Before For Squirrels became one of Gainesville’s great almost-famous bands, before Example released as a posthumous major-label record of promise and loss, before Bill White was remembered by a cult following of fans as For Squirrels’ bassist, he was known as a smart, funny, mischievous kid. One whose life kept intersecting with Trey Dunlap’s in unexpected ways.
Their circle was young, musical, restless, and close enough that friendships, crushes, rivalries, and bands could all overlap before anyone understood what any of it would become.
Bill attended the University of Florida, where he taught himself guitar and helped form a band. Founded in a UF dorm room in 1991, the band’s classic lineup centered on Jack Vigliatura on vocals, Travis Tooke on guitar, Bill on bass, and Jay Russell on drums before he left the band and Jack Griego succeeded him with the sticks. The group developed a jangly, melodic alternative-rock sound that drew comparisons to R.E.M. while carrying a rougher, grunge era edge. Bill was the bass player, but he was never just that.
Bill sang backup vocals, played piano, and even took lead vocals on “3.,” a song he helped write on the band’s first album, Baypath Road. At the time, the song could be heard as a young man’s cryptic goodbye to a place, a person, or a version of himself. Years later, after the accident, its title and refrain would take on a darker charge that no one could have known to hear in 1993.
Enemies, Then Friends
Trey’s first story of getting to know Bill is not about music at all. It is about jealousy, confusion, and a bouquet of flowers. “There was a time when I actually hated him,” Trey said with a laugh.
Trey grew up in Clearwater, and knew Bill through Clearwater Community Church. They were just acquaintances then, but both were seeing the same girl without seeing the full picture. Bill returned to Clearwater from Gainesville and left flowers and a love note on her car. Trey found them first. “I went out to get something from the car and I was like, ‘What the heck is going on here? Why would Bill be doing this? I don’t understand.’”
About a week after the flowers appeared, Trey confronted Bill at church. “I said, ‘Look man. I’m not going to lie. I’m really upset about the flowers, but it’s more important to me to forgive and show grace. I don’t want there to be bad blood between us.’ That was how it started.”
The confrontation could have hardened into a feud, but choosing forgiveness over escalation paid off because “To make a long story short, she was telling Bill that we weren’t very serious, but she didn’t tell me that she wanted to see other people.”
When they realized they were both being played, they bonded over the shared experience and what they did to bury the hatchet once and for all: in an empty van, with an absurd amount of confetti, and their buddy Jeff Carter along for the ride.
“Bill, Jeff and I were at a movie and we saw a Xerox place or something like that that had a whole bunch of confetti, and I mean huge bags of it.” They immediately understood that the universe had handed them a prank and piled it into the van. “We were like, ‘Okay, what are we going to do with it? We’ve got to do something.’ We wound up taking it to the girl’s car, broke into the car and emptied out the bags of confetti into her car. That night is when we fully bonded. It wasn’t anything malicious towards her and I don’t have any bad feelings towards her, but it was a special thing for Bill and I to get through together.”
The confetti prank pulled off by Trey, Bill and Jeff was captured on video. Trey laid down the guitar track to the short video, which can be accessed by clicking here.
Following For Squirrels in Gainesville
By the time Trey was seeing For Squirrels around Gainesville, the friendship with Bill had become something steady and real. Even Travis knew the backstory. “Travis knew me as the guy who wanted to beat up Bill,” Trey said. “But I never really wanted to beat him up. I was just really pissed off at him.” The bitterness had become a joke.
Trey followed For Squirrels through the kind of Gainesville circuit that made bands durable before they were thrust into the limelight: house parties in the student ghetto, noisy nights at The Covered Dish, the types of shows where anything could happen.
Gainesville itself was overloaded with bands then: Less Than Jake, Sister Hazel, Hot Water Music, Wholeculture, and For Squirrels all moved through the same ecosystem. “There were so many good bands in Gainesville at that time,” Trey said. He knew the scene was rich, but his memory narrows to the band he cared about most. “I know the guys played with a lot of them, but I don’t remember who. I only remember For Squirrels.”
Trey was struck by how complete the band already seemed. “I was super stoked about the band. They were so fun to watch. You know how some bands just have an infectious attitude? There’s so many layers a band has to have to be good and entertaining. Good hooks. Good songs. Good musicianship. Good stage presence. They had everything! They had camaraderie and just good songs. The talent they all brought to it was awesome.”
Humor was part of the show. The band could be fixing technical difficulties and still keep the room with them. “They would do little jokes and things like that while changing out guitar strings and things like that. It was just fun and good infectious energy that the whole band had.”
Once, Bill broke a bass string in the middle of a set at a house party. Jack Vig asked the crowd if anyone happened to have one. Trey did not, but he lived close enough to improvise.
