My partner in crime for many of the years I was involved actively in the Flint punk rock scene was Mark Ojeda.  It all started in the late 1970s when Mark's Mom moved into the pink house next door to my parents house.  We hit it off right away and became the best of friends.  Mark and I were big into skateboarding and always looking for places to ride.  Skateboarding's premier rag was (and still arguably is) Thrasher.  Mark and I read every word of every Thrasher that we bought and shared with each other.  We found out about the skate rock scene through the pages of Thrasher, and soon started listening to a lot of stuff, most notably JFA.  Jodi Foster's Army (JFA, duh) featured this sound that was so totally different from most of the hardcore punk we were also listening to at the time.  I can describe it as a sort of surf rock guitar sound (reverb all up in there) with unintelligible vocals, a ripping bass line and a drummer that wasn't afraid to change things up a bit.  It was a sound that went with every ollie, manual, bert slide and boneless that we were doing.  To this day I can't come up with a band I would want to hear more while skateboarding than JFA.  So, needless to say, Mark and I were skaters that read Thrasher and jammed to JFA, yippee!  But what I was getting to was that Mark and I were also practically inseparable, especially on weekends (Mark ended up living with his Dad in Flint while I stayed put in Grand Blanc).  We started going to OLOL Dances, messing with people and skating around the parking lot.  At some point Mark went to this little record store near his house caled Wyatt Earp's, and he was getting some choice cuts from there, so I went in there with him, (first time, mind you) and was just blown away that this little 250 square foot (if that) record store could have such a density of incredible music!  From there, we started learning about these Hall Shows since Wyatt Earp's had flyers posted for upcoming shows.  Wow, what a great experience it was to go to something in Flint where there were people who you could totally relate with (and the other way around), that was cool, all ages, and so accessible.

So thus began our adventure into punk rock in Flint Michigan.

Mark has been a student of drumming as long as I have known him, and had a drum kit that we would often play in his basement, but a drummer needs other musicians to thrive, so eventually Mark started playing with a group called Smashed.  Jason Adsit was on vocals, John Jackson on guitar and Shawn Ellis played bass, and Mark, of course, drums.  THey incorporated a straight edge sort of style to their music, think Dag Nasty, but with John and Shawn the music reached a totally different level.  I served as a sort of stage crew and security (like that was necessary) for Smashed, which got me in for free.  I also had them perform at the 2 Foust Fest's that I threw at my parent's house when they were out of town.  In fact, Smashed's first live performance was at Foust Fest 1.

Mark later joined the near legendary Jesus Christ and the Superstars who made each show they performed as loud and annoying as humanly possible.  Eric Scott was singer in J.C. & the SS (as they were known).  My good friend, the late Chuck Taylor was guitarist and class clown.  There isn't a lot of recorded history of J.C. & the SS so I don't have much to share, but here is a cool picture that Eric Scott provided me of one of their live performances.

Mark is now tending farm in Southern California and still playing drums in a band with some co-workers.