"...after a decade of
declaring war with
the world,
I surrendered..."

"... I was a dick -
just ask somebody,
they'll tell you..."

Biography (continued)

I met Dwayne Fowler while waiting tables at TGI Friday’s in Atlanta. He was the first black musician that I ever grew to know. During our friendship we had many discussions about what it would be like to fuse together funk, metal, jazz, reggae, and progressive rock into some kind of sonic Frankenstein. One night Dwayne invited me to come over to jam with he and his drummer at the time, Richard Farmer. This meeting provided the genesis for what would eventually become Stuck Mojo – the focus of my life for the next decade.

Over the course of that ten year period, Stuck Mojo would pioneer and help to define the genre that, for lack of a better term, became known as “rap metal.” During our tenure, many of the band’s ardent fans would go on to begin similar groups of their own. Using the Mojo formula, bands such as Limp Bizkit, Papa Roach and others went on to multi-platinum success. Although never reaching such status, Mojo would eventually go on to release seven albums, tour the world a dozen times, and establish an army of fiercely loyal fans from Europe to Japan, Australia to Brazil and beyond.

In 2000, Stuck Mojo released its last album, “Violate This” – a compilation record of rarities and b-sides. By that time I had reached a point where I could no longer separate the angry person from the angry music and it affected virtually all of my personal relationships. I was a dick – just ask somebody, they’ll tell you. I guess the real turning point occurred in our tour bus while in Austria. The details aren’t important but I ended up in a fight with one of my band mates. The kind where people get hurt. So after a decade of declaring war with the world, I surrendered.

I had always tried to incorporate many of my early rock influences into Mojo’s music. These include bands like Rush, Queen, The Police and several others. Now, with a clean slate, I was free to create music without the restriction of trying to please a particular fan base. Also, I could begin to write vocal melodies and arrangements that could not be performed by a rap vocalist. The result was a series of demos under the working names of Ride the Snake, Sick Speed and Cafu. After a couple years of live performances and networking, these demos garnered the attention of several record companies. Ultimately, a selection of the songs were packaged and released in Europe during the summer of 2002.

During this same timeframe, in order to satisfy my desire to play the occasional riffs of ultimate heaviness, I collaborated with WWE superstar and good friend Chris Jericho on a project going under the name of Fozzy. At first, the group was basically the world’s greatest metal cover band. Strangely enough, though, before our third gig together we were offered a record deal through a partnership between Palm and Megaforce records. The deal also included the filming of a 30 minute mockumentary about the band detailing its fictitious past and eventual rise to fame. Over the next four years fact would prove to be stranger than fiction. We have gone on to record three albums, have performed live on national television and the Howard Stern show among others, played live internationally, and we have written music for and performed in a commercial for a well-known soft drink. As with all my musical ventures, Fozzy will exist as long as it is destined to last.

Page Two     Page Four