GUADALCANAL DIARY

"It was startin' to get a little bit too closed in," recalls Crowe, speaking in her delightfully thick southern accent. "We didn't have the TIME to step back and get a vision. It was always like push, push, push, tour, write songs, get in the studio."

"Rhett wanted to take some time off and raise her child properly," Poe adds. "We were all getting along famously, so that was a good time to take a break. Most bands do it the other way around -- they wait till they hate each other and THEN break up."

"We felt like we'd gone far enough and all wanted to do different sorts of things, musically or not," Attaway remembers. "It turned into a seven year holiday. We quit and stayed friends. I don't know that woulda happened if we'd kept going." He pauses and adds thoughtfully, "In hindsight, two years after we quit, commercial alternative radio broke all these other bands real big -- so maybe we quit too early."

Wall shrugs. "We probably shoulda just taken a year off and gone back to it."

\ "It's hard to believe that so much time has passed and so many people remember," marvels Poe.

Of all the members of Guadalcanal Diary, drummer Poe's journey has probably been the strangest. He's also the only one of them currently living in Atlanta, so he and I agree to rally one night near his Midtown home to talk. While driving through a thunderstorm to meet him, I hear a WRAS DJ asking, "Hey kids, ya wanna hear something cool?" -- and then playing Guadalcanal Diary's "The Likes of You" from FLIP-FLOP.