Hustle The Most

I think that having brothers and sisters is pretty amazing I grew up with 2 bothers and 2 sisters. We all got along for the most part minus the growing up woes that happen in every house hold. This episode we are going to talk about how 2 brothers that live in the same house with the same opportunities can go down 2 different paths.

Growing up we had this detached garage next to my house that went through many iterations over the years. When I was really little it was red and had thins metal roll up door that was off white with these long red ornamental banding on it. We kept the normal stuff in there ya know lawn mowers, bikes, balls, BBQ grills.

My dad used to have these crazy BBQ parties with tons people people and we would keep all the food and drinks in the patio. My dad had this crazy grill that I think one of his army buddies made for him. It was a 55 gallon steel drum that was cut in half with 4 legs welded onto. When it opened up at it was basically 2 huge grill crates and he would fill it full of charcoal and let it rip.

At one point the entire house and garage got a face lift because we were putting it up for sale. We were moving out of Flint. See my Dad didn’t want me going to Flint city schools anymore. I just had finished 8th grade and the schools were going downhill pretty fast. My middle school had a lot of drugs and guns in it. There were kids that were literally driving to school that were in the 8th grade. I don’t think kids aged out of that school until like 17 or something. That school was eventually shut down a few year later.

So after 8th grade my dad had to make a choice. Send me to a city high school that was much worse than where i had just come from or move somewhere outside the city to another school district.

We picked up and moved to another city about 30 minutes outside the city called Flushing where were rented this little time 2 bedroom house while our Flint house was on the market. Just a few months earlier my Dad bought into this family vending business that my other 2 uncles started and had been running for 25 years. This was great for my dad because not only did it give him a steady income but the new office was just down the road from the new house.

In Flushing the new house was on the same street as the highschool and about 5 minutes from the downtown area. This downtown was like 2 blocks long with 1 traffic light and an A&W so it wasn’t all that exciting to me. Pretty quickly I met some other skater kids and started hanging out with them. It was funny the first kid I met was a guy named Shawn and he quickly introduced me to all the other skaters in the town. It was like “yeah we got a new one”. All these kids came from very different backgrounds but we all hung out together it was a local riff raff crew for sure. I spent about 4 months in that school and made a ton of friends. IT actually started out a little rough for me but ended pretty well. Coming from Flint my academic learnings were so far behind these kids in Flushing. These kids were so far ahead of me that I almost flunked out of school. That first semester I had the worst grades I had ever had in my life. It was definitely a combination of me being academically behind and also coming home from school everyday and dropping my books and grabbing my skateboard to meet my friends at this middle school that we all used to skate at.

My dad had to make the call to move North of Flint to Flushing to better my education but it was a total flop that fell 100% on me. Now I put us in a situation that he had to make another call. He absolutely did not want to do this because it was always him and I doing things together. His next plan was to ship me south of the city to a city called Grand Blanc to live with my mom. This kind of stuff happens to kids all the time and it’s awful.

Grand Blanc to us was like the 90210 of the Flint area. It was a preppy school. If you knew someone that drive a fancy car and lived in a big house then you assumed that they lived in Grand Blanc. I never thought I would live there.

I am sure a lot of people listening come from broken homes it’s more common these day then not. My mom’s house was a whole different world. She lived in Grand Blanc with my brother and Step dad. Her house was very much a take your shoes off when you come in, don’t touch anything and ask before eating anything kind of place. It was basically the exact opposite of my Dad’s  house. I moved in over the Christmas Break in the middle of my Freshman year.

I have to take a second out ot tell you that academically this was actually the best move. I was able to get caught up and back on track 100% due to my step dad Jim sitting down with me every single night and going through my homework with me. He explained every algebra equation to me 10 different ways until I got it. He held me accountable and gave me the confidence that I could do it.

If I failed and got it wrong it was ok we would just walk through my the steps and see where I went wrong. WIthout him I absolutely would have not succeeded.

So my brother Jason lived there with us and he was a few years older than me and 2 grades ahead of me. He and I grew up together and lived in different houses during the week and also went down very different paths in our lives. He was way into heavy metal and leather jackets. His room was like a shrine to Iron Maiden. He had all Eddie posters possible on the walls. Eddie is like the official mascot of Iron Maiden and they put him into all these scenes and images.

