Former Punk Rocker’s Arrest For Murder Is Pretty Mest Up

noah | March 26, 2007 3:01 am
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Our tipline received quite a few e-mails about the arrest of Tony Lovato, the former lead singer of the now-defunct band Mest, this morning. Lovato was arrested for allegedly stabbing his ex-girlfriend’s new boyfriend, and the fact that we received multiple tips about this news made us curious for one reason: Did this many people really know who Mest were? We barely remembered ourselves, although one of your Idolators did actually review an album of theirs a few years back.

Anyway, this case seems to have some sort of legs, and on the off-chance that we get called by Nancy Grace to talk about the crime rate among third-rate pop-punk bands, we figured we’d need to know at least something about Mest. Our findings are after the jump.

– Mest formed in 1995 in Blue Island, Ill., outside of Chicago. – The band put out four albums on Maverick before splitting up last year. – The band’s greatest moment of notoreity probably came in 2003, when they released the song “Jaded (These Years),” which featured Joel Madden of Good Charlotte, who is (was?) apparently one of Lovato’s best friends. – An old Mest bio, which was put out around the time of their fourth album, opens with Lovato claiming that he’d “cheated death” after leaving a nagging back injury untreated for too long. – A girlfriend of his made him cry on The Jimmy Kimmel Show. (The linked MSN group seems to have been dormant since 2004, so there’s no word on whether this girlfriend is the same one involved in the stabbing.) – His fans are still behind him, although some seem more interested in snagging a “free i.P.h.o.n.e” than supporting his legal plight. – A commenter on PunkNews.org helpfully describes the evolution of their sound as “From blink-182 to Sugar Ray to Good Charlotte to My Chemical Romance in four albums,” and a spin through the songs on their MySpace page bears out this claim. Wonder how long “Kiss Me Kill Me” will last before being taken down by Lovato’s lawyers?

Mest [MySpace] Punk rocker jailed over fatal stabbing [Reuters via CNN]