John Freeman Leaving Dallas, But Not Going Where You Heard (Maybe)

John Freeman has been a member of at least a dozen bands during his on-again, off-again tenure in Dallas (Dooms U.K., the Dutch Treats, Telethon, the Golden Vipers, N.I.B. — and those are just the ones I had the fortune of seeing). He was also instrumental in the late, great Good/Bad Art Collective and, briefly, ran Sloppyworld, a venue-and-more in Expo Park. Among many other things. Now he’s moving again. He’s selling off Sloppyworld’s P.A. system to help pay off debts and fund his departure, ostensibly to move to NYC to write rock operas with his pal Corn Mo. But that might not necessarily be true. I think we’ve reached the point where we need to, oh, you know.

A few weeks ago, I ran into Freeman at Good Records 8th birthday/Record Store Day shindig. He was the MC for the event, and was sweetly wearing a ZC/07 T-shirt. I hadn’t seen him in a bit, so I asked him about what I had read in the Observer, or on its blog at any rate. He said that he wasn’t, in fact, moving to New York, though the idea of getting paid to write rock operas with Corn Mo would of course be awesome. (Paraphrase–I don’t think he used the word “awesome,” since it’s a habit only I can’t break.) He said he was probably moving to Portland, and that he pretty much made the rest of it up, as revenge for Pete Freedman’s piece about the Melodica Festival.

But who knows? Maybe he was playing a joke on me. It wouldn’t be the first time that happened, and it certainly won’t be the last. I’m a strange mixture of sarcastic and gullible. Nothing is ever as it seems around me.