Jason “Jay” Russell never set out to become a rock star. That may be the clearest way to understand his brief, essential place in the story of For Squirrels, the Gainesville-bred indie rock band whose promise, work ethic and tragedy became part of Florida music lore. Jay was there before the record deal, before the national attention, before the band’s devastating 1995 van crash, and before its major-label album Example reached listeners who would never get to see the original lineup realize its future.

He was there when the songs were still raw enough to arrive on a cassette tape, when a drummer had three days to learn a dozen originals, when flyers were run across the University of Florida campus by hand, when a party in a garage could change the direction of a band, and when a storage unit in Gainesville could hold the first fully realized version of “Flagboy.”

“I always enjoyed playing with other people, but I never had any aspirations for being a rock star or anything like that,” Jay said. “It was just for fun.”

For Jack Vigliatura, Travis Tooke and Bill White, it was more than fun. Jay saw that immediately.

“I knew right from the beginning that this was Jack, Bill and Travis’ calling,” he said. “It was very abundant that this was the direction that they were going.”

From East Lake to the Warehouse

Jay’s path into For Squirrels began in the same Tampa Bay orbit that produced the band itself. He moved around as a child, grew up in the Tampa Bay area, attended Tarpon Springs High School, spent a year overseas as an exchange student, then returned to Florida and entered East Lake High School halfway through his junior year. There he crossed paths with Jack Vigliatura, Travis and Bill, who played soccer together and shared a passion for music.

Jay graduated from East Lake with Jack Vigliatura in 1991. Their friendship grew through the school’s theater program.

“I was friends with most of the soccer players and Jack Vigliatura and I were in drama and on stage together at the high school level,” Jay said. “Jack and I became friends our senior year of high school through those things.”

Even then, Jack Vigliatura was impossible to miss.

“Jack was one of the more energetic and hilarious people in every room we were always in,” Jay said. “He was the Church Lady in one of the skits at one point. He was just absurdly funny.”

Jay had already been playing drums for years. He described the instrument as an outlet from childhood.

“From about first grade on I had a lot of kinetic energy and my parents were trying to figure an outlet to do something with it,” he said. “Drums were always a sort of therapeutic outlet for me.”

In high school, Jay started a band with Andy Lord and Mike Amish called Caspar Milqetoast, which paid homage to the fictional character created by H.T. Webster for his comic strip The Timid Soul.

“That was our first attempt at starting a band,” Jay said. “We started in Mike’s mom’s garage and ultimately got our own warehouse storage unit in Oldsmar, Florida. We played our own shows Friday and Saturday night. Our little entourage got bigger and bigger each Friday and Saturday night.”

That garage-and-storage-unit scene helped pull Jack Vigliatura, Bill and Travis closer to making music themselves.

“Jack, Bill and Travis started arriving to listen to us perform at the warehouse,” Jay said. “That sort of drew them to us and their desire to be in a band themselves.”

Training Day

After high school, Jay went to Stetson University for his freshman year. He came home for holidays and heard that Jack Vigliatura, Bill and Travis were playing around Gainesville as an acoustic trio and looking for a drummer. By the end of that freshman year, they invited him to Gainesville.

“I thought, ‘What the heck. That sounds like fun,’” Jay said. “So, I moved to Gainesville, got myself an apartment with some friends and it all started happening really, really fast at that point.”

Fast was an understatement. Jay said he had not even finished unpacking or setting up his futon when the other three arrived at his apartment with a 60-minute cassette tape filled front and back with their songs.

“All of their songs were acoustic at that point,” Jay said of Bill and Travis, who had spent the past year teaching themselves guitar, and Jack Vigliatura, who was in the embryotic stage of spearheading lyrics and vocals. “They said to me, ‘Hey, here are our songs. Our first practice at the warehouse will be tomorrow night and we have a gig on Friday night. You’ve got three days to learn a dozen songs with music.’ It was an exciting challenge.”

The ground rules were clear. This was not a loose jam band. The songs had shapes, lengths and structures, and Jay was expected to learn them.