He had posters stranger in a strange land, the tail gunner, Number of the beast, The trooper, piece of mind and more it was actually pretty awesome. He also had a huge water bed, tons of cassette tape and his own phone line. It was like a metalhead paradise!

My brother was a total stoner most of his friends were stoners. They all rocked mullets and  tight holey jeans and leather jackets. I remember after report cards would come out you’d see his friends all showing up with new short hair cuts because their parents made them cut off their mullets for having bad grades.

Let me just quickly clarify that he was my big brother, he was my protector and always looked out for me. At school he literally made these dudes cry that were kind of bullying me. He was always the toughest dude in the room but he also has the biggest heart of anyone that I had ever met. He got it to more fights that I could count and he had a reputation for just leaving a trail of beaten up dudes behind him. He was a total magnet for trouble. If there was some trouble to get in he would find it everytime.  He had a lot of “accidents” I don’t mean like normal people that have slip and falls. I mean more like an accident from doing something dumb.

Here is a great example. My friends and I hung out in the front yard at my dads house all the time. We were always out there skateboarding or throwing the football or whatever. We had no problems ever. My brother got dropped of one day for the weekend and he’s hanging out in the front yard for like 10 minutes then he comes running in the house with blood all over his head and face. And I was like “what happened” and he was like these dudes were driving down the street and threw a 40 bottle and hit me in the head. How does this only happen to him?

I knew my brother better than anyone I think that he forgot that sometimes. We grew up together and we were glued at the hip for years. The truth is that there was always another side to the story. I don’t know what really happened in the front yard that day because he was the only one out there. Here is what probably happened: Some dudes drove by in a car and my brother probably said something stupid to them and there was an altercation and one of them probably threw the the 40 bottle and hit him in the head and then they sped off. So part of the story is probably true, the blood was real but it was always the how and the details that were always a little off. 

So let’s jump into my official first day. My brother usually rode the bus to school so my mom told him the night before “ make sure you show your brother how to ride the bus”. I think she meant where do I get on, which bus and where does it drop me off. We started school at 7:15 AM so we headed out at about 6:40 were heading to the bus. We left the house and started walking down the street to the bus We got like 3 houses down from my house in front of these big pine trees we we stopped and we were standing in the snow and I remember being like uhh is this the bus stop? And as soon as I got the words out of my mouth here comes my brothers stoner girlfriend barreling around the corner in her red Buick Skyhawk with the music just blasting. She stopped and he was like get in. This was totally something out of Fast Times at Ridgemont High. We were definitely not riding the bus.

We got to school and parked in the lot and one of his friends pulls out this big joint and my brother was like YO my little brother is in the car. Which I thought was pretty cool he was always protective of me. He never wanted me to be around that stuff. I was always thankful for that. I got out and they blazed up of course. We did ride the bus home tough so when my mom asked us how the bus was when we got home we were like ya know it was fine. There was truth to it because we did ride the bus, we just didn’t ride it both ways.

After about 3 months of living there my brother actually ran away from home and I ended up moving into his room. I got the big waterbed and my own phone line, it was awesome but it was bittersweet for sure. I ran into my brother about 4 months later at this place in downtown Flint called the Capital Theater. We were at this metal show and the band Overkill was playing and I was walking by the bar and all the sudden someone grabbed my arm and then I heard “hey little brother” and it was him.

He was standing there wearing these holey levis and some big tongued Adidas hitops. He wasn’t wearing a shirt but he did have his head shaved bald and had huge black and grey flames tattooed on his head starting from his hairline and went back to about the middle of his head. I gave him a hug and he asked if I was good or needed anything. I said I was good but he gave me $20 out of his sweaty pocket and said to get dinner on him. After that he disappeared into a sea of dark sweaty drunken moshers. I didn’t see him again for a few months after that.

