-Two days ago I received a call from my friend, Roy Coston, that another friend, Jerry Yerman, had passed away. I was in a band with Jerry called Four Large Men (FLM) from October 11, 1993-January 19, 1999. This was the “Mark III” version of the band consisting of Jerry on vocals, Roy on guitar, Mike Merrifield on drums and myself on bass. It was initially a hard time for me cause not only was I transitioning to bass (I’d always been a lead guitarist in previous bands so there was an approach/mechanics challenge as well as some drama that followed it for a while..), but I was also in the midst of a bad breakup with a woman so I wasn’t the easiest person to be around with for a while.

-Up until CAROLINE BLUE, FLM was the band I’d spent the most time with-and now one of us is gone…It’s been around 20-plus years but it doesn’t seem that long ago… There were a lot of memories from this time period. Perhaps if I ever actually get “WAYNE-THE BOOK” off the ground I’ll be sure to include the FLM years-and yes Roy, this also includes my run-ins with cops, strippers and more (HA!) 🙂 We all basically kept in touch with each other (in various degrees) after the breakup and whenever the four of us were in the same room, we’d recreate the pose we all did for a TV commercial for Music Lovers Shopp (yes-2 “P’s”) in Syracuse back in the 90s where Jerry would say “We are Four Large Men” and all of us would then put up four fingers-hence some of the poses in some of the included pics. I’ll digitize and upload that commercial at some point…

-From what little I knew Jerry (who was always the most private out of the four of us) had hard times more often than not. He almost died a few times from complications with heart surgery. He’d lost a lot of weight and became diabetic not too long after the break-up. I remember the first time I saw him after the breakup years ago and I almost didn’t recognize him-he’d shrunk down by that much. Back in the day, he was known as “The Largest of the Large” (and with all the connotations that came with that phrase) 🙂 so you can imagine my shock when he was down to almost Roy size…

-The last time I heard from him was when he wished me a happy birthday eight days ago… One of my future projects is to digitize both pics and videos from the FLM days (as well as others like Front Row, CAROLINE BLUE & more) and get them online (thru here, Instagram, YouTube, etc…). It’s very time consuming but I wish I’d gotten the FLM stuff all done before Jerry passed… I wish you were still here with us Jerry, but at least you’re no longer in pain. R.I.P. brudder…