TOM + CHARLES played with the Swimming Pool Qs @ the 688/Metroplex reunion...Please be informed that THE BRAINS/TOM GRAY et al. had nothing to do with their appearance being called a "BRAINS REUNION" the venue was way out of line on that one--like they pull the strings....They shake your hands, + they smile + they buy you a drink...

I know some of you called, specifically asked, and were told it was a BRAINS reunion--with the whole band...

The good news is that Charles + Tom + The Qs were thrilling as ever...

Photos below are by the most XLNT---DAN FARRIS.

Thanks, baby.

from the raleigh NEWSPAPER....

JANUARY 16, 2008
Delta Moon's "Money Changes Everything"
Tom Gray on cycles, Cyndi Lauper and cynicism

BY RICK CORNELL


Money buys better tools: Delta Moon in the shop

Late '70s. The music world had already suggested that money can't buy you love and that, alternately, money was a crime and a hit. Now, courtesy of a homemade single, a band out of Atlanta named the Brains—led by songwriter/ keyboardist Tom Gray—was telling us that money changes everything. Folks around the Southeast heard this cynical gem, delivered in somewhat dry vocals by Gray and his synthesizers bonding with the edgy guitar of Rick Price (who'd go on to play in the Georgia Satellites) in the background kind of like a Peachtree State Cars. More folks got to hear the song when the Brains rerecorded it for their Mercury Records-backed debut, with Steve Lillywhite at the helm. And more, a lot more, heard it a few years later when Cyndi Lauper included it on her smash She's So Unusual. "Money Changes Everything" has had a resurgence of late, some 25 years down the road. Lauper revisited the song in 2007, placing it in a rootsy setting. And Gray, with his blues-leaning outfit Delta Moon, re-rerecorded the song, a version that brings to mind the late Warren Zevon with its rustic wit and sinewy vocals.

Here's what Gray had to say about "Money Changes Everything," circa 1980 and today.

INDEPENDENT WEEKLY: For the history portion, can you talk about the origins of the Brains and the origins of Delta Moon? And what did you do to keep busy musically between the two?

TOM GRAY: Before the Brains, I'd been working in nightclubs six nights a week with dance bands. It was fun and I learned a lot, but it was time to break out of that. Some friends of mine had an original band called the Fans. They'd been driving up to New York, playing CBGB and other clubs, and getting write-ups in the Village Voice, New York Times, etc. I made a trip to New York with them and then joined the band for a trip to L.A. and some gigs around Atlanta. By that time, I had my own body of original songs worked up, and I started the Brains. We played a few gigs around Atlanta and then immediately started following the path the Fans had blazed. That led to a record deal with Mercury. Another band the Fans encouraged to follow that road was the B-52s from Athens.

For several years after the Brains' demise I worked as a songwriter and session player in New York, Nashville and L.A., but home was always with my wife in Atlanta. When my son was born in 1995, I gave up traveling all the time and became a stay-at-home dad. But I couldn't give up playing. I fell in with Mark Johnson, who lived only a couple blocks away, and we started playing slide guitar together in the living room, Mark on bottleneck standard guitar and me on six-string steel guitar. Gradually we added some other members and started playing in clubs around town. Once my son started school, Delta Moon hit the road.

Was there was a feeling with "Money Changes Everything" that it had some extra durability and that it would become your signature song?

I remember the day I wrote the song I was worried it was too simple. But it had such a strong effect on everyone who heard it that I knew it was something special. When we pressed the Brains' 45, I played it for my parents. At the end of the song there was a long silence. Then my dad said, "Well, it's different."

What do you remember about the process for writing "Money Changes Everything"? Did you start with the phrase "money changes everything" and build it from that, or did that phrase emerge as the song evolved?

I had the keyboard lick and the chords of the chorus, just a little thing I'd bang on the piano. Then in a conversation my landlady said, "Money changes things." I said, "Money changes everything. ... Um, excuse me," and ran down to my apartment to write the rest of the song. It came pretty quickly.

You, of course, recorded the first versions of the song with the Brains, and then the song appeared on Cyndi Lauper's huge She's So Unusual. Do you know of any other versions of the song? If so, how were those other versions arranged?

A few years ago, my brother made me a CD of versions he'd collected from Napster. There was a pretty wide range. My favorite was an Australian lounge singer who'd recorded it with a string orchestra. It's almost unrecognizable.

Can you describe the two versions of "Money Changes Everything" that the Brains recorded? Other than budget, how was the homemade single different from the album version?

On the single, I was just starting to sing with a band and, to my ear now, I sound a little strangled. But we worked very hard on getting the sound the way we wanted. On the LP, we've got the Steve Lillywhite sound of course, since he produced it. I let others talk me into singing a different second verse on that version, since I'd originally written three, but we'd trimmed it to two for the 45. I think I made the right choice the first time. Cyndi must have felt the same, since she sang the second verse from the 45, not the one on the LP.

How difficult or easy was it to reimagine "Money Changes Everything" to fit Delta Moon's musical vision? What was that process like?

Well, Delta Moon's signature sound is the two slide guitars, but that didn't really fit this song. So we ended up using electric guitar and dulcimer, and we invited Zeb Bowles to play fiddle on the record. I'd always pictured a fiddle on the song anyway. Tonally, the song stands a little apart from the others on the CD, but it's not out of the ballpark. We've got other songs that vary the sound, too. It's interesting that Cyndi Lauper recorded an acoustic version last year, and while hers is very different from Delta Moon's, she also went with a dulcimer and fiddle. That's something I'd been doing off and on since the 1990s, but I'm sure she never knew that. So maybe that's just where the song belongs right now.

