Watching the universe collide with the dark
Since everyone is posting their memories of Brad...
I first met Brad October 16th, 2003. A co-worker invited me to play drums in her band, of which Brad was the lead singer. My first impression was "who is this jackass kid who thinks he's so cool? There's no way I'm joining this band." There was something magnetic about him though and I ended up staying in the band for almost a year, even though my drumming never improved and they progressed way beyond me. Along the way I realized that Brad was a genius and one of the most fascinating people I had ever met. He could come up with lyrics like:
The cornstalks are bending their ears, so everything hears
The coming of the summer thunderstorms
I hear you calling to me from the windows of the dorms
The harvest moon is night
I saw her smile in my mind's eye
It launched a daydream of silk bedding
Now my finger's on the trigger at a shotgun wedding
A stiff wind cycles through the city and speaks
Through the creaks of the maple tree that leaks its syrup
And the traffic sings its hymns to the sky above America, Asia, and Europe
We argued a lot about music, politics, religion, movies... You name it, if Brad loved it I almost certainly hated it, but not vice versa because he was a much nicer guy than me. He gave Karla and I free lifetime passes to the Stanford Theater after he had only known us a few months, just because he knew we liked old movies. He was always doing stuff like that.
If you read his journal at johnsongo, you know he was often frustrated with his perceived lack of success in music. Well, to those of us who knew him, Brad was already a rock star, a movie star and the pope all rolled into one. Any time 2 or more of us got together we'd generally talk about Brad, and nothing but Brad...for hours. We even played "Brad Trivia".
Last year we started a little picnic society, just for fun. We were going to get together once a week for lunch to talk about music and whatever. We were all working on albums and had planned to maybe do a short tour together this spring. The day Brad killed himself, he was supposed to have been working at the downtown library. It was warm and sunny. Why didn't I schedule a picnic for that day? And would it have made a difference? I guess I'll never know.
From one of Brad's last journal entries:
I always thought I was going to be great. I didn't know what, a baseball player... superhero? Rockstar? Famous actor? Prophet? Philosopher? martyr? Something extraordinary. But when you come to the realization that this might not happen, it's more than a little disappointing. And my goal was always fame, fortune, fun, females, and a whole bunch of other very covetous things. But you take those fantasies to the end.. every last one of them.. and once you have everything, what then? You are still you.
Yeah Braddy, you're still you, and that's more than the rest of us could ever hope to be.