The Lost and Found came out of Bellaire High School, 10 miles southwest of downtown Houston, and originally called themselves the Misfits.

Members were:

Peter Black – guitar and vocals
Jimmy Frost – lead guitar
James Harrell – bass

They went through a succession of drummers, first Norman Blythe, then Micky Bishop, his younger brother Stephen Bishop, and finally Steve Webb.

On March 11, 1966, the Baytown Sun ran the photo of the Misfits seen at top, with the caption:

Meet the Misfits. This band with the big beat will play at “Safari A Go Go” Friday night at a teenage dance in the Bayshore Rod, Reel and Gun Club, 3223 Minnesota. Hours will be from 8 p.m. to midnight. Admission will be $1.25 per person.

The Misfits played shows at Love Street and La Maison, where, according to Jimmy Frost, they met the 13th Floor Elevators for the first time. The Elevators would have a big influence on their sound, and their friendship with Roky Erickson and Stacy Sutherland would eventually lead to an introduction to the International Artists label. Frost stated that they did not make any records as the Misfits.

On November 29, 1966, at the start of a residency at the Living Eye in Houston, they became the first Texas group busted for LSD. Jimmy Frost remembered Peter, James and Mickey facing charges, and that one of the reasons the band signed with International Artists was because its owners, Bill Dillard and Noble Ginther, were lawyers who could help them with the bust. Actually it was Micky’s younger brother Stephen Bishop who was arrested with Black, Harrell and their friend George Banks.

The Houston Chronicle broke the news on November 30, 1966 in a front-page feature “Dope, LSD Raids Net 12 in City”!

Marijuana Found In a Black Hearse

A raid on two apartments at 2404 Yoakum Blvd. resulted in the arrest of four men on charges of possession of dangerous drugs and possession of marijuana. Those charged were George Baldwin Banks Jr., 22, James Lee Harrell, 19, Stephen Stafford Bishop, 21, and William Peter Black, 21. A 17-year-old girl and an 18-year-old youth were questioned but were not charged …

The article stated “Chemists are analyzing 49 white pills in possession of some of those arrested. The police narcotics squad has been told they are LSD tablets …” However, only one one person is listed as actually possessing LSD, “a 21-year-old man from San Francisco who said he brought 50 or 60 LSD tablets here from California five days ago. He gave police a bottle containing 34 pills he said were LSD. He was not charged.”

The Associated Press version confirms that the band was busted for LSD: “Those charged and liable to prosecution in an LSD test case include four members of a Rock ‘n’ roll group: George Glandwin Banks, Jr., 22; James Lee Harrell, 19; Steven Stafford Bishop, 21, and a 23-year-old service station attendant, Robert Bruce Kilpatrick”; and that it would be the first LSD prosecution in Texas: “… based on Texas ‘dangerous drug’ statues … Dist. Atty. Carol Vance said he knew of no other LSD charges filed in Texas to date.”

Frost told Not Fade Away that the charges were dismissed because, unlike marijuana, LSD was not yet illegal (which is correct: possession was not criminalized federally until 1968). Frost also said that Scott Holtzman of the Living Eye wanted the Misfits to change their name after the drug bust. However, the name change to the Lost and Found, seems to have come a few weeks before the bust, and in any case was a more appropriate band name given the increasingly psychedelic direction of their music.

George Banks, a friend of the band who took over management of the Misfits, wrote to me:

I spoke with James Harrell, just to confirm what I am about to list. First, the MISFITS was a name Micky Bishop came up with, as it was a group he played with in the Navy. He was the first drummer, and to James’ recollection, Kearney never played in the group. After Micky, his younger brother Steve also played drums in the band and as I recall then Webb. There may have been the other fella you mention [Norman Blythe], but I do not know him.

We all met the Elevators in Austin, before they played the infamous Jade Room gig, and all remain friends to this day. I was maybe a try-to-be manager with the original Misfits, after leaving the military; and then later the Lost and Found, but I also assisted (I’ll describe it that way) Euphoria, which you rarely see any info about.

Euphoria did come into Houston about high times for the Elevators and others of the IA time frame. They were a sizzlin’ three piece group. Wesley Watt, David Potter, drums and Pat.. I forget his last name.. [Pat Connolly of the Surfaris] on bass (early on, in CA, Pat was with a surf group, pre-Beach Boys, and they were very successful in their locale.) Euphoria and the guys from the Misfits got along quite well and … through some differences .. all together left for LA, minus Frost, who having married early on and was with their first child, did not travel to CA with everyone else.

We played around out there got a recording contract. I brought the first release [Euphoria’s “Hungry Woman” / “No Me Tomorrow” 45 on the Mainstream label] back to Houston and presented it to Larry Kane. It didn’t really take off, Euphoria hadn’t stuck around town long enough to really develop any notoriety, or following.