My brother eventually ended up living at my Dad’s house and my Dad had this idea of turning the garage into an apartment type space. He pulled the roll up door off and put up he put up this kind of barnwood front with a few windows and he painted it to match. It was like this little cool bachelor pad. It wasn’t finished inside yet but he moved a bed out there and was crashing out there anyway. I think my brother lived there for a few weeks until he ran away and stayed with a few of his buddies. My dad always gave him space and always gave him another chance but I guess my brother didn’t really like any sort of rules over him.

At the time my drums were in the basement at my dads house and the guys I played with had their amps and stuff there. It was a concrete basement and it was really really loud!

With the new garage facelift It was like the bedroom situation all over again. He rolled out and we rolled in. It wasn’t finished but there was insulation on the walls but no dry wall and the ceiling. There was drywall but it was stacked in the corner. My guys and I eventually finished the garage with drywall with the help of my buddy Eric uncle. We painted it and throw down some carpet and that became the band hang out space for the next few years.

We did everything in that garage. We had small skate ramps, guitars, drums, a TV and VCR, a fridge, couches and more it was awesome. I spent all my time in there, playing my drums and watching music videos and listening to music. In the winter we had a heater and in the summer we had a window air conditioning unit. There wasn’t much that could keep us out of the garage.

Looking back on it things seemed normal at time because we were living it but the reality is that is that things were actually pretty messed up. My brother always struggled with drugs and drinking and the law. He was a total magnet for trouble. It all came down to decisions. That was his crux. If there was a choice to go left and everything would be ok or go right and there was a risk of danger and excitement he would he choose to go right every time. It’s sad to say but having him in my life was like having having a book of things not to do in life and he was writing it for me every single day.

Maybe this was his way of protecting me maybe he was doing these things to himself so I would know what would happen to me if I did these things. He was always trying to protect me and look out for me and I will always be grateful for that. 

My brother Jason passed away in 2008 in the our garage.

I learned that sometimes you can have 2 brothers grow up in the same house with the same parents and same opportunities and you can end up down very different paths. This apparently is a lot more normal than I thought.

I also learned that people learn differently and it’s ok to fail. Failing means that you probably tried and something just went wrong along the way. Retrace your steps and figure out where things went wrong and do your best to fix them.

I learned that parents sometimes have to make a call. If may not seem like the right call to you at the time but they are probably doing the bet they can.

If you are kid and you are listening to this. Cut your parents some slack. They were kids once too and they probably understand more than you think.

I knew a few kids in my school that played drums and my brother was always into drums. He air drummed a lot but I had never seen him play. He had these black lacker sticks that he used to spin and air drum with. Anyway there was a kid in my biology class that was a big Pantera fan and according to him and his electrical taped microphone he was the next Phil Anselmo.

He had an old drum set in parts and pieces around his house. I remember him telling me that he was using one of the drums as dirty clothes hamper. I told him I was looking for some drums and he told me he he would part with his clothes hamper.

This kit was an old 5 piece Ludwig kit that was pretty much the worst kit ever. There was no bottom hardware on the toms, a kick drum with no front head, a snare drum with 2 broken heads, no kick pedal, a hihat stand and warped hihats, an a ride stand with a cymbal that had been spray painted yellow.

We agreed that I would buy it for $80 and he would take payments. $20 bucks a month for the next 4 months.

I think the day that I brought home Brandon had his guitar and little amp over at my house and we were trying to play Metallica covers. Which thinking back I didn’t have a full kit, I definitely didn’t know how to play and I am sure that it was the worst sounding thing ever.

We will talk in another episode about how playing the drums took a poor kid from Flint around the world to see things that most people only get to read about in books.

Bandon and I started playing music together over 25 years ago and I can still remember bringing home the my drums and the “music” that we tried to play that day. I remember not having a full set of drums and this super tiny amp that he had but we were crushing it anyways. Well we thought we were crushing it.

Our first band that ever played a show was called JIVE and we were pretty awful. We did have a few other band names before that but they were just as bad if not worse. Brandon seemed to me remember me teasing him about this band name that he came up with but I think it was really the kid that I bought the drums from that came up with this name. It was Rehabilitated Hamster. This is probably one of the worst band names ever but I think that’s what happens when you are 14. At one point the name Farmers Lung came into play. I think I was just looking through one of my Mom’s medical dictionaries just trying to come up with something that sounded cool. This name was also not the best.

