I live not too far from Buffalo, New York and spend a fair amount of time just across the bridge from there. A bunch of the TV channels I get are from Buffalo and I have good friends from there. So the city means something to me. The news of the recent mass shooting there hit pretty hard it got me thinking about some stuff.
Racial hatred is a hard thing for me to understand but I am familiar with it. There was some ugly-ass racism in the small town where I grew up when I was a kid. This was rural east coast Canada in the 70s and 80s and the place was almost completely white. There was this general ignorance all over the place. I remember hearing kids at school, friends, neighbors and even relatives telling racist jokes and everyone yukking it up. It was stupid redneck stuff.
I grew up on a dirt road and through most of my childhood, there were probably less than 20 houses on it. I think there were only about four kids around my age and so all of them were my friends. One of them was Black. Donna. We spent a lot of time together. So I never thought the racist jokes were funny. I always thought of Donna when I heard that shit and it would make me really mad.
Then one day, something truly awful and strange happened. Someone (I never found out who) painted the words “N****S WILL DIE” in big white letters on the main road right in front of the elementary school. What was strange about it was that it bummed out a lot of the people I knew who told racist jokes all the time. My cousins and I rode up there on our bikes and painted over it. I can still picture those words vividly.
Here’s another messed up memory. On the first day of school when I was in seventh grade, our homeroom teacher wanted to get to know his new students so he asked each of us - one-by-one - to stand up, say our name and a thing or two about ourselves (hobbies, interests, whatever). About halfway through, this one kid stood up (I don’t remember his name now) and said, “my name is so-and-so and I hate n*****s.” Just like that. Can you fucking imagine?! To my teacher’s credit, he grabbed that little asshole by the ear and marched him right out of the room and then gave us a long lecture.
There was this other kid I hung around with sometimes because he was one of the only people around who liked baseball and he would play catch with me. But it was a weird dilemma because I kinda hated him. And one of the reasons why was because he was racist as hell and was always going on with his bullshit even though he knew where I stood. One day we were playing catch and he started up with the racist shit and I snapped. I gave him a bit of a pounding and pushed his face into the dirt. I didn’t mess him up too hard because he was smaller than me. But I let him know that I wasn’t going to hear that shit anymore. I was probably 13 or 14 at the time. Last I heard, that guy was living in his car.
There was no high school in my little town. I had to ride a bus for an hour to another town. There were more Black kids there. I played basketball and was deep into hip hop and so I ended up hanging out with the Black kids during lunch and whatnot. In the 11th or 12th grade, I started seeing a Black girl named Francene and she became my first girlfriend (I was a late bloomer). I can’t remember if I told my mother ahead of time or if it just came as a surprise the first time I brought Francene home but my mom was - how should I put it? - taken aback. At first she struggled with it. She didn’t understand it. I remember her crying once or twice. My mom had never known a Black person before. But when she got to know Francene, she quickly came to love her. They stayed close long after Francene and I went our separate ways - until my mom passed away.
Not long after that, my mom became best friends with a Black woman she met at work whose nickname was Wax. I don’t remember her real name. She was so nice. I always took a little pride in playing a role in my mom’s evolution.
Side note: a few years before I brought Francene home, my Public Enemy fandom inspired me to read books like The Autobiography Of Malcolm X, Soul On Ice, etc. I used to borrow a copy of The Black Panthers Speak by Phillip S. Foner over and over again from my nearest library. I had it my possession for years. I photocopied pages from it and tacked them to my bedroom walls. I remember that some of the Emory Douglas cartoons freaked my mom out.
So, what’s my point? Well, maybe it’s this: my mom’s intolerance was an easy-easy ailment to cure. She fell in love with the first Black person she met. That’s all it took to re-wire her brain. It’s not hard. That’s part of what’s so frustrating about seeing this shit in the news night after night.
I wish everyone could travel the way I did in the years when I was touring. The more stuff you see and experience, the more stuff you love. That’s how it’s been for me. My guess is that it would be the same for everyone. But I also know my privilege enabled me to do that.
Sometimes I wonder if things might have gone a different way for me if Donna didn’t live a few doors up the road from me when I was growing up. It’s a disturbing thing to think about.
Updates on a few things:
The King Of Drums album is just a few weeks away now. As far as physical product goes, looks like we’ll have cassettes first. CDs will follow. Vinyl eventually. I’ll give you a little preview soon. And a quick reminder that the plan is to set up a paid subscription option for this newsletter thing once the album comes out and I’ll open the flood gates on all kinds of stuff.
King Of Drums will be available digitally on Bandcamp. Keep an eye on my page. I’m still adding new stuff there all the time. The original version of the Weirdo Magnet album went up yesterday. 35 friggin’ songs!
My baseball season is off to a good start. We played our big rival team the weekend before last and kicked their ass. I pitched the 8th inning. Probably threw about ten pitches. Three up, three down. Made quick work of them. Felt good. I’m also hitting the ball very hard. We won again a few nights ago. I was called in to pitch in relief in the bottom of the ninth inning. We had a three-run lead. The based were loaded. Tight spot. I wiped out the next three batters and strutted off the mound victorious.
I’m still going through tons of old tapes and disks and finding all kinds of stuff. Lots of demos. Songs that were never released that I forgot I even recorded from all through the years. Some of it is pretty cool. Some of it is painfully embarrassing. We’ll get into it.
On the topic of unheard music, I made beats for an album by a notable rapper several years ago. Just as we were about to get down to business, the rapper in question had to attend to some important real-life stuff. And then COVID came along. So the beats have been on ice. I listened to them all in the car the other day. I must have been in the zone when I did that work because I think they’re the best beats I’ve ever made. Hopefully we’ll get back to it and I can share that stuff with you soon. I’ll let you know.
A new post authored by a special guest writer will be going up here a few days. Keep your eye open for that!
Until next time…
