Once upon a time in America, kids would form rock bands.
Learn about some of Josh's groups here.​
Dead Fish, the Colour and Toxic Cops
Ah, the musical passions of adolescence!!! It is a time when you can barely play your instrument, but the magic of creating something new simply can't be beat! For me it started the joys started with a Casio keyboard. I formed a band with myself called "The Unexplained" and began recording projects on audio cassette and then reel-to-reel tape deck.
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Soon thereafter, I began learning guitar on a classical that my sister gave me. I moved onto electric guitar around the age of 14 and started taking lessons. My first real band was "Dead Fish" with childhood friend Gabe Gilligan on vocals and T. Xiques on drums (see video below). Though our production value was low -- I spent countless hours listening to our demo tapes on a Sony Walkman during a road trip to Maine and found unbounded excitement in finding unplanned nuances in our original songs. In some ways it was a high that I continued to chase throughout life, but a magic that was not easily re-created.
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Sometime around junior high I formed the band "The Color" with friends Dev Patnaik and John Marr. As you can hear in the recording below (done with Mark Meritt on synths), we were fully immersed in the 1980s sound. However, I would soon become obsessed with Led Zeppelin and Jimi Hendrix and began to focus on classic rock. Throughout the years I continued to get together periodically with Gabe Gilligan to record blues-based rock. One summer around the start of college, Giligan, T. Xiques and Matt Frischman (the bassist of my high school band "The Vagodas") got together to form "Toxic Cops". By now we were squarely in the 4-track tape recorder era, and I could experiment with layering multiple parts.​​ You can appreciate the insanity that led to in the "police interrogation" section of the Tabloid TV recording below.
"The Vagodas" was the most legendary band to emerge from John Jay High School in Dutchess County, NY.
The Vagodas was assembled as a supergroup of John Jay's best musicans -- patterned after the Blues Brothers -- with the sole intent of putting on a gig in the school's auditorium. The group's storied past was recently captured in the documentary "Ladies and Gentlemen, the Vagodas" leading to a multiyear John Jay reunion concert in Poughkeepsie, NY in 2023. If you are curious about high school life in the 1980s, you don't want to miss this!
Josh's band at Brown University was quite possibly the greatest performance-art funk-rock band of the 1990s!
Every gig that band put on was a full-out multi-media experience. Given his dedication to the band, it is quite amazing that Josh's was able to complete his regular coursework!
At the group's apex, the Boston Sushi Fiesta opened up for "Fishbone" when they performed at Brown.​
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Signos y Sombras
Josh's funk-rock band while he lived in Mexico is covered extensively in mExpats. Amazingly the group was on national Mexican TV several times -- winning the battle of the bands on the season finale of Coca Cola "Liquid Rock". The group also won a contest to open for international rock sensation "Maná" at the National Auditorium -- playing for a crowd of 10,000. ​Despite all this, the band was unable to leverage its successes to get a recording contract.
After leaving Mexico, Josh quit the corporate world and formed the band Fitehouse. You can learn more about the group in the "Hero's Journey" mExpats epilogue documentary, or by clicking the band name above.
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