Bass, There Was the Soundboard
Long before Bill was in a band, Jeff saw the musician inside him revealed in an empty church. The soundboard was in the kitchen, and Bill used it for something private and earnest. “Bill would record a lot of love songs to his girlfriend in Connecticut. He would make me turn the mic down so I could only record it, not listen to it,” Jeff said laughing.
He says Bill instinctively acted as a maestro, of sorts, on piano, trombone, as drum major for his high school band, while singing, and eventually while wielding a bass guitar. “Bill would play drums, but sometimes he’d have me play the drums because we had a drum machine,” Jeff said, except he knew where he belonged: not necessarily on stage, but behind the scenes, helping make the sound work. “You could hear [Bill] yelling, ‘Keep the beat. Just keep the beat.’ We used to do that sort of thing all the time.”
Letters from Gainesville
Bill’s decision to pursue music was not an epiphany. It was more practical and more Bill than that. It was what he was doing, and once he started, he took it seriously. “I think he got really into it when Travis came to UF and started learning how to play guitar,” Jeff said.
The musical bond that For Squirrels grew out of formed at the University of Florida in the early 1990s around guitarist Travis Tooke, bassist Bill White, lead singer Jack Vigliatura and, later, drummer Jack Griego.
Bill, Travis, and Jack Vig had played soccer together at East Lake High School in Tarpon Springs, and the musical aspect of their friendship first took wings when Bill and Travis, then roommates at the U of F, bought used guitars at a pawn shop and taught themselves to play.
“They started playing talent shows. I even have a letter from Bill that he wrote me in 1992, and in it he talks about how they rented a storage unit to start practicing in, and performed at a show as a band named Lenny Kravitz Got Drafted.”
By that time, Jeff had gone west to work on a dude ranch in Colorado. Their friendship continued by mail. Bill kept him filled him on developments in Gainesville: the jokes, the shows, the strange momentum of a band discovering itself one talent show and one road trip at a time.
Letter Written by Bill and Sent Home to Jeff in 1990
Hey dork –
How’s college? Mine is pretty groovy. I hear that you don’t have a roommate. Well, you rot. What classes are you taking? I’ve got Classical Archeology, which is my favorite class, Astronomy, which is real hard and the professor is an old crotchety man with a plastic globe that I’d like to smash over his head, Public Policy, which is really small and pretty cool – we sit around a big executive table in huge leather chairs, and finally – Biological Anthropology, which is tough, but has 4 hot chicks in it that I hit on every day. Oooh mama.
Band’s pretty cool. We get into all the games free, and the kids are all crazy. Last weekend we went on a trip to Tennessee for that game. We stayed in Gatlinburg for 2 nights. It was cooly-wooly. My favorite game was to switch around the room numbers so the drunk kids would get confused and not be able to get back in their rooms. Our team is 5-1 and ranked 17th in the nation. This weekend is homecoming. I’ve been working on this one chuck, Suzanne, for 3 weeks now. Hopefully, on Saturday, I’ll cash in the chips.
I call Becky or she calls me once a week. Last week I baked her cookies and sent ‘em to her.
My roommate is pretty cool (hmm, how many times will you use the word cool in this letter, oh Bill, master of hip teen jargon). He’s mega-rich, so our room as a TV (color), a toaster, a computer, a microwave, a refrigerator, and a fancy telephone, all of which I use and none of which are mine. He has a pretty good taste in music, and he likes the Far Side and Monty Python. In my room, I have 2 R.E.M. posters, 2 They Might Be Giants posters, 1 Cowboy Junkies poster and assorted pictures of you in various stages of undress – no! Not really. A few days ago, some big poster company came here and had a poster sale of movie posters. They were too expensive, so I didn’t buy any. For instance, they had an original Raiders of the Lost Ark poster for 55 bucks.
I bought a guitar and I’m learning to play pretty well. It’s an acoustic. Rock and roll is my life.
I’m joining a club they have here called “Crosscuts.” In it, you can take out really fancy video cameras – real nice ones – and use their editing facilities here. It looks pretty cool.
I play on the dorm room flag football team. We are 1-2. We play against huge, fast kids, and we’re only a couple of skinny kids. It’s fun. However, babes come and watch, which is cool.
There are a lot of really weird kids in my dorm. One kid we call “Morb,” because he’s so morbid. Another kid’s named Ted, so we play cards together, and we’ve been known as Bill and Ted’s Excellent Spades Pair. Another kid is named Nigel – he’s from Trinidad and Tobago. He’s bizarre. He dances around and sings tribal chants. He also cooks things in the lounge, like whole chickens – heads and all. We think he’s some kind of tribal witch doctor. Another kid, Paul, is engaged to be married. He’s 18.
