Fireballet

Begun in North Jersey as The Fireball Kids, Fireballet marked the American emergence of bands that would at least attempt to contend with the classical vocabulary of European counterparts like Emerson Lake and Palmer and Gentle Giant. Moreover, the band boasted the production talents of a bona-fide founding father of prog rock: Ian McDonald, late of King Crimson and later to be of Foreigner. Armed with two talented keyboardists, Fireballet took their orchestral rock quite seriously; Mussorsky and Debussy both crop up in their 1975 debut album. Their follow-up the next year, "Two Too," was not as well received, despite an amusing cover photo of the band dressed as ballerinas. The band dissolved soon afterwards. Bryan Howe (nee Brian Hough) and Jim Como continued to play together at a yearly party for a while, and there's even some talk of reissuing the albums as cherried-out CDs, but in the meantime the lack of activity has caused the band to fall into obscurity.