“I said, ‘Dude. I’ll be right back,’” Trey remembered. “I only lived a 10-minute bike trip away. I grabbed a bass string off a guitar I had, or one I found in my place, rushed back and gave it to them. They put it on and finished the set.” That moment captured the early For Squirrels experience: scrappy, communal, and funny without undercutting the earnest heart of the music.
Jack Vig might ride a unicycle on stage, crash, get back up, and keep going. The band’s looseness never meant laziness. “They’d have trivia questions and whomever answered correctly would win a pie that the band had literally baked before the show.”
As the years went on, Trey watched them get tighter, especially after Jack Griego joined on drums.
Others noticed them, too. Trey remembered hearing that Stephen Malkmus of Pavement sought the band out after a show near Jannus Landing and told them, “You guys are a really good band.”
For Trey, who counted Malkmus among his favorite artists, that endorsement mattered. “When Bill and Travis told me that I was like, ‘What? The guy from Pavement sought you out to tell you that?’”
The Sound of Promise
The band’s debut album, Baypath Road., was funded with student-loan money and recorded at Gainesville’s Mirror Images Studio in late 1993 by a band that was raw but already full of hooks, humor, and ambition.
When the record arrived, Trey heard the leap from live potential to recorded proof. “I was so impressed,” he said. “I just had it on repeat, repeat, repeat. I had seen them live, but when I heard the album I couldn’t believe it.”
By then, Trey had established a firm friendship with Bill, as well as Travis and Jack Vig, but he also became closer with road manager Tim Bender. While both took a photography course at UF, they were in separate classes. They did, however, spend a significant amount of time togher in the art school’s darkroom.
“There was this time when I rode my bike to class and stopped by when I saw Tim and the guys loading up the van to go out on a small tour,” Trey recalled. “I think it was before any label interest. Tim asked me if I wanted to go with them on the tour. All of the guys agreed. I was so tempted, but I just couldn’t go. Looking back now, I feel honored to have been asked to be part of it.”
As they gained in popularity in Gainesville, some were critical of For Squirrels, who were dismissed as too close to R.E.M. But Trey heard more than imitation.
“There were a lot of haters out there,” Trey recalled. “They would say, ‘They sound like R.E.M.’ Some people would say that, and I’d say, ‘Yeah, they’re good! Really good!’ From the beginning I was an advocate of the band and telling people about them. I don’t think they were trying to be like R.E.M. Bill really liked Simon and Garfunkel, and you can hear that in their music, too.”
Bill’s musical curiosity was part of what made him memorable. Trey once returned from Chicago after his brother insisted he buy Gish by Smashing Pumpkins immediately. Back in Gainesville, he played it in the car for Travis, Bill, and friend Ken Baker. “They became Smashing Pumpkins fans almost immediately,” Trey recalled.
Bill was also excited about the making of Example, the band’s major-label debut for Sony 550 Music, recorded with producer Nick Launay at Compass Point Studios in Nassau and Criteria Studios in Miami. Trey remembered him talking about experimenting with sounds, even breaking things or making strange noises for the record.
“As far as the longevity of the band, he never really talked about that,” Trey said. “Bill was just all in and doing it.” That was how Trey remembered Bill in general: fully present, witty, and restless
“Bill was just a really smart, kind person,” he said. “Even if you were just with him for a few minutes you could tell he was really smart. He knew about a lot of things like history and things like that. Really fun guy to be around and just a really good friend. He was just a super, kind individual.”
He was also part of a rascally bunch.
“Bill and that whole crew liked to do mischievous stuff,” Trey said. “It was light-hearted, fun stuff, but stuff you shouldn’t be doing, as a joke.” There were countless stories like one from a trip to Weeki Wachee when one friend took off all his clothes and started jumping from a tree into the water, and soon everyone was joining in.
They sound like throwaway anecdotes, but in Trey’s telling it belongs to the same portrait as the confetti prank and the stage pies: a group of young people living in the charged space between innocence and lighthearted hooliganism, making memories with the casual assumption that there would be plenty more time to make more.
When Promise Became Memory
In September 1995, For Squirrels were on the edge of national recognition. They had signed to Sony 550 Music and recorded Example, and had played a showcase at the CBGB, connected to the CMJ Music Marathon in New York. On their way home to Gainesville, their van blew a tire on Interstate 95 south of Savannah, Georgia. The crash killed three people: Jack Vig, tour manager Tim Bender, and Bill.
The loss rippled through families and friendships. Trey thought often of Bill’s brother Jon. “I have an older brother and I can’t even imagine losing him. It was extremely tough on Jon.”
Trey was living in Chicago when the news reached him. “I got the call from my roommate who told me what had happened,” he said. “It was heartbreaking. I flew down for the funeral.”
Bill and Jack shared a funeral, and Trey remembered the band’s unreleased song “Van Gogh” playing on loop, and at the wake Examplewas played on repeat. The band’s songs, already filled with unusual images and intimations of death, felt different afterward, as if their lyrics had been pulled through the wreckage and come back with a terrible new meaning.
