lowquality.net

Just found out that a friend of mine from Alpha Music passed away. We’d lost touch after I left the teach­ing staff but he also left later on to return to Winston-Salem for his law degree (which I recall was his ini­tial aspi­ra­tion before being side­tracked by music). I was indi­rectly respon­si­ble for his teach­ing gig at Alpha: Scott, John Kohn and I played a gig together for his boss and that intro­duced him to the Alpha family.

Appar­ently Scott was hit by a car on his way to school and the only rea­son any­one even knows about it down here is because the ER peo­ple used his cell phone address book to notify his next of kin.

Scott was a free spirit type who was always encour­ag­ing me to do more as a musi­cian and I hardly ever lis­tened to him. He was a gen­uinely noble per­son who never seemed stressed out or both­ered by any­thing. I remem­ber he just decided one day to quit smok­ing and he just did it. He’d been smok­ing his whole life (he’s from NC) and he just woke up one morn­ing and decided to stop and never com­plained or vocal­ized any desire to have a cig­a­rette again. He just stopped. He didn’t want his stu­dents to see him smok­ing out­side when they came in for lessons, which, even though I teased him about it, I very much admired.

I though Scott was a bet­ter vocal­ist than a gui­tarist but he made up for his short­com­ings with charisma, class, and the desire to per­form and teach. He was one of the few sources of intel­lec­tual non-musical con­ver­sa­tions that I’d have at Alpha. We’d talk about any­thing from physics to phi­los­o­phy. He was a really smart dude.

We played sev­eral shows together and I regret not stay­ing in touch with him after I left Alpha. I fig­ured our paths would cross again even­tu­ally but I guess that won’t be the case. I didn’t even know he and Ter­rie got mar­ried and had a son.

I feel awful about this.

Think about your friends. Imag­ine your world sud­denly with­out them.