Sonny Vincent called me the other day to tell me that our bandmate from Sonny Vincent and The Extreme, Jeff Rogers, died. That’s Jeff on the right in the picture above.

Jeff was in a punk band with me, but he wasn’t a punk. Before playing with us in The Extreme, he was the drummer for a polka band. I’m not kidding. He’d also played in blues bands, which is where he ultimately wound up at the end of his drumming days, playing with Twin Cities perennials the Lamont Cranston Band, and others.

I lived with Jeff shortly after I moved to California. We rented a studio apartment in Venice Beach, a few steps from the sand, for $400 a month (the same room in that building goes $2200 now, though they probably don’t have the hey, there’s a human body in the dumpster problem anymore, as they did when we lived there). Later, he and I moved to Topanga Canyon, but Jeff left the canyon pretty soon after.

He was a unique, troubled character, and he saw right through me. Once when he was mad at me for some reason, he said, “I don’t know what it is with you man, it’s like you’re carrying around this big bag of shit on your shoulders and it’s impossible to get through to you.” Well, he wasn’t wrong about that.

The last time I spoke to him, he promised to come visit Joshua Tree and said that he was, maybe, moving to Phoenix, Arizona. I’m not sure if he ever made it there. And I don’t know how or why he died, I didn’t ask Sonny because I don’t know if it matters. He had health problems and was chronically poor, so I choose to remember him as I knew him, a young man playing the hell out of the drums.

But death gets you thinking, and it got me thinking that four people (that I know of) who I played with in bands have died.

The first was another member of Sonny Vincent and The Extreme, Mort Baumann. Mort was a stage name; his real name was Mark, though he was kind of always on stage, so it was Impossible to see him as anyone but the character he created: Mort.

Mort could give the impression of being a phony dude (he spoke in a weird British accent much of the time, despite being born and raised in Minnesota). But if you spent enough time with him, you’d learn that he could also be the biggest sweetheart you’d ever meet.

After I left Sonny’s band, he, Sonny, and Jeff played together for a while, and he and Sonny had a short-lived band that included Bob Stinson from the Replacements and Cheetah Chrome from The Dead Boys in the same band at the same time. If you know how chaotically unpredictable Bob and Cheetah were, you can imagine what that was like.

Massive respect due to everyone involved in that, but boy, I’m glad I was gone by then. Ha.

Mort died in 2002, murdered by his girlfriend. He was 39 years old.

The next to pass was Roger DeBace, my fellow guitar player in the first band I gigged with, the Reactors. The band started in late 1978 and only played together for a year or so, but we were the first punk band in St. Paul.

I say we were first, but Hüsker Dü beat us to the stage, playing their first gig a couple of months before ours. Whoever was technically first, we emerged from the womb of St. Paul at the same time.

Before the Reactors, Roger and I played together in a band that never left the basement or played in front of an audience. I don’t think we had a name, but I wrote “Trash” next to the pictures I have of the band in a photo album. So maybe that was our name. I guess we would have been the first punk band in St. Paul now that I think of it.

A couple of years after the Reactors, Roger formed a hardcore band called Willful Neglect, and they went on to make a name for themselves in that scene (and mock what I was doing with Sonny, calling us “Wall-standing posers” in one of their songs – so punk!).

After he retired from music, Roger opened his own offset printing shop, a profession he and I shared. I wasn’t close to Roger after the Reactors, but I heard he passed away due to long-standing health issues.

Trevy Felix from Boom Shaka died in 2015. Funny, I met Trevy, whose front door was about 100 yards from mine in Topanga Canyon, shortly after Jeff moved back to the city. Worlds collide!

Trevy’s death hit me hardest because I spent more time with him than I did with Jeff, Mort, or Roger. They were bandmates, and I’d definitely call them friends, but Trevy and I were friends outside of music, so it was a different kind of relationship.

Well, to be fair, there wasn’t much outside of music for either of us at that time; we were both consumed by it. I wasn’t working a day job when we met (and he didn’t have to), which resulted in us spending virtually every day together for two years, so his passing was hard to take. What made it harder still was that Trevy was also murdered.

When I said I didn’t want to know how or why Jeff died, that’s why. I don’t want to take the chance of finding out yet another friend was murdered. Not saying I believe Jeff was murdered, I just don’t want to know.

I’ve written about Trevy before, and I did a podcast episode about him. All I’ll say here is that he talked me into riding a camel on a beach in Tunisia, and I don’t think anyone else could have done that. He also got me arrested in Tunisia, so there was that. And nearly got me killed in an Oakland reggae dancehall, but that’s another story.

Four former colleagues are a lot to lose. Too many. But as I get older, losses like these are inevitable. It’s the inevitability of all of our lives. If we’re lucky enough to survive, we can’t avoid the experience of friends and family dying. It’s the cost of our survival.

But I’ll remember all of these people as I knew them and not for their deaths. We had extraordinary times together, suffered together, failed together, triumphed together, lived together, and made music together.

And there’s nothing better than making music with your friends.

WRITTEN BY A HUMAN