From the stage, have you witnessed the light coming on for people as they hear Delta Moon perform the song—as in they know that they know the song but can't quite place it and then it finally clicks? And I imagine that more than one person has asked you afterward about your cover of the Cyndi Lauper song... .

Yes, all of that. But it doesn't always click. One recent reviewer accused me of using a cliché for a title. Well, it wasn't a cliché when I wrote it.

Are you still as cynical as you were when you wrote the song about 30 years ago?

Cynical, me?

In the immortal words of MINK DE VILLE:
"LET ME DREAM IF I WANT TO...."

BACK ON GUITAR FOR JUST ONE NIGHT...
I'd trade (almost) ALL my vinyl for that...

---Everyone but Mauro in MINNEAPOLIS. LL has the REAL shot of RR...

...................................................................................................................................................... From: R S Crabb....................................... Date: Dec 12 2006 9:33 PM ....................................................................................................................... 1980 at the late lamented Record Bar, searching through the cassettes. In the attempt to try find something new I came across a interesting band.
The Brains they were called and a couple things looked interesting.
One, it was produced by Steve Lillywhite to who helped shaped Eddie And The Hot Rod's 1978 Life On The Line LP. And second of all, one of the guys looked like the drummer from that band. Must have been british right?............WRONG.
The Brains were actually from Georgia and second of all they played highly intelligent new wave that rocked a bit harder than their New Wave brethen. And the guy I thought was the drummer was actually the bass player, Bryan Smithwick. The "brain" behind The Brains was a quirky looking keyboardist by the name of Tom Gray whose songs of desperation shaped songs such as "See Me", and their best known song "Money Changes Everything", and, in my opinion, the best song off the album "Girl In The Magazine", which sounds like the answer to "Pictures Of Lily"................
Although Lilywhite did produce the album, the loud drums, by Charles Wolff, were actually recorded by Mark Richardson, one of the most prominent sound engineers at that time. For years in my own band, while trying to learn "Girl In The Magazine", we have tried and failed, to get the loud drum sound...........
In my other top forty band, nobody cared to covered any of The Brains songs. Won't get folks out on the dance floor they said. What did they know. Although KRNA never bothered to play anything off the album, KKRQ did play "Money Changes Everything" after midnite a couple times but the underground college stations KUNI and KRUI did pick tracks off the album, KUNI tracking "In The Night" and "Magazine" and KRUI playing "Raeline"........
Like the majority of bands that were on Mercury/Polydor, the lack of promotion didn't help The Brains, especially with the new Rush Permanent Waves coming out, although The Brains did move enough copies to warrant another effort--Electronic Eden. A little more discontent sounding, perhaps dealing with the hassles of being on a major label, this album has the most dated of sound, although Lilywhite and Richardson were back on board. My faves remain "Dream Life" and "Aspalt Wonderland". Nevertheless, Manfred Mann's Earth Band did cover "Heart In The Street" for their Change album of 1981. Shortly after Mercury/Polygram dropped the band. Along with a change in bass players (Keith Christopher comes on board), The Brains found themselves on Landslide in 1982 with the classic "Dancing Under Streetlights" EP of that year......
Listening to Streetlights, one wonders what would have happen had it become a full album. Rolling Stone gave it a four star rating and there could have been two bonified hits with the title track; the second song "Tanya" is a song for the ages. One of the more chilling accounts of (what I thought) was about a guy running into a ex-girlfriend years later as she drove down the road in a station wagon full of kids. A song that reminded me so much of somebody that I dated, only to find her five years later, downtown with a husband and two daughters......Sometimes a song becomes a reality before you know it..........."Tanya", the song itself, was way too smart and way too hooky for the classic rock stations out there. How the HELL did Tom Gray write that song the way it was written? Perhaps he might have lived the song, as I did when running into someone I used to go with.......With the final chorus line "Tanya"--'will life be a song/Tanya why be a song?' comes the thought of living in the fantasy/thinking of being together and actually being together are two different things. Certainly the intense guitar notes from Rick Price, and Tom's keyboard at the end brings the song to a crashing finale and, like the band, echoes out into the distance. Never to be heard from again.........
That would be the end of The Brains as we would know them. Charles Wolff would leave and be replaced by Mauro Magellan. The band disbanded soon after.
Nevertheless, Christopher and Magellan would join forces with Rick Richards and Dan Baird to become something  different and something more southern boogie. You know them as the Georgia Satellites, with Rick Price on bass..........Cyndi Lauper did keep the memory of the band going for me by covering "Money Changes Everything", but in my opinion she murdered it on that MTV video which played in 1984. 
Tom Gray disappeared. Then, in 2004, while using Google to do research, I came to find out that Gray had taken up the steel slide guitar and formed a band by the name of Delta Moon, completely redoing his sound from hard edged new wave rock to straight ahead Southern Delta blues based rock, releasing four albums in the process--free from the major label hassles of years ago. In fact, on the first Delta Moon album, Charles did play drums on some of the tracks............The Brains in the CD age? Non-existant. Hell, I had to transfer my casette copy to CD with Dancing Under Streetlights, "Tanya", and bonus tracks. The Brains 1980 album still holds up very well enough though it does show it's 80s sound. There are fans still out there (a lot of them have cropped up on my space the past weekend, with the offical Brains and Delta Moon myspace sites and even Charles Wolff has his own myspace profile). I imagine if each and every one of us makes a request to some of the special order record companies, (Collector's Choice or Nina's Discount Oldies/Collectibles label, perhaps even Hip O Select can issue it, even with 5000 copies it would sell out---look at Rank And File) The Brains output just could be reissued. I'm sure it can be done........But a Brains fan is forever, and if you have read this far, include yourself. Who knows, there might be a few surprises in store for us in preserving the history of one of rock's ahead before their time bands.