by Benji Heywood (@benjiheywood)
Rick Froberg, vocalist and guitarist of San Diego post-hardcore band Drive Like Jehu, died Friday June 30th at age 55. As the tributes have come pouring in, it’s clear Froberg had an outsized influence on modern guitar music. While this piece is a tribute to Froberg, it’s also a personal reckoning with a musician who in many ways was a cypher of my own lived experience. Despite having never met him, I felt a kinship with this once-in-a-generation artist. His voice, lyrics, guitar playing, and art made a lasting impact on who I am and now that he’s gone, I find myself unexpectedly unmoored.
Like Froberg, I moved to Encinitas, in North County San Diego, the summer of 1983, just a couple years after he did. Though Froberg’s experience of the sleepy beachside town was undoubtably different due to our age difference (he’s ten years older), I imagine the underlying logistics to be similar. Place shapes a person. While Froberg’s earlier years were spent in Los Angeles, I like to think that he and I biked or skated the same Encinitas streets or sipped beers beneath the sage brush in the same hidden canyons or smoked cigarettes along the same stretch of railway that hugged PCH. Regardless, there was something about San Diego in the 80s that felt both very hyper specific, yet mundanely universal.
I returned to San Diego for college in 1997 after a few years living in northern California. I already loved music but had no idea Drive Like Jehu or any of Froberg’s earlier projects existed. San Diego in the fall of ‘97 meant dreaming up bands in dorm rooms, seeing shows like Spanakorzo and Get Up Kids at the Che, and hearing the ubiquitous “Damn It” on 91X. It also meant a weekly trip up the coast to my old haunt, Encinitas, where my drumkit lived in a storefront church, to jam with childhood friends. After, I’d often visit Lou’s Records, where I’d browse their large backroom of used CDs. It was here I’d discover the first of many albums I’ve loved by Froberg.
Froberg was adamant about his hatred of CDs – an inscription on the CD of his band Pitchfork stated “CDs fucking blow.” His disdain was partly due to the commodification implicated by CDs but primarily it derived from Froberg’s love of the jumbo-sized album art of a vinyl record. Froberg was an accomplished visual artist. When you look at an album cover designed by Froberg, the art was every bit as important to the record as the music itself. Drive Like Jehu’s seminal album Yank Crime is no different.
That day at Lou’s, Yank Crime’s striking black and white image stopped me cold. As the child of Pentecostal pastors who grew up going to a church less than a mile away from Lou’s, the biblically-inspired name Drive Like Jehu scrawled across the cover carried immediate resonance. The image of a medicinal dropper leaking a sinewy, blood-like liquid struck me as violent and dangerous. The words “yank crime” painted in the same inky script further mystified me. There remains something propagandistic about Froberg’s imagery, epitomized on Yank Crime. The visual was an imperative: you will listen. I obeyed.
I wish I could describe an experience of listening to Drive Like Jehu for the first time – I’m sure I popped it in for the drive back to UCSD – but I don’t have any memory of it. It wasn’t until years later that a friend mentioned Jehu and my mind clicked – oh yeah, I liked that band. All my CDs had been stolen (along with the Encinitas drumkit), so I went out and rebought it, this time on vinyl. The version of Yank Crime I bought in the early aughts had a bonus, unlabeled 7” inside its packaging, which I thought was particularly cool. I may not remember the first time I heard Jehu, but as I placed the stylus to the jet-black vinyl, I knew this album was important.
Listening to the music of Drive Like Jehu taught me two things: If I could sing like anyone, I’d sing like Rick Froberg and if I could play guitar like anyone, I’d play guitar like John Reis. This pairing, showcased in Drive Like Jehu but equally and dynamically resonate on four frenzied albums by their next band, Hot Snakes, is one of the great duos in the history of rock music. Acrobatic, noisy, but still razor sharp, nothing sounded like the guitar playing on Yank Crime. Froberg’s singing – fever pitched and anxious – connected with me in a way other singers hadn’t. It made me want to play in an aggressive guitar band. I spent the next decade of my life trying to emulate the music I heard on Yank Crime, touring the country, releasing vinyl albums, and meeting some of my best friends in the process.
Froberg’s music not only altered the course of my life, it became entwined in the very fabric of my identity. His bracing lyrics and his voice – which sounds like enriched uranium, pressurized until only the most volatile essence remains – reflected something I felt deep within me. I don’t claim to know what Froberg intended when he wrote a song like “Here Come the Rome Plows,” but the emotions his songs stirred in me – pain, anxiety, fear – mirrored my own experience of adulthood. Throughout my adult life, I’ve struggled with alcohol addiction, suicidal ideations, and the pain of watching friends die from diseases of despair. Froberg’s lyrics seemed to me encoded missives designed to help me cope. The math was easy to compute: When I listened to Froberg’s music, I felt less alone.
Froberg was a master at using his words to induce big feelings. Syphoned through a voice that sounds at turns sardonic and biting, Froberg’s lyrics are both a reason to love his bands and a reason why his music often keeps one at arm’s reach. According to Froberg, this disassociation was by design. When asked in 2015 on the Kreative Kontrol podcast about his lyrics, Froberg had this to say: “Most of the songs have to do with fear of the outside world, fear of what’s around me, fear of what’s to come.”
The host, Val Khanna, follows up, “Do you know where that emanates from?”
“Yea, I do,” Froberg says with laugh, “but I’m not gonna tell you.”
His response resonates with me because it speaks to a larger incongruity we face: knowing yet unknowing. Death may be a painful reminder of life’s impermanence, but it’s also an integral signifier that gives life meaning. Yet, while I understand this rationally, I can’t seem to get my emotional self – the part of me propelled and fed by music like Froberg’s – to get on board. It seems to me at the core of life lies a profound unfairness, reified by the often temporal randomness of death. The tacit knowledge of our mortality exists in opposition to everything we hope for. As such, Froberg’s passing exposes in me a dread that’s lurked about me ever since I left Encinitas: the fear that at any moment, the worst is possible and there’s nothing I can do to stop it.
Which is what makes Froberg’s passing especially painful. A suspension of disbelief concerning our own mortality depends on someone being there on the other end of the line to answer when we call. Sadly, for those who knew Froberg the person, the answer is now silence. For us who didn’t know him personally, yet loved the art he made, the music is still there. All we can do is offer you who did lose a friend our deep condolences and the tiniest sliver of hope that comes with knowing his art changed lives. I’m living proof.