it remains a cult staple. Clem Burke, who had joined the band for the Vinyl tour, appears on this album, and backing vocal contributions include Dwight Twilley and Sylvain Sylvain. After the tours, the group split. 1995–2005 Following two relatively quiet years after the 1994 breakup, John Easdale began performing live music again in 1996, doing shows in both New Jersey and the L.A. area. He assembled a band that he occasionally has named The John Easdale Group and has casually named it The Newcomers, featuring Dramarama's Mark Englert, as well as Peter Wood for East Coast appearances. Other Newcomers have included fellow eggBERT alum Nick Celeste (of former Bongo Richard Barone's band and once the frontman for In Color, Aimee Mann, Jules Shear, Muddy Shews, Danny Roselle, and Chris O'Hara. Easdale found steady players in Mike Davis, Tony Snow and Craig Ballam, who connected with Easdale circa 1996. In 1998, John Easdale released a solo album on the eggBERT label titled Bright Side, on which many of the tracks featured musicians with ties to both Dramarama and the Newcomers, including Mark Englert and Clem Burke, as well as Mike Davis, Tony Snow and Craig Ballam, who also contributed production and engineering skills. Before Bright Side, Easdale issued a fan-only, no-label version of the Bright Side in 1996 that contained versions of songs that made the final cut as well as some that did not. Easdale refers to it as his "blueprint" for the final collection, and fans call it the "pre-release" of Bright Side. Following the publicity from the VH1]series Bands Reunited, subsequent KROQ's Inland Invasion, and an article in Rolling Stone that lauded their retooling of the Dead Kennedys' politically charged "California über alles" in response to Arnold Schwarzenegger's 2003 run for governor of California, Easdale decided in late 2003 the band name Dramarama should continue. The next CD (an EP) would be billed to Dramarama, titled Absolutely, 100% Made in N.J., which was recorded on a whim while John and the band were on a brief tour of New Jersey in 2003. The EP's liner notes indicated that most of the seven tracks were "from the forthcoming Dramarama album Everybody Dies." The album was released on October 25, 2005 by California-based label 33rd Street Records. They appeared on The Ellen DeGeneres Show as Ellen's 50th birthday present from her DJ Ted Stryker. 2006–present The current lineup consists