Our friend Christ Roark was our original bass player. Chris the best best, he was definitely one of the funniest dudes around. He always had jokes and usually a pretty upbeat and out going outlook on things. It’s awesome if you liked something and he didn’t and you told him to try it again he would totally try it. If it was music or a food or whatever. It was pretty awesome. I feel like people now are pretty set in their ways and most people wouldn’t give a thing another shot but he would. If you told something that didn’t like pickles to try this new people most of the time they will say “I don’t like pickles” but with Chris he would go “really”, I’ll try it. Even if he didn’t like it he would try it. He didn’t want to miss out on anything in life and I think that’s so amazing and admirable.

Chris passed away well after the band stuff happened but we will never forget his smile and the impact that he had on us. Good dude an is and will forever be missed.

Brandon and I started these bands together and this is was a new and weird thing to us. As kids I don’t think that any of us really knew how to communicate very well as people let alone with instruments and convey to someone else what we liked or didn’t like and why. I think that it’s almost like jumping into a new career field you have to learn the language and all speak the common language to get ideas across. When we were kids we were all in different places as far as our understanding of music. It’s almost like communicating with people that kind of speak your language you are always putting bits and pieces together to create a full something.

I think when you add creativity to it along with putting effort into something it can get pretty sketchy. When someone puts a lot of work into something and then puts it out into the world you become vulnerable. I think that’s tough for anyone. Even in my career now I can working on a project for 20-30 hours and then present it and someone will say yeah that’s pretty good. You are putting something out there to be judged. Just because you put a lot of effort into something doesn’t make it awesome. It just means more or less that you worked on something and here it is.

Looking back 25 years later we kind of equate it to the Metallica “Some Kind Of Monster” experience. A bunch of guys that were friends for years that had a lot of history together that were all on the some journey but on different paths.

I learned that sometimes when you jump in with both feet it can really surprise you on where it could take you. Had I not taken a chance and jumped into playing drums I have no idea where my life would have taken me. I could have ended up working in the shop, working a dead end job or even dead.

I also learned that it’s much harder to come up with reasons not to do something opposed to just jumping in and doing it. The way I look at it is the only real question you should ask yourself is: Ok am I going to die. No, Ok lets give it a go. Take a chance.

I really that that the most valuable thing that I learned is that you should always be open to trying something new. It can make you more rounded, it can expose you to new places, friends and experiences. It can take you places that you would never imagine.

I think like most other kids I went through my share of fads and interests. I feel like it was always whatever the next thing was. Whatever your friends were into it was like we all just fell into it together. If it was sports, or music, or hackey sack or whatever we all kind of did it together.

I was so lucky and thankful to have my life long friend drive 2 hours across the state to join me for this podcast episode.

Personal Note: Brandon and I have been friends for 29 years and have a lot of amazing history together. Aside from our stories together Brandon has played guitar in a number of amazing bands like Kid Brother Collective, Spit, Braided Veins and many more. He is a food enthusiast, a great guitar player, songs writer and arranger, a dad, husband and more. I am so grateful to have met him all those years ago.

One of my childhood best friends named Brandon lived outside of my neighborhood. Before we were friends i would see him cruising down my street on his skateboard he was coming to pick up his sister. She used to hang out with my nextdoor neighbor. He was this skater kid that was a few years older than me. I would see him on street and he would always be rocking these skate clothes and like Airwalks or something I remember he had of his head shaved with something shaved into the back and sides of his head. I think sometimes it was an H-Street logo which was a skateboard company and sometimes said DRI which was an acronym for the band Dirty Rotten Imbeciles.

Brandon lived on the other side of atherton road about a half mile from my dad’s house. Thinking back I don’t really remember how we actually met but I remember that we quickly became good friends. We pretty much lived at eachothers houses for years. We mostly stayed at my house because his family had small house that he shared with his mom, brother, sister and new born sister.