Then there’s a short, dumpy red-haired kid that is never seen. He’s always in his room with the door locked. We call him Magic Man.
Crazy stuff is always happening around here. One night I came home and found my roommate and his girlfriend getting into it. The sight of these two balling was disgusting and very embarrassing. The kids down the hall smoke pot, and are always talking about ganja. This week is Alcohol Awareness Week. Tomorrow night is “Drunk RA Night.” It’s where all the residence hall advisors get together and get drunk to show us the adverse effects of alcohol. Real nice.
There are so many incredible girls here. I can hardly stand it. Babes are everywhere. And they’re all so friendly. Ah, college is a nice place.
I wrote a letter to that dork Mullaney, but he didn’t write me back. Don’t be a dork. Just say write. Party on, dude.
Love Later,
Bill
P.S. You’re cool. NOT.
That’s a Wrap
While some of Jeff’s stories with Bill are downright cinematic, others are intimate and ordinary. One of those stories is from when Bill was dating Tracy Peters, the daughter of Pulitzer-winning cartoonist Mike Peters, whom he met at the U of F.
Bill wanted to find Tracy, who was a writer/English major, some antique books for Christmas before flying to Aspen to meet her family. Jeff remembers driving all over Palm Harbor with him, amazed that Bill had done the research before there was an easy internet search to do the legwork for him.
“That is when I knew he was in deep for Tracy,” Jeff said. “Bill would do stuff for Christmas, but his idea of a present was getting his dad a bottle of jellybeans that read, ‘Funny Pills.’ I was impressed that Bill was going through this much effort to find a girl this type of gift.”
Bill found the books. Then, the same bright young man who had been accepted into Harvard and was able to track those books down, brought them home and asked Jeff to show him how to wrap the set properly. “Come on, dude,” Jeff told him. “You have to make the wrapping neat.”
Before the Music Hurt
Jeff often saw For Squirrels playing at The Covered Dish, their local haunt in Gainesville, and kept artifacts from that time: letters, articles, flyers—the kind of paper trail that becomes a private archive. He remembers riding over to Jannus Landing in St. Petersburg to see For Squirrels play a gig with the band Live on their Throwing Copper tour, and he remembers discovering that a backstage pass was only useful if someone was willing to walk upstairs to where the food was.
“We had backstage passes, but I was the only one who had the balls to go to the section where there was food and where Live was hanging out,” Jeff said. “We all had the passes, including the For Squirrels guys, but none of them would go up the stairs to where Live was and where the pizza was. So, I went up there and was hanging out and talking to [Live’s lead singer] Ed Kowalczyk.”
When Baypath Road. arrived in 1994, Jeff had already heard many of the songs in concert. He first heard the finished product on tape before he owned it on CD. “I really enjoyed it,” he said. “But I haven’t listened to it in a very long time. I sort of have a difficult time revisiting that stuff.”
Bill had shown his range on the album, playing bass on most songs, adding piano on a few tracks, including “Left Behind”, contributing backing vocals on “Kabaret” and “Kill the Birds”, and singing lead on “3.”
One of Jeff’s last ordinary nights with Bill came at the Main Street movie theater in Palm Harbor, watching Dumb and Dumber. They were both laughing hard during the film, but one scene still plays in Carter’s memory. “Bill fell out of his chair when Jeff Daniels hit Lauren Holly smack dab in the face with the snowball,” Jeff recalled.
After the movie, Travis appeared and jumped onto the hood of Jeff’s car in the parking lot. Jeff asked Bill if he wanted to go hang out. Bill had been on the road with the band. He wanted time with his friend. “No, dude,” Jeff remembered him saying. “I’ve been on the road with them. I want to be as far away from them as possible.”
The Business of Being For Squirrels
As the band moved closer to a major-label deal, Jeff remained one of the people Bill trusted to see the behind-the-scenes of the operation. “I liked hearing about the behind the scenes things and business negotiations,” Jeff said. “I learned for the first time about per diem through Bill because each band member had per diem each day on tour, only a certain amount they could spend on food.”
The band had options, Jeff says, but their issue was control. “There were some record labels that offered the band a pretty big chunk of change to sign with them, but the record labels wanted to have the rights to the music,” Jeff said. “The guys wanted to sign with a label that allowed them to retain the rights to their own music, and that’s what they were holding out for.”