“One of the things that struck me the most was when they said, ‘The songs will be just the way they are on tape. We’re not improvising and this is just how they are. So, if you learn them how they are you’ll be good to go. We’re not making it up on the fly.’ I was like, ‘Okay.’”

For Jay, who described himself as “much more of a freeform, jam band type of drummer,” the assignment demanded a different discipline.

“To sit there and be like, ‘This song is always going to be somewhere between two minutes and two minutes and thirty-three seconds long’ is an interesting challenge,” he said. “So, they laid that tape on me and I got one practice in with them. We played for about three or four hours and then we started playing gigs.”

He was suddenly balancing school, work, music and the lifestyle of a 19-year-old.

“I was working, in school and in the band,” Jay recalled. “And if you throw in the partying of a typical 19- year-old, you’ve got a really full schedule.”

From Flyers to a Full House

For Squirrels started at parties and quickly worked toward the Gainesville club circuit. Jay remembered the band’s first significant gig as an AIDS fundraiser at The Covered Dish, likely in the fall of 1992. There were several bands on the bill, and For Squirrels opened the night. Nobody had heard of them yet, Jay said, but the band behaved as if the show mattered deeply because to them it did.

“We were driven by the energy of Jack and Bill,” Jay said. “It was Jack in particular – he seemed to always be the V-8 engine that was powering the whole thing. But Bill and Travis were giving it their all, too.”

Before that show, the band did the unglamorous work.

“Those guys did all the work,” Jay said of Jack Vigliatura, Bill and Travis. “They put flyers everywhere around the University of Florida campus, all the apartments, parking lots and everywhere. We ran miles and miles and miles leading up to that first gig. I remember spending money at the copy place, buying the staplers and putting up thousands of flyers.”

The band’s promotional efforts proved to be fruitful.

“The very first show at The Covered Dish the line was out the door for us,” Jay said. “The crowd actually thinned after we were done because a lot of them had come to see us. I believe that was one of the last times For Squirrels was the opening band or anywhere near the front of the lineup there.”

Jay still marvels at the band’s drive.

“Their enthusiasm, their work ethic and their desire to get people in front of them so they could perform for people was second to none,” he said.

Part Band, Part Circus

From behind the drums, Jay had a unique view of what For Squirrels was becoming. The band could be tightly rehearsed and still unpredictable. It had songs, but it also had bits, jokes, prizes, trivia and emergency routines for broken strings.

“Jack was always just the most absurd, entertaining, funny person in the room,” Jay said. “Bill’s humor was just incredible, but it was so much dryer. The combination of those two on stage – I would just sit in the back and enjoy it while hitting on my drum set. I was basically just being part of the audience watching them run the room.”

There were trivia questions at nearly every show, Jay said, and prizes that could turn into a pie in the face. If an instrument string broke, the band already knew how to fill time.

“We’d pull out bongos or congas and play ‘In the Jungle, the Mighty Jungle, the Lion Sleeps Tonight’ and sing it acoustically and bang on bongos and wait for the bass guitarist to replace a string,” he said. “They had all of these sort of tricks, tools and filler ready to go.”

That made every performance feel alive.

“Sitting back on the drums, it was never like, ‘Here’s our 12-song setlist and that’s all we’re going to do,’” Jay said. “It was more like, ‘You’re going to be part of a circus tonight. We’re going to play some songs, but be prepared for anything.’”

Tim Bender, who would become the band’s tour manager, entered Jay’s memory through that same live-wire energy. Jay recalled meeting him at a private-house party where the band had been set up in a garage behind a large house.

“I remember Tim was in the audience and was just showing an incredible amount of enthusiasm for what we were doing,” Jay said. “He found his way to the front and couldn’t wait to meet everybody after we were done.”

Tim, Jay said, “kind of injected himself into For Squirrels as the road manager he became.” The fit was instant.

“He was super excited,” Jay said of Tim. “I don’t remember how it happened, and it happened fast, but he quickly just became a member of the team. He took a very high level of energy the band already had to another level.”