He was my first real skater friend. He’s the one that got me really hard core into skateboarding. He was way better than me so it’s like I was always learning how to do and try new stuff from watching him. There were a few other friends that I hung out with in the neighborhood that were semi into skating. It wasn’t before too long that we all started hanging out together. We started a club that was called USA! The United Skaters Association. We had stickers made that were probably the worst stickers of all time. Paper stickers that just said USA and under it it said United Skaters Association of course. Black and white, paper stickers that were printed on a sheet of 8. We actually had a made a little hang out spot in my basement where were had a table for working on our boards and where we kept our skate journals. These were little books where we documented our progress. Hahaha looking back it it’s actually pretty funny that we did this. We even had a “trick of the month” where everyone in the club had to learn the trick of the month.

USA started having sleep overs where we would watch skate videos on VHS and watch 120 minutes on MTV where we would see all these random and obscure videos from punk bands like Bad Religion, The Cure and Ministry that they didn’t play during the day time.

We would sometimes plan on skating one day and we would wake up and it was be raining or wet outside or sometimes it would even snow. We we wait and watch skate videos until it dried up or we would walk our boards to a dry place like under an overhang or something. We just wanted to skate.

Watching these videos would get us pumped that we would leave the house at 4 AM to go and skate parking lots that we could only skate when the bars and businesses were closed and there were no cars in the parking lot. We had this thing we called the Fenton Road Modeal. We had a line of places all the way down this road that ran through the south side of Flint called Fenton road.

It was lot after lot each having different curbs, banks, parking blocks and drop offs that we would just shred for hours and hours. We would often up at Taco Bell looking for something to drink. This was about the time that Free Refills stated to become a thing but they were still behind the counter. We would all pile into a booth and get one small drink and pass it around. Last person had to go up and ask for a refill. Eventually they cut us off and we would head back out to thrash some more curbs.

We would skate like 8 miles down the road and then have to skate back. The route back was more direct. More like a “just get home” already kind of route. Sometimes we would cut through neighborhoods or fields that would get us home quicker.

We would skate from like 4 AM until about 4 PM and just come home dragging bruised, sometimes bloody.

I remember one time were skating this parking lot of the FOX66 office and there was this giant stair set that was like an 8 stair. And he said “if anyone ollies down these stairs and lands it first try I’ll shave my head” I grabbed my board and just flew down the sidewalk and just popped it. I floated down the stairs and landed it and did a power slide and was just like “were gonna shave your head” !!!!

I talked a little earlier about friends all kind following the same trends together. Brandon and I were no different. I remember we had this conversation on the phone about how he had just got a guitar. I guess he had been playing it a lot while babysitting at his neighbors house that owned the guitar, and how he had learned a few songs. Anyway we were talking on the phone and he told me about getting  the guitar and I said “dude, I’ll get some drums and we will start a band”. Now keep in mind I didn’t play the drums nor did I know anything about drums. I think I played a set once at one of my neighbors house but I didn’t gravitate toward it or anything. It just came out. I was going to be a drummer.

In a matter of days we formed a band. We were jamming in our friends Chris’ living room, my basement, his garage and anywhere we could make noise and not have the cops called on us. The cops were called on us a few times but more than likely it was because we were an awful sounding band!

Coming up with a band name is always the best/worst part of being in a band. Some of the best bands have the worst band names. Think of your favorite band and think about the name and then ask yourself what does that really even mean?

I learned that we are still the same silly kids we were when we were 13 but now we have kids and careers and do adult stuff. When you have a 20-30 years of history with someone looking back can be awesome, eye opening, funny and even a bit frightening.

I think that when you get older you still have friends but you see them less often and they are replaced with things like work, running kids to practice and other daily task oriented stuff. This has always been a tough one for me to handle as I have gotten older because I love my friends so much and I want to always see them as much as I can but life just happens.

Lastly I really think that getting old is more awesome than I would have ever imagined when looking back at it. All the knowledge we have acquired and the relationships that we have forged over the years are all the things that make us who we are today.

We all have ideas on a daily basis. Some of the idea are probably amazing and some of them are the exact opposite. What happens when you don’t follow through? What about the ideas that you forget about? My dad bet against me and even cheered me on to move forward with an idea that he thought was a pipe dream.