The band in LA went through a lot of emotional changes in part due to the fact that Wesley and David were married (and drugs). The times got tough, to even feed ourselves. James, Pete and I headed back to Houston, the rest kind of picks up with the bust after we had been back a month or two. Micky was not included in the bust in ’66, it was his younger brother Steve and another fella, a writer, Roger Hamilton (deceased) aka William West, and James. Their arrests were dismissed, we each served 10 year probation sentences.

I don’t believe that the signing with International Artists had anything to do with there being attorneys in the head office. If I am mistaken, well, I don’t know every minute detail of all these guys lives, but we did live and recreate together often. It was not the notoriety that changed the bands name (I don’t think). But having returned from CA and playing with/as Euphoria the group was rejoined with Jimmy Frost. So I felt the absence from and the reunion, as it were, with the whole band, it was .. well .. Lost and Found.

Scott Holtzman’s nowsounds column on June 19, 1966 mentioned Euphoria being “fresh from Hollywood’s Sunset Strip … playing at La Maison and recording at Houston’s Andrus Productions.” For his July 24 column, Scott wrote “Wesley Watt of Euphoria called Frank Davis from LA and asked him to come out there and engineer and play and sing on their sessions. Frank would rather stay at Andrus Productions though.”

October 9, 1966 nowsounds: “George Banks, manager of Euphoria, is in town promoting their new Mainstream single. Wesley and Dave have combined with two former Misfits, (James Harrell and Pete Black) and their sound is something else.”

November 6, 1966 nowsounds: “Euphoria broke up for good. George Banks is building a new group from the old Misfits into Lost & Found.”

The gist of this timeline is that the Misfits took a hiatus around late July or August of 1966 while James Harrell and Pete Black accompanied George Banks, Wesley Watt and Dave Potter to Los Angeles where James and Pete may have played on Euphoria’s Mainstream 7″, “Hungry Women” / “No Me Tomorrow”. By early November, 1966, that version of Euphoria had broken up, and James Harrell and Pete Black were back in Houston, reforming the Misfits as Lost and Found with Jim Frost back on lead guitar, and probably Stephen Bishop on drums, since he was arrested with James and Pete that month.

Certainly the group was trying out the new band name before the arrest. An ad for shows at the Living Eye lists the “Lost and Found” opening for Neal Ford and the Fanatics on November 11, and then the Coastliners on Saturday, November 12, 1966.

The signing with International Artists probably came months after the bust, sometime in 1967, as the copyright for most of the songs on the album were registered on August 30, 1967.

Their first 45, “Everybody’s Here” / “Forever Lasting Plastic Words” shows the lighter side of their repertoire, and the band complained that IA toned down their sound. Recorded at Andrus Studios, the engineer was Frank Davis who worked with other IA bands, like the Elevators and the Golden Dawn. Though at times sounding like the Elevators, their LP has many good songs such as “I Realize” and “There Would Be No Doubt”. George Banks did the cover art for their LP as well as the covers of the Elevators’ Easter Everywhere and Golden Dawn’s Power Plant.

Jim Frost wrote “Everybody’s Here“ and “Let Me Be”, while James Harrell wrote “Foreverlasting Plastic Words” and three songs on side two: “I Realize”, “2 Stroke Blues”, “I’m So Hip to Pain”. “Zig Zag Blues” and “Living Eye” was a collaboration between Harrell, Frost, Black and Webb.

Peter Black and William West wrote “There Would Be No Doubt”.

The back cover lists first names only, including Steve (this would be drummer Steve Webb), and Frank (Frank Davis). Producer Lelan Rogers praises Frank Davis in the back cover notes and calls him the fifth member of the band.

The group recorded some more songs in February 1968 that went unreleased at the time. Lelan added “25 MPH” to the Epitaph for a Legend album he compiled in 1978. I haven’t yet heard “Girl with a One Track Mind”, written by William West according to George Banks.

By the time they recorded their second and last 45 in ’68, their sound was totally original and psychedelic. “Professor Black” is supposed to be about Pete Black, it was written by Black, James Harrell and George Banks. “When Will You Come Through” is just as good, with searing guitar work. This time they worked with Fred Carroll as producer, who perhaps did not restrain them in the studio as much as Lelan Rogers. Fred Carroll (real name Fred Courtney, Jr) founded International Artists in October of ’65, but sold it soon after, then returned as a producer after Lelan Rogers left. He also started the Solar label and managed the Coastliners. He passed away in late June, 2007.

The Lost and Found played at lead four weekends at the Vulcan Gas Company in Austin from December 15 and 16, 1967 to March 22 & 23, 1968, usually with Shiva’s Headband. They also played the New Orleans Club in Austin on at least one occasion. See the partial gig list at end of article. Strangely, I can find no gig listings for the Lost and Found from January through October 1967!