After touring and building a following, the band signed with Sony 550 Music and recorded Example, produced by Nick Launay and slated for release on October 3rd, 1995.
The Call Home
In late 1995, Jeff was working as a white-water rafting guide on the Ocoee River and living in a bunkhouse in North Carolina. He came home from work and found a note on his bed telling him to call his parents as soon as he could, regardless of the hour. They were traveling, and the urgency made him fear the news involved his grandmother.
“My dad answered and told me about the accident and Bill,” Jeff said. “At first, I was just in shock. I wasn’t even processing it. So, I had to call them back and make sure I was hearing what I thought I was hearing.”
On September 8th, 1995, the band was driving home from New York after a showcase performance at CBGB when a tire blew on Interstate 95 near Midway, Georgia. The van overturned, taking with it the lives of Bill White, 23, Jack Viglitura, 21, and their tour manager Tim Bender, 23.
Jeff picked up his sister Stacy in Tennessee, and they traveled to Atlanta to fly home. On the plane he saw his friend Jason, another member of the old high school crew. Jason had known Jeff would be there, but Jeff wasn’t expecting him. The sight broke through the numbness.
“Once I saw him I got emotional because it all kind of crashed down on me,” Jeff said. “I was thinking to myself, ‘What the hell just happened? I am going home for my high school best friend’s funeral.’”
Jeff recalls little of the flight. He remembers little until reaching the house where they stayed.
At the wake, representatives from Sony 550 were present, and so much seemed centered on the music rather than memories of his friend that Jeff was left alienated by it all. “I just remember how much it stung to have the service centered around the band,” Jeff recalled of the service. “I think that’s where my resentment towards the band started. It may sound weird, but at that point I quit paying attention to the band.”
The family had not been deeply involved in its organization and the band material was what people had access to. Jeff said Mr. White had apologized for that at the service, and the funeral was different. “The funeral was much better because that is where I remembered my Bill,” Jeff said. Jeff was a pallbearer, along with his brother Kevin and Bill’s brother Jon. “So, I left on a high note.”
The Music that Carried the Grief
Despite his resentment with the shadow of For Squirrels, Jeff still listened to Example. “I listened to Example after the accident because the CD was released after the accident,” he said.
The release had been scheduled before the crash, and less than a month after Example was released as planned, carrying For Squirrels’ music into a world the band itself could no longer enter intact, and “Mighty K.C.” became the song that carried their name beyond Gainesville.
“I listened to it a lot. I had to. But I can’t go back to it any longer because it brings back that time period. I needed it at that time, but I don’t need it anymore. It just brings back the pain.”
For years, Jeff also wrestled with the moral arithmetic of grief. Bill, he said, did not drink and held tightly to his values, while at that time he had been living the rafting-guide rhythm of partying at night and working the river by day. “Being a Christian, it was a real struggle for me personally after the accident,” Jeff said. “‘Why Bill and not me?’ But it also put into perspective to me that God allows crap to happen, but he doesn’t make crap happen.”
The things that remain
What remains around For Squirrels now are easy to list: the records, the videos, the articles, the old flyers and the legacy of a band cut short just as the industry was beginning to notice them. But around Bill White, for Jeff Carter, there is something more precise and harder to reduce.
There is the friend who knew how to work a soundboard, how to charm George Lucas, how to talk his way through a Dominican market, how to make a love song private, how to fall out of a movie-theater chair laughing, how to make a present matter, and how to be, in Jeff’s words, a person with “good, clean humor” and values he held true to.
The story of For Squirrels can be told as a brief, aching music-business arc: four young musicians from Florida, a self-released album, a major-label deal, a finished record, a crash, a song that outlived half the band. Jeff’s story does not contradict that version. It deepens its scars. Before Bill was part of a band people mourned, he was the person Jeff called his best friend.
And that is why, decades later, the memories still arrive. Not only on anniversaries, but in movie theaters, in old songs, in names from the 1980s, and in the sentence Jeff keeps returning to because it is the truest one he has.
“I don’t really have one story,” Jeff said of Bill. “I just have a lot.”
The For Squirrels Project was made possible through the generosity of countless individuals who shared their memories, experiences, and stories about For Squirrels and Subrosa. This project is dedicated to the bands we loved, the music that continues to inspire us, and the fans whose passion has kept their legacy alive.
Project by: Chris Shortt and Jim Flynn
Collection of articles written by: Jim Flynn
Collection of articles edited by: Connor Schwake
Photography: Tim Bender, the Bender family, Lance Mercer and friends of the bands
Website courtesy of: Rich Booth
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