I had a chance to go to California was I was 12. One of my good friends in the neighborhood his dad lived somewhere around San Diego. He was going out there so visit him and he asked me to go with him. I was 12 and had never really been anywhere other than Cedar Point which is this amazing amusement park in Sandusky Ohio. I was pretty siked about this and was thinking that this would be the trip of a lifetime. I had never been on a plane or even driven anywhere far away so I this seemed like a cool idea.

So I sat down with my dad and I timed this conversation pretty strategically. I started to tell him about how I had this amazing opportunity. It was very much a “what do I have to do to put you in this used car today” type conversation. I asked my dad If I could go and he was like “yeah of course, that sounds awesome”. Like he agreed right away with almost no questions asked. My dad even said it would give me $100 to spend while I was there. This was awesome to 12 year old me. But thinking back on he answered almost too quickly. It was kind of like when your friend would be like  “I’ll be you a hundred bucks I can jump over that creek and your response is I’ll be you a thousand buck” because you were sooo confident that we would never make it. This was 1990 so $100 went a lot farther than it does today.

I remember at the time my parents absolutely forbid me to be anywhere near a skateboard. They didn’t want another huge hospital bill coming to the house and I don’t think my mouth could handle another curbing. My dad was a little more forgiving than my mom plus I was the last of 5 kids so my brothers and sisters kind of paved the way for me. I had this conversation with my Dad about a week after he agrees to let me go to california about me getting a skateboard. Again this was supposed to be a persuasive conversation to obviously go in my favor.

I feel that we all have some things about ourselves that we are not exactly stoked on. We all do our best to hide them from the world. Some people may have a belly, or acne or weird looking feet. Some things we can’t change so we just do our best to navigate them. When you are young these things seem to be directly out in the open for other kids see, judge and make fun of. When you are weird or different looking you are seemingly an easy target. 

I think as adults we have a very different perspective on what’s cruel and what’s not. But I’m sure that if you think back to when you were a kid you can remember more than a few times that kids were cruel to you or maybe you were cruel to them.

So we have all had amazing ideas at one time or another. Some people have amazing ideas that lead  to something and totally change the world like creating an mp3 player or color printing or something like that. But sometimes ideas go the other way where they are life altering and sometimes worse. This is what simply today call a fail. We have all seen the fail videos where 10 seconds into a compilation our feet are sweating and we are cringing in some way or another as we watch some guy try to do a flip off a ladder into a above ground pool and it just goes horribly wrong.

When I was 10 old I had this amazing idea that would end up changing my entire life. My idea was that I was going to ride my skateboard down the sidewalk on my knees. I had done this so many other times around my driveway and it was always fun. Now I realize this doesn’t sound like some crazy feat that is pushing the bounds of amaziness but here’s how it went.

I was cruising down the sidewalk and I had one knee on my board and and I was pushing with the 

I think that everyone knows what it means to Hustle. It means to move fast, quickly, put in effort, do work. This episode of Hustle The Most I jump into hustling and getting hustled at a very young age. Hanging out at a flea market when I was 10 years old taught me a lot about how to talk to people, be quick witted and how to keep my money in my pocket. The flea market is a place where I learned a little about a lot of things. I was running wild in a giant warehouse full of vendors at 10 years old.

Since this is the first episode of Hustle The Most I’ll want to give you a quick background on your host. I’m a designer, drummer, and entrepreneur. I spent most of my 20’s touring around the world playing drums in rock bands, designing and attempting to be creative.

I run a few different companies and I am generally interested in others stories. Where they came from, what they do and why they do what they do. This podcast series is really a series of stories and featured guests that talk about all things hustle, heart, design and innovation. There are a lot of successes and a definitely a lot of failures but in the end it’s all about what did I learn.

I grew up on the southside of Flint Michigan in the late 80’s early 90’s. Flint was a pretty cool place to grow up. I feel like there was always something happening. In the early 80’s General Motors was still themain gig in town so people were still flocking to the city looking for work although I think GM peaked in Michigan around 1978. There were always new stores and restaurants popping up all the time. One would close and another would open in its place.