There were other songs recorded around this time for a second LP, but before that could come to pass, International Artists booked them on a tour of Texas, Louisiana and Alabama with the Music Machine, I believe in May or June 1968, though I would like to find some gig notices.

Jimmy Frost: “When we got back International Artists said we owed them money and that just finished the band off, we didn’t see any money from the tour, and we were all so broke that the band just split up.”

Still under contract from IA, Pete Black and James Harrell reluctantly played about a dozen dates with Stacy Sutherland and Danny Thomas in a ersatz version of the 13th Floor Elevators after the release of the fake “Live” album in July of ’68. This lineup of the Elevators may have included Steve Webb, who I’ve read was able to mimic Roky’s wailing vocals.

Pete Black joined Endle St. Cloud. I’ve read Steve Webb played drums with Potter St. Cloud and Euphoria, but that conflicts with David Potter’s account (and Potter certainly was the drummer on Potter St. Cloud’s album). Steve Webb passed away a few years ago.

George Banks continues on the connections between the Lost and Found, Endle St. Cloud and Euphoria:

Alan Mellinger (Endle St. Cloud) .. some how.. after we’d left LA.. wound up in LA playin’ around with Euphoria.. in fact they released an album – [A Gift From] Euphoria. James Harrell, after the bust here in Houston, returned to LA (he did studio work for a couple of years) and may have been on that album also (?). Euphoria later did an extensive tour with Blue Cheer. I visited Alan Mellinger in Morrison, CO some many years ago where he and his wife and two children were doing quite well, as Alan was a partner in a Clinical Drug and Alcohol Re-Hab Practice in Denver. While there we called David Potter, who at the time was living in I believe, Wisconsin or Minnesota, working construction as a masonry contractor. A couple of years later I heard that Alan died of a heart attack.. and so ends my immediate and intimate association with the ‘Music World’ of the 60’s. As a footnote I think that Frank Davis, besides being one of Texas’s true hidden jewels as a performer, did all he could with the available equipment of the times.

I read that John Kearney of the Spades played with the Misfits for a short while after the Spades had split up in 1965, but neither George Banks nor Jimmy Frost remembered him in the group.

Update: James “Frosty” Frost passed away on July 2, 2025, at the age of 81 in Round Rock, Texas.

A couple quotes from Jimmy Frost’s interview in Not Fade Away:

“[The Catacombs], they were the competition, we never played over there. That was the rich kids [laughs] … we played a Foley’s fashion show one time and the management said we were too loud and wanted us to quit so we just turned it way up…!”

“Me and Stacy [Sutherland] were good friends, we used to trade licks alot. He was an excellent guitar player … boy when he’d start hitting the beat and stompin’ his feet on the state the dust would fly …”

Sources include: Interview with Jimmy Frost in Not Fade Away #4, Paul Drummond’s Eye Mind, and my correspondence with George Banks. Some photos were originally taken by their manager, Gary Iwers. Misfits business card from the collection of Andrew Brown. La Maison photo courtesy of Nancy Kuehl.

Special thanks to Jim Frost’s daughter, Tiffany for sharing her family’s photos. Her interest in her father’s music has led me to revise this article in July, 2026, with a fresh look at my old sources and a search for some new ones.

Very incomplete gig list:

Friday, March 11, 1966: The Misfits at Safari a Go Go in Baytown

Friday, November 11, 1966: Lost and Found, Neal Ford & the Fanatics at the Living Eye
Saturday, November 12, 1966: Lost and Found, the Coastliners at the Living Eye
Friday, November 18, 1966: Lost and Found, the Runaways at the Living Eye
Saturday, November 19, 1966: Lost and Found, Neal Ford & the Fanatics at the Living Eye
Friday, December 2, 1966: Lost and Found, the Moving Sidewalks at the Living Eye
Saturday, December 3:, 1966: Lost and Found, Neal Ford & the Fanatics at the Living Eye

Sunday, November 19, 1967: Lost and Found at the New Orleans Club, Austin
Friday & Saturday, December 1 & 2, 1967: Lost and Found, Starvation Army Band at Love Street Light Circus
Friday & Saturday, December 15 & 16, 1967: Lost and Found, Shiva’s Head Band at the Vulcan Gas Company
Sunday, December 17, 1967: 13th Floor Elevators, Lost and Found, Shades and Starvation Army Band at Love Street Light Circus

Friday & Saturday, January 12 & 13, 1968: Lost and Found, Shiva’s Head Band at the Vulcan Gas Company
Saturday, February 3, 1968: Lost and Found, the Starvation Army Band at Taylor Hall, Pasadena
Friday & Saturday, February 9 & 10, 1968: Lost and Found, Georgetown Medical Band at the Vulcan Gas Company
Friday & Saturday, March 22 & 23, 1968: Lost and Found, Shiva’s Head Band at the Vulcan Gas Company