Writing the Drum Language of Baypath Road

Although Jack Griego would play drums when For Squirrels recorded Baypath Road in November and December 1993, Jay’s role in the band’s early sound was foundational. He was the original drummer who learned the acoustic songs, built drum parts around them and helped push the material from folk- leaning sketches toward the rhythmic identity that would become part of the band’s first album.

Jay remembered an early Gainesville studio session that produced much of what became Baypath Road.

“There was a guy in Gainesville somewhere just outside of town,” he said. “He had his own studio on his property. We booked some time and spent an evening out there. None of us really had any idea what we were doing. It was super fun and scary at the same time.”

The recording process, as Jay tells it, was raw and rushed.

“We basically recorded Baypath Road in what seemed like about three hours,” he said. “So, we got a cassette out of it, but that is what eventually turned into Baypath Road. They added some songs after I left the band, but we did it in a studio in one night with not a lot of takes, very little editing and very little sound manipulation. We laid down what was most of what was to become Baypath Road.”

That contribution mattered. Jack Griego later credited Jay for laying out much of the drumming language on the record. Jay’s own description is modest:

“They added some songs after I was gone.”

But his memories show how thoroughly he had helped translate the band’s earliest acoustic arrangements into something that moved, hit and breathed like a full rock band.

The clearest example was “Flagboy,” a song Jay still remembers not as a track on a record but as a moment in a Gainesville storage unit when everything suddenly locked into place.

“It was the very first time we nailed ‘Flagboy,’” Jay said. “When you’re in a band you can have some challenges getting things right. You turn left when everybody turns right. Or there’s feedback if you play it like this. Things like that. So, you play it 100 different times.”

The band was rehearsing in its storage unit around September or October 1992, recording on cassette by pressing play and record at the same time. A group of older blues players practiced next door. Jay remembered working on “Flagboy” for most of the evening, then finally playing it perfectly.

“We all hit the last note perfectly on time and we all sat there as that last note faded out to silence,” he recalled. “Nobody wanted to be the next person to make a sound because we didn’t want to ruin it.”

Then the wall erupted.

“We all just sat there with eyeballs wide open looking at each other knowing we had just nailed an original song that everybody’s going to love,” Jay said. “And just as we did, the blues guys next to us started beating on the aluminum walls yelling, ‘Holy shit. You guys fucking rock. You guys are going to be rich.’ That moment right there was one of the best moments of my life, certainly the best musical moment of my life because there was a moment when there wasn’t ‘Flagboy’ and then there was the moment when there was.”

A Fork in the (Baypath) Road

For all the joy of those rehearsals and shows, Jay could see the difference between his relationship to music and the band’s. For Squirrels was becoming more organized, more ambitious and more serious. The band met Sunday nights at Gatorwood Apartments, where Jack Vigliatura, Bill and Travis lived, to review shows, plan the week and talk through the schedule.

“We didn’t have cell phones or internet then, but it was kind of like a small business operation,” Jay said. “A lot of those Sunday nights were listening to those guys work something out on their string instruments and me banging on a bongo or something to try to give them some rhythm for writing the songs. Sunday nights were just great.”

In June 1993, Jay took several weeks away and hitchhiked to Seattle to go hiking. When he returned, the tension between his path and the band’s path became unavoidable.

“I remember the guys being a little irritated with me,” he said. “They were joking with me when I came back and saying, ‘Did you find yourself yet? Can we get back to work?’”

At a Sunday meeting soon after, the band faced a decision.

“The Sunday meeting went a little like, ‘Okay. It’s time to either become a college student who drops out of this band or become a band member who drops out of college. Choose the path and commit to it because at this point it’s not going to be possible to do both,’” Jay recalled of the message that was conveyed.

It was not directed only at him, Jay said, but he understood what it meant.

“It was pretty obvious what the three of them were going to do,” he said. “They made it fairly clear that they were going to go all in on the music, book gigs outside of Gainesville and take it to the next level with Tim.”

The terms were simple.

“They said, ‘We don’t need to say anything and we don’t need to voice any answers right now. But if your answer is to stay, practice is tomorrow night at the warehouse. If your choice is to go, then just have your stuff out of the studio by tomorrow night.’ That was the end of the meeting,” Jay recalled.