“There are definitely some references in those songs where they were almost predicting this or something,” Trey said. “It was like, ‘Wow!’ It was eerie.”
For Trey, the accident froze the band at the moment when everything seemed possible.
“The world lost three beautiful people,” he said. “It was such a loss for the families, fans of the music and just good music in general. Tragic! That was our special experience and not many people knew about it. Their music is so good. Their hooks are so good. Jack’s voice is so good. The bass lines are so good. The guitar work is so good. It’s all good.”
That feeling was keenest around “3.” What had once sounded like a strange, private lyric now seemed almost too precisely weighted: three remembered, two chosen, one voice asking not to be forgotten.
Even the old love-triangle story seemed to echo inside the music. Asked whether Bill’s song “3.” from Baypath Roadmight have been about the girl who had briefly made enemies of him and Trey, Trey said, “I want to say he was writing that song to her. Jeff would ask him what that song was about and Bill was kind of vague and wouldn’t answer him.”
If so, the song became another strange artifact of the way pain, forgiveness, humor, and friendship had braided together in Bill’s life. But the eeriness does not depend on solving what the song was “really” about. Its uncanny impact comes from the way the meaning was shifted after the crash.
Lyrics from “3.” by For Squirrels on the album Baypath Road
So, goodbye Baypath Road
Now your influence is done
Cause now I live by hope you see
I’m waitin’ for the one
So when you think of yesterday
Remember three
When you decide on two
Remember me
“Remember three” no longer felt abstract. It seemed to point, unbearably and inexorably, toward Bill, Jack Vig, and Tim, and “When you decide on two” could not help but summon Travis and Jack Griego, those two left behind.
For Squirrels’ cult following are left with that unsettling coincidence: a song called “3.” written by Bill and Jack Vig before the accident, later shadowed by a crash that killed three people—including the very writers—and spared two. It is not prophecy in any literal sense. It is something more haunting because it remains accidental, unexplainable, and impossible to unhear once the facts are known. The lyrics become less a prediction than a ghostly echo, one of those cruel associations that grief notices and never quite releases.
The Weight of Survival
Two survived the crash. Travis and Jack Griego, both severely injured, were left to carry the band’s interrupted story forward. Examplewas released as planned less than a month after the accident, on October 3, 1995.
After recovering, Travis and Jack Griego endeavored to press on. At first, they performed low-key shows as For Squirrels with bassist Andy Lord before becoming Subrosa. Andy and Mike Amish, like Bill and Jack Vig, came from the same wider Clearwater orbit, and Subrosa’s 1997 album Never Bet the Devil Your Head put Travis at the center as lead vocalist and songwriter. The music was darker and heavier than For Squirrels, and it carried the weight of survival.
Trey listened obsessively. “I listened to that album over and over and over,” he said. “Travis is such a talent and was a friend, so I wanted him to continue to go for it. I don’t know how he did it. The Subrosa album is so great. It’s like, ‘Whoa.’ But lyrically it’s difficult to listen to. But I appreciate the rawness and honesty of it.” He had always believed in Travis’ ability, as did others.
“I remember Tim Bender telling me one day that Travis was so talented,” Trey said. “Tim was like, ‘Travis has got it. He could be doing so much more in the band than he is right now.’ He was basically saying that Travis was badass.”
Seeing Subrosa live was harder. In Chicago, Trey unexpectedly spotted the band downtown on their way to a radio interview. He pulled over, yelled for Travis, and ended up spending the afternoon with them, finding a pool hall to hang out in and grabbing some dinner. The reunion was warm, but the performance Trey saw opened something raw.
“During the show I was watching them, I cried,” Trey said. “Just bawled. It was tough to watch. And then afterwards I was hanging out with Travis and I lost it. It was such a good show, but it was so hard to watch.”
A Legacy Handed Forward
Years later, Trey still carries For Squirrels forward person by person. “I still run into people and try to introduce them to For Squirrels,” he said. “I’ve given it to some of my friends multiple times forgetting that I had already given it to them. They all love it, even when someone hears it for the first time 20-something years later.”
In 2008, he introduced a boss to the band and told him the whole story, including Subrosa. “My boss liked For Squirrels,” Trey said, “but he actually liked the Subrosa album better.”
That may be the most fitting afterlife for Bill and For Squirrels: not a clean tragedy, not a cult-band footnote, but a set of songs and stories that keep being handed to new listeners.
The story begins with flowers on a car and two young men angry at each other for reasons neither fully understood. It moves through confetti, church, Gainesville house parties, unicycle crashes, broken bass strings, homemade pies, major-label studios, grief, and the refusal of the surviving members to let silence have the final word.
In Trey’s memory, Bill remains the smart, kind friend who helped make all of that possible—the bass player whose lines still move inside the songs, and whose brief life keeps finding new ears every time someone presses play.
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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