Like so many things these days, the news first filtered through to me on Facebook. It was garbled at first – something had happened to Josh – but over the course of a day of increasingly frantic messages and phone calls, the rumours coalesced into the awful truth. Josh was gone, and he’d done it himself.
It was so hard to make sense of the news – then and now. Josh Burdette was a rock of a man, both physically and personally. He was the security guy at the 9:30 Club in Washington DC, a legendary punk rock venue. Everyone on the North American punk rock touring circuit knew him; he was both an imposing physical presence – massive, tattooed and pierced – and a generous, kind soul, a man who’d help out the visiting itinerants in his town with whatever they needed.
I wish I’d been able to tell him that there’s always a reason to go on
I first met him at a radio session in DC the morning before a show. He walked into the studio, towering over me, and simply informed me that he was my guy in town.
Over the years we’d become firm friends. He was a fan of my music and he saw me play in DC many times, as well as driving further afield to catch shows – Philadelphia, New York, even Cleveland. More than that, though, we were kindred spirits. He was one of the kindest souls I’ve ever encountered, he always had time for everyone else’s troubles, an ear to listen, a shoulder to cry on. I talked through my troubles with him many, many times and I was far from the only one.
That’s the most tragic thing about his passing. Josh was owed, karmically, many thousands of listening hours by so many people, not least myself. He’d had a few issues over the years – a physical injury to his shoulder that had endangered his work, troubles with love – but he’d always shrugged them off and changed the subject. That he had so much weight built up on him that he took his own life was a terrible shock. It left me sad, lost and even angry. He could have called me, or anyone, to talk about it and we would have listened, repaid him with all the love and patience that he needed. He never made that call.
That’s why I’ve been doing some work with CALM – the Campaign Against Living Miserably. I’ve had my brushes with depression in my time but one way or another I’ve pulled through. More often than not it’s been because I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to break the isolation, which is the worst part of it – the feeling that no one understands or cares.