Jay answered immediately without saying anything.

“I walked out of the apartment, got in my jeep and drove straight to the warehouse,” he said. “I packed up my drum set. I actually played a few of the songs by myself there for a couple of minutes as sort of a sentimental thing. I packed up my drum set, my sticks, my cymbals and everything, threw it in my jeep and drove home. That was my response to that meeting.”

He dropped out of the band and stayed in school. The others continued forward.

“I wasn’t torn at all,” Jay said. “I never had musical aspirations to be a rock star. I liked playing drums and I continued to play drums with people who also weren’t interested in being rock stars, the workload, the dedication, the commitment or the travel and everything else that comes with that. I knew that they were serious and that I was not a good fit for them.”

The separation was not bitter. Jay recognized a difference in ambition, lifestyle and musical imagination. “We were on different paths in a lot of ways,” he said. “Musically we were on different paths.”

Jay was drawn to jam bands, electronic music, DJs, scratching and heavier rhythmic ideas; they were moving with a clearer, more disciplined sense of mission.

“It became clear to me after that meeting,” Jay said. “These guys were pretty serious about this thing and I needed to get out of their way.”

Within the next week, Jay left Gainesville and returned to Stetson. He put his key to the warehouse in an envelope, wrote a short note and slid it under the door at Gatorwood Apartments.

“My note probably said something like, ‘Good luck on your quest,’” he said. Jay finished his business degree at Stetson in 1995.

The Evolution Toward Example

After leaving, Jay followed For Squirrels as much as he could in a pre-internet, pre-cell-phone era. He saw the band at The Covered Dish after Sony 550 signed them, on the same night label executives were scouting them, and he was struck by how far the music had moved since the acoustic cassette he received in 1992.

“The band was great,” Jay said. “The new drummer was great and I loved the direction that they had gone. Their songs had evolved. In the beginning they handed me the cassette tape and I thought, ‘Hey, we’re going to be R.E.M. Great.’ Then I added drum tracks to the songs, which moved the needle toward Baypath Road.”

By the time he saw them later, the sound was changing quickly.

“It was still very R.E.M. and very folky, but it started to get more noise involved in it and they were doing some cool things with feedback,” Jay said. “It was almost like a Radiohead influence or something like that. They were really taking it in their own direction. They really started to mix up the time signatures and drum beats and everything started to get more complicated musically, which I really liked. It was evolving fast and becoming something that was their own.”

When Jay heard For Squirrels had signed with Sony 550, he did not second-guess his decision to leave the band.

“I can imagine people would think I could feel like, ‘Wow, I should have hung in there and that should have been me.’ But not one iota of my soul felt that way,” he said. “When I found out that they got signed I was so happy for them. It was totally not my path and I had no regrets whatsoever. It was their calling and their path.”

To Jay, the deal confirmed what he had seen early.

“How many people do you know in life at that young age know exactly what they want to be when they grow up and do everything they can to start being it right then and there?” he asked. “I was surrounded by and got to spend a few years of my life with three guys who absolutely did. They were crystal clear in their spiritual beliefs, they were crystal clear in their musical ambitions, so to learn they had signed a record deal just validated everything I had believed to be true about them.”

The Weight of the Words

On Sept. 8, 1995, For Squirrels was returning to Florida after a performance at CBGB in New York when the band’s tour van suffered a tire blowout near Midway, Georgia, and flipped several times. Jack Vigliatura, 21, Bill, 23, and Tim, 23, were killed. Travis, 23, and Jack Griego, 28, were seriously injured and later released from the hospital. Less than a month later, Sony 550 released For Squirrels’ 10-song album Example.

Jay remembers learning about the crash with the frozen clarity people often reserve for public disasters.

“I remember, probably like people remember where they were when Kennedy was shot or the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded,” he said. “I was called that morning and told to read the newspaper, which I never did, but I think it was my mother who told me I had to read it.”

