# A musical legend in Dallas and a friend of mine has died **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Tags:** music\ **Created:** [August 20, 2024, 2:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-musical-legend-in-dallas-and-a-friend-of-mine-has-died/1005923 "2024-08-20T02:38:42Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 4\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![scabpicker](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/scabpicker/32/8268_2.png) [@scabpicker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/scabpicker)\ **Post date:** [August 20, 2024, 2:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-musical-legend-in-dallas-and-a-friend-of-mine-has-died/1005923/1 "2024-08-20T02:38:42Z")
I’m not really sure whether to put this in Cafe Society or MPSIMS. He was an artist and well known enough that his passing generated press, so I’m sticking it here. John Freeman is probably the only person I’ve played with who (shortly) had his own Wiki page. He was amazing. He understood songs, music, lyrics and comedy on an instinctive level I will never really grasp. I first saw him play at the Bruce Hall Punk Rock Weenie Roast mentioned in the article below, and I was the person who said “Hey, we can tune your guitar to an open chord and you can just put your finger down across the frets for a chord.” At that point, as Matt Pence says, his guitar lessons were over. That was enough for him to create the chords he needed, and he could solo better than most people by instinct from there. A friend of mine and I both told him we could put a band together to back him at separate times that day, and that’s how Duck Duck Annihilation came to be. One of that band’s songs was where my user name comes from. That band was popular enough and went on long enough that my titular song became one that we wished we could leave off the set list, but people would holler and complain about it if we left it off. He had ideas flowing out of him all the time. One early afternoon he showed up at my house with both sides of a 90 minute tape dripping with “Cooze: A Rock Opera Loosely Based on the Life of Ernest Borgnine”, He had written and recorded the whole thing overnight. It was amazing. I don’t think it ever actually mentioned Ernest Borgnine. To this day I have friends who can recall several of its songs, and I can too. It’s so good and odd, it burned itself into our memories. I’m actually not sure any copies remain on the planet, but if I ever locate another copy or miraculously find mine, I’m digitizing it immediately. But around that time, he started to attract much better musicians than my friends and I. Hey, we were in Denton, which has a pretty good jazz school. The place was littered with better musicians than we were, and people can recognize quality when they see it performing in front of them. So, eventually he formed Dooms UK and lost interest in Duck Duck Annihilation. I don’t hold it against him at all, they could do all we could do, and much more. He started tons of other bands after that, as well. After that, he moved away, and we didn’t have much contact other than occasionally seeing each other at shows when he was in town. He died about a week ago today. I should have known it would affect me more than the deaths of others I’ve known, but I didn’t really expect him to die in the first place. You don’t expect a force of nature to die, I suppose. But we’re all human, and we all have problems resulting from us being humans. His got him before mine got me. Here’s an article about his death in the Dallas Observer. Unlike a bunch of music journalism, as far as I know all of it is true. > **[When John Freeman Died Last Week, So Did a Bit of the Soul of Dallas Music](https://www.dallasobserver.com/music/dallas-loses-another-great-with-musician-john-freemans-death-20267858)** > > The North Texas music scene owes a great debt to the late John Freeman for making it that much more exciting. Here’s a video of one of his more recent songs, “Close Your Robe”, shot in a wonderful guerrilla fashion in Dallas. [https://vimeo.com/9795269](https://vimeo.com/9795269) And a mid-90s record by Dooms UK, which is pretty gorgeous. [![](https://img.youtube.com/vi/dGRdvKSXkNY/hqdefault.jpg "Dooms U.K. - Art Rock Explosion!") ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGRdvKSXkNY) And the song that generated my user name (yeah, it’s really cheap early 90s punk rock production). John is the guitar coming at you in your right earhole, IIRC. Standard disclaimers apply: John wrote the lyrics, I don’t think they’re about me, but they are pretty offensive. [![](https://img.youtube.com/vi/Z3lNXgV_z4E/maxresdefault.jpg "Scabpicker by Duck Duck Annihilation") ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3lNXgV_z4E) Either way, I’m still getting adjusted to knowing I’m living on a rock that doesn’t include him. ---
**Author:** ![beowulff](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/beowulff/32/542_2.png) [@beowulff](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/beowulff)\ **Post date:** [August 20, 2024, 2:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-musical-legend-in-dallas-and-a-friend-of-mine-has-died/1005923/2 "2024-08-20T02:43:18Z")
I sorry for your loss. He sounds like he was an amazing person. ---
**Author:** ![scabpicker](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/scabpicker/32/8268_2.png) [@scabpicker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/scabpicker)\ **Post date:** [August 20, 2024, 3:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-musical-legend-in-dallas-and-a-friend-of-mine-has-died/1005923/3 "2024-08-20T03:55:57Z")
He really was, and amazingly nice in person despite how confrontational his stage presence could be. ---
**Author:** ![scabpicker](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/scabpicker/32/8268_2.png) [@scabpicker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/scabpicker)\ **Post date:** [March 29, 2025, 5:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-musical-legend-in-dallas-and-a-friend-of-mine-has-died/1005923/4 "2025-03-29T17:21:53Z")
As a final good bye to John, several of his bands are getting together tomorrow for a tribute to him. It will be seriously weird playing those songs without him, but I think we gotta do it. So, if you’re in DFW tomorrow with nothing to do around 5PM and don’t mind some very funny and quite offensive songs; drive up to Denton and pour a beer out on the curb for Uncle Sloppy. > **[An outrageous art-rock memorial honors John Freeman, whose wild creativity...](https://dentonrc.com/entertainment/an-outrageous-art-rock-memorial-honors-john-freeman-whose-wild-creativity-ignited-a-denton-scene/article_5bd96b56-2a3e-436b-9d9a-c41d7ba64c49.html)** > > The first time Jermy Johnson saw Denton icon John Freeman perform in the late ’90s, Johnson recalls a colossal show: people in costumes, an air raid siren, a smoke machine > **[LÖVE, JOHNNY – CELEBRATING THE LIFE, MUSIC, AND ART OF JOHN FREEMAN - Rubber...](https://rubberglovesdenton.com/events/love-johnny-celebrating-the-life-music-and-art-of-john-freeman/)** > > LÖVE, JOHNNY: Celebrating the life, art, and music of John Freeman Denton, TX – John Freeman was a songwriter, frontman, and provocateur who left a beautiful stain on the underground … Read more "LÖVE, JOHNNY – CELEBRATING THE LIFE, MUSIC, AND ART OF... Oh, and they’ve put up a Bandcamp page of all of his music they could locate, a bit over 35 releases worth. Nope, it doesn’t seem like anyone located the lost tape I mentioned above, so that search continues. But if you can’t make it out, you can still have your own personal Sloppyfest. > **[John Freeman](https://sloppyworld.bandcamp.com/music)** > > John Freeman was a songwriter, frontman, and provocateur who left a beautiful stain on the underground art and music scenes of Texas and New York. > > Emerging in the early ‘90s, his unfiltered performances blurred the lines between punk, performance... Two of my favorites: Smoke a Dead Man’s X-Ray by Dooms UK https://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/v=2/track=3417944686/size=large/tracklist=false/artwork=small/ Mekanized Death by Telethön https://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/v=2/track=4160923347/size=large/tracklist=false/artwork=small/