Formed near the end of his tenure as the leader of Los Angeles hardcore legends
Black Flag,
Greg Ginn's instrumental group
Gone walked the strange fine line between atonal jazz, riff-heavy rock, and brief forays into funk stylings sporadically from 1986 onward. The first
Gone release,
Let's Get Real, Real Gone for a Change, and its follow up,
Gone II: But Never Too Gone, featured eventual
Rollins Band members Sim Cain (drums) and Andrew Weiss (bass).
Gone went quiet after their first two releases, not to return until 1994 with not one but two new full-lengths releases that year,
Criminal Mind and
All the Dirt That's Fit to Print. With Cain and Weiss no longer playing with
Ginn (Weiss, by this time, had moved on from
the Rollins Band and taken up bass duties with
Ween), replacements were found with bassist Steve Sharp and drummer Gregory Moore. 1996 and 1998 saw further
Gone releases,
Best Left Unsaid and
Country Dumb, respectively. Other projects, as well as distribution problems at
Ginn's (and for that matter
Gone's) label, SST, kept
Gone quiet after 1998, limiting the band to occasional live appearances. ~ Christopher M. True