He got out of bed, read the story, folded the newspaper and put it away. “I was in denial about it, I think,” Jay said.

Later that day, as he headed to his job in Tampa as an investment advisor for an insurance company, the reality began to settle in.

“I remember the article saying Jack, Bill and Tim had been killed at the scene,” he said. “I read a little more to figure out what happened to Travis and Jack. I didn’t process it until later that day and I allowed it to kind of sink in. I just got overwhelmed. It was crushing.”

Jay attended the funerals for Jack Vigliatura and Bill in Palm Harbor. The tragedy also changed the experience of hearing Example, which arrived after the deaths of the very friends who had handed him that first cassette and invited him into the band.

Jay wore out his copy of Example before the songs reached radio. Then one day, while he was driving, he heard “The Mighty K.C.” come through the speakers.

“As soon as I heard the opening guitar string scratches, I pulled over the car and just focused my energy on it,” he recalled. “Initially all I could think of was how excited they would have been to hear it on the mainstream radio like I was hearing it.”

That thought brought both grief and joy. That thought carried both grief and joy.

He also heard the album through the shadow of what had happened.

“Anybody who has listened to those lyrics and thought about what happened in their lives, there’s a lot of prophecy in those lyrics,” Jay said.

Jay was referring to eerie lyrics on over half the songs on Example, including Superstar, The Mighty K.C., Under Smithville, The Immortal Dog and Pony Show and Stark Pretty.

Lyrics from The Mighty K.C. – on the album Example by For Squirrels

Ship me off to the morgue I’m ready to be buried

Alone way down in my bed, bed And I’m alone without the sun Please just take one

And by the grace of God go I Into the great unknown

Things are gonna change in our favor

And if we gather, if we fall Over the great unknown

Things are gonna change in our favor

“When you’re hearing those lyrics on the radio and you had just seen your friends put in the ground who made this song, that’s quite a telling story,” Jay said.

For Squirrels intentionally did not print its lyrics in Baypath Road or Example, in part because the band wanted listeners to interpret the songs for themselves. After the accident, and across the years and decades that followed, Jay heard Jack Vigliatura belt out the chorus to “Flagboy” much differently than he had when he and the band were still creating and solidifying the song.

I’m the Flagboy now … Make your momma proud

Oh the body of the Flagboy has been found

“You know what a Flagboy was, right?” Russell asked. “They were fairly disposable people and didn’t have a long life expectancy. They were critical in communicating to their side what was getting ready to happen. They’d line up, take the next shot and the flag boy usually got one run. And then they had to have a new flag boy. I didn’t know that at the time. It was only through retrospective ponderance of it all when I said, ‘Holy cow. Did these guys really know all of this?’ It’s totally mind-blowing. I haven’t spent a lot of time sharing that with people who aren’t close to it because you could have that conversation and come out of it sounding like a nutjob pretty quickly. But it’s an absolutely critical part of the story and possibly the arc of the story to make sure the message is delivered. These guys, without saying a word about the bible or spirituality or without any type of judgement, they led by example and seemed to have some sort of divine energy about their sense of urgency and about their need to do what they were doing.”

From Baypath Road to Example, the band had traveled an enormous distance in a very short time, which left a lot of people, including Jay, in awe.

“They had gone so far from the cassette tape I heard in 1992 to what they put out in 1995,” he said. “That really isn’t a long time. That’s a short period of time. I was with them until May or June of 1993, so in two short years for them to cover the musical ground they did and put together such a diverse album, it was really impressive.”

Jay loved Example because it sounded unlike anything else around it.

“It was like nothing else that was out at that time,” Jay said. “That was a huge grunge era and a lot of mixes of music coming together with grunge, pop and hip hop. And yet here was this band that was rocking this sound that was coming out of a good and positive place. They were unique and had made so much progress. It was really impressive.”

Carrying the Torch

After the crash, Travis and Jack Griego carried on under the name Subrosa, later recording Never Bet the Devil Your Head. Travis recruited Andy Lord and Mike Amish, Jay’s former high school bandmates and soccer friends, to complete the group. Jay saw Subrosa perform at The Ritz in Ybor City in 1996 and was struck less by the mechanics of survival than by the emotional force required to keep playing.

