The familyhood has lost a good soldier last week. Toronto soldier John, aka J.Wo (after Jennifer Lopez called herself J.Lo) aka Jazzpatrick, unexpectedly passed away at age 42 while visiting his father in Barbados on March 7th. He leaves a wife and a kid behind. I've known John for the past 7 years or so on the Nuttwork and immediately appreciated his witty sense of humour and "don't take anything for granted" approach. Besides, he was yet another strong Chim Chim partisan. My thoughts go to his family. I think G-Bone made justice to his memory on fishbone.net's forum much better than i could ever write, so i take the liberty to extensively quote him here.
One of the aspects I really enjoyed most about John's style of writting apart from his humor laced with heavy drippings of sarcasm was his honesty and frustrations regarding Fishbone. Unlike many fans who feel 'their' band can do no wrong, j.wo let fly many times at the not so admirable attributes of Fishbone. Loads of people here at the forum and on the mailing list got upset about this seeing it as a negative attack but he was so passionate about the band that when they did things that jeopardised their future or reputation, he just voiced his frustrations at ANOTHER barrier the band had to bust through to get their rightful desserts. In all honesty, I agreed with virtually everything he said regarding these facts. The list of Fishbone's dodgy business strategies range from not having an offishal web site until sometime around 2002, not delivering goods purchased by fans on the merchandize section of the site yet pocketing the money, claiming more often than not to be 'victims' of a white corperate music industry rather than looking sometimes at their otfen unapproachable attitude towards compromise and commercialisation, scrapping an album and disbanding a live dvd after stateing that they were in the pipeline but never saying why they never came, having Norwood manage the band when the band needed an objective third party to look after the affairs of business and management, in 2002-03 reduce the the band to a 'Greatest Hits' live show and eventually lose Spacey and Walt because nothing new was on the horizon and until this web site's forum, rarely posting a word to fans while the technology was there to make easy contact to them. These were points that John felt were shortcomings that needed to be addressed but the funniest part was when someone would turn around a say, "You can't say that about Fishbone, don't be so negative and hate on them so much! Why are you here if you have to say such bad things about this band that have been slogging their asses off for the last 20 odd years?!" He'd just turn around in a sarcastic way point out that Fishbone are humans, flaws and all that needed to take stock from time to time to preserve and nurture their loyal fanbase whilst looking at what they were doing wrong and improve on it in order to keep their careers afloat. He'd also witfully reduce these people to silence which is neither a good or a bad thing. In the early days, I was often on the "wrong" side of a debate with him but that's the beauty of opinion.
With all this said, I believe he was very positive and proud of where the band was right now stating that some of the material off 'SSIYT' was his favourite, up there with 'Chim Chim'. His words of late were nothing but praise for the band and he was especially happy with the members of the current line up. It is heartwarming to know that when he left this earth, his beloved Fishbone were touring the world and thriving as a unit better than ever.
.jpg "© TonoVision2011")
Headlines 
R.I.P. Dad