Short Stories, Long Odds

Things have been light here because I was working on this column for Fort Worth Weekly about censorship and hometown regression.

1. I was born in Michigan. My family moved to Texas when I was 4. I have lived in Michigan, Texas, and Massachusetts. I have never lived alone. I still consider Boston to be my home because it is the place I felt and feel the most comfortable.
2. My life is divided into two distinct phases – my music / drumming phase and my writing / politics phase. People that know me in politics often have little or no idea how wholly consumed I once was by music, how good I used to be at it, or what happened that resulted in me getting out of it and into other things.  Once while having drinks with politipals, someone started saying that drummers now are “funkier” than they ever were. I piped up and said that that was nonsense, and that you’d be hard pressed to find someone “funkier” than Clyde Stubblefield, who played for James Brown (and was the Funky Drummer), or any number of drummers from the 60’s and 70’s and someone said “Whatever, Josh, what do you know about music?” It does not happen very often, but I was honestly speechless. They had no idea that I at least had some claim to making an argument, and there was no way for me to explain it without a story that might as well have started with the line, “Since the dawn of time…”

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