“Physically speaking, what Jack Griego was doing was incredibly impressive,” Jay said of his successor, who used a pulley system after his injuries. “But the most impressive thing I saw at that show was that those guys were still doing it, still making music.”

For Jay, that resilience was staggering.

“It would be really easy to want to go crawl up in a ball and hide in some corner to put all of those bad memories aside,” he said. “The emotional strength that it would have taken to continue on and carry that torch, whether it was under the For Squirrels name or Subrosa, I was really just blown away by their emotional strength.”

The Long Memory of a Short Chapter

Jay’s own life moved far from Gainesville’s storage units and club stages. After finishing college, he went into business, started and sold insurance companies and payroll agencies, traveled through roughly 20 countries, lived overseas, taught English as a foreign language and later returned to the insurance industry in Michigan.

“I’ve been on a very different journey,” he said. Yet For Squirrels has never left him.

“It’s never been hard for me to remember these guys because they were people I knew and loved and were people who absolutely lived their dreams,” Jay said. “Although their lives were cut short, they followed their calling in their 21 or 23 years here.”

He thinks of them every Sept. 8. Sometimes he checks Facebook to see what others are saying. Sometimes he travels back to Florida to visit the Jack Vigliatura and Bill’s graves at Slyvan Abbey Memorial Park in Palm Harbor, Florida.

“Although it hurt, and it still hurts to talk about them, and to think about them being gone and the impact that had on their families, I always smile and admire how they lived their lives and how much they were able to accomplish in alignment with their values in a short amount of time,” he said. “They were exceptional young men. I don’t go to a dark place with them.”

The music has even found its way into the next generation of Jay’s family. Before his daughter turned 13, he gave her his CD collection and a boom box. He told her to start with Baypath Road and Example, without first explaining his connection to the band.

“She loves Example and she loves ‘Flagboy’ from Baypath Road,” Jay said. “She listens to it all of the time and had it as the ring tone on her phone. So, in random intervals I get For Squirrels back into my life because my daughter is a fan.”

Jay also sees the band differently now than he did when he was the drummer trying to learn songs from a cassette tape. He speaks often of Jack and Bill as spiritual people who lived their values without preaching them.

“They were examples of God,” he said. “They didn’t say a word about it, nobody ever knew it and they didn’t preach it. They just lived it.”

Over time, he said, that example helped shape him.

“Just knowing who Jack and Bill, in particular, were as spiritual people and finding my way onto that path over 20 years later, finding that power now that they had then, it starts to become clear to me now what was driving these guys, where they were getting this joy and where they were getting this clarity. I didn’t have it back then. I didn’t even know what it was back then. I just knew they had something that I didn’t.”

“The Author of For Squirrels”

Jay’s time in For Squirrels didn’t last long, but the band’s own frontman seemed to understand that his early contribution was larger than chronology. His signed copy of Example remains one of Jay’s most treasured possessions because of what Jack Vigliatura wrote inside it.

“Jack signed it, ‘To the author of For Squirrels – Jack,’” Jay said. “I still have it and will always keep it.”

It is an inscription that reframes Jay’s role. He was not the drummer on the major-label record. He was not in the van on Sept. 8, 1995. He was not part of the touring future the band was chasing when he chose school over the road. But he was there at the beginning, when the songs moved from acoustic outlines into band arrangements, when For Squirrels learned how to make people line up outside The Covered Dish, when “Flagboy” first became “Flagboy,” and when three young musicians made it clear they were willing to build their lives around the music.

For Jay, For Squirrels is not only a story of promise interrupted. It is also a story of clarity, friendship, discipline and a small group of young men living with urgency.

“They seemed to live their lives as if they knew time was of the essence,” he said. “They lived as if they knew they had a limited number of days, hours, weeks or months to be good examples.”

That is why the short chapter still echoes. The original drummer who says he never wanted to be a rock star helped give For Squirrels its first pulse. Decades later, he still hears it.