John Herndon doesn’t really want to tell me this story. He hasn’t discussed it much in public, and he’s not sure he wants to now. You can’t blame him. It’s hard to know who to trust with details of the cruel abuse you survived in foster care, or who will understand what it was like to be raised by committee in an intentional community in North Carolina.
“I totally cried out loud when I heard them,” he says. “Wow, my friends, putting their care into the work. It felt like a really special thing.” Herndon wants people to hear this music that some of his favorite people have poured themselves into—in fact it seems like it’s more important to him than promoting his own album. That’s the main reason he’s in his garage having this conversation—his publicist suggested that if he were willing to talk about his life, it might help generate some coverage for the new release. A bit begrudgingly, he agreed. “It’s fine,” he says to me. “But I’m not trying to tell my life story.”
“My mother, I think, was using a lot of substances, which I think triggered sort of a latent schizophrenia, or bipolar disorder, or both,” Herndon explains. “While my father was in jail, she brought my brother and I to the park in Boston and just left us on a park bench. And then she just bounced. Police found us, and then, from what I understand, neither her parents nor my father’s parents were willing or able to care for us, so we were put in the foster care system.” He was just a toddler, at most two years old, but he remembers.
“They’re kind of an intellectual group of craft people,” Herndon explains. “Not as much like druggy free love and more like, ‘Let’s run a business and get work done.’” As the commune got on its feet, Herndon and his brother found theirs, exploring the strange new world of country life after years of city dwelling.
Herndon was totally smitten. “Somehow Dave was able to get some other pieces together, and then my folks got me this drum kit for Christmas,” he says. “I just started playing the drums. I would just go and practice for six, eight, whatever hours a day. And that’s just what I did.”
“I just feel like, among other things, it just made me have to be a liar about my life for my whole life,” Herndon says. “I had to lie to everyone, which is a sucky thing.” California wasn’t the paradise filled with music and skateboarding that Herndon had dreamed he’d find. He didn’t get along with his stepmother either, and he got in trouble at school when a teacher tried to grab some drumsticks out of his hand. He was eventually suspended, and later he got into a physical altercation with his dad.
