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| John Faria playing his Ibanez Les Paul |
There are times I think this blog has become a requiem for friends and family in the past several years and I guess that it is expected as one ages, more family and friends go away and so shall I some day. I am here yet again to remember yet another friend that has gone before us. His name was John Faria, born in December of 1960. I came to meet John in high school through a friend Peter Faldorf. At the time Pete, my brother and Paul Beylerian played in a band together. Pete played guitar as did John. John and Pete were seniors(I was a junior at this time) when I was introduced to John, who had just moved here from North Carolina. Actually, he was from Levittown NY, but I'll explain in a bit. John's father moved to NC for a job and passed away, so he and his mom moved back to NY, renting an apartment in Bellmore around the start of the of the school year. Pete told me to meet him in the library as he wanted to introduce me to John, who also played guitar. We hit it off and made a date to meet to play together at my house. My dad converted a large shed into a room that we could practice playing instruments. We padded the walls and all and it kept my parents sanity. Anyway, we all hit it off well and John eventually introduced me to Mike Bottalico, who also played guitar and we formed yet another band. You can hear Mike, my brother Tony and I play on a couple songs on my videos, Never and The Hate Song, but I digress. John loved The Who, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath and Pink Floyd (He also was a big Ramones fan) and we covered a lot of their songs. John had an exuberance like an announcer/MC introducing an act and I'll never forget when he introduced me to Mike, he said I had the energy of Keith Moon and the power of John Bonham, neither of which rang completely true. More like a Keith Moon in spirit but plays like Ringo or Bun E Carlos. John got more involved in folk music at church and we drifted a bit, but always keeping in touch no matter where I moved to, we managed to catch up. More recently, we kept connected through Facebook and Instagram and it dawned on me that I hadn't heard from him in some weeks. we were always liking each other's posts, commenting and messaging. I decided to dig and send some messages to his followers/connections. Like Stan Botway in an earlier post, I found out the bad news. I had a feeling it came to this. Not only his silence, but that he hadn't looked well in the past year. I had asked him if he was ok and he said he hadn't eaten much being low on funds, so I sent him some money through FB. There's a lot more to John than I can mention here and I feel with a little bit resignation about this, like it's another passage I am going through, the loss of contemporary friends and family. There's a lot more memories I could regale, but I will leave it at this: John, wherever you are, thank you. I wish we could jam one more time. Maybe we will if what some believe is true, if not, it's ok. We did the best we could.
Thank you for reading this blog.
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