*Pic of when my wife Allyson first braided my hair on 09/20/18. We did it as a joke.
Throughout my life, I have lived with long hair. Unlike the parents of most of my friends in elementary school, my parents weren’t the type to insist on my brother and I going down to the barber shop and having our hair shaved down to a military-looking buzz cut. Instead, and especially after she divorced my Dad and began raising us 3 kids alone, my Mom pretty much encouraged us to look and dress however we wanted to.
By the age of 11, I wanted my hair as long as Mark Farner of Grand Funk Railroad’s. GFR was my favorite band then, and I thought Mark looked like a total badass.
Then everything came to a screeching halt during my 7th Grade year in school, in Folsom, California. Folsom was very conservative in the early 1970s and considered to be a little backward redneck town and every boy in school had an ugly-looking buzzcut. By then, I was completely enamored of David Carradine’s character Kwai Chang Caine on the hit ABC TV series Kung Fu and I asked my Mom to trim my hair a bit so it looked like Caine’s did after the first season of the show.
Despite the trimming, it was still too long for my fellow junior high schoolmates and I was mercilessly picked on and fucked with just about every day that school year. To be honest, it was during this time that I learned how to fight but I hated every second of it because, much like his hairstyle, I also admired Kwai Chang Caines’s Buddhist beliefs and pacifistic philosophy. Eventually, I was forced to fight back or get my ass handed to me every day.
That would be the longest my hair would ever get until much, much later, sometime around 1989, just after 7 Seconds came out with our Soulforce Revolution and toured a ton. I was seeing a woman named Phyllis who loved long hair and was always on me to let my hair grow out. I finally gave in and stopped shaving my head. Phyllis and I split up in 1991 and after a while, I started getting interested in dating. I immediately noticed that my longhair got me instant attention. Women would walk up to me and ask me if they could feel and even brush my hair and I ate it up. By 1992, my hair had grown so long, I could sit on it. My wife Allyson and I began seeing each other in March of that year and since she loved my long hair, I continued to let it grow but a few months into it, just as summer was beginning, I decided to cut it all off and shave it down. Allyson shot a video of us/me hacking it off and if I find the footage, I’ll share it here because there are some pretty ridiculous and comical moments.
The last time I cut my hair short was on April 12, 2016. My pal Chris Sanchez was my barber and nailed exactly what I wanted. I know the date only because I posted a pic on Instagram showing off my new hair cut. I left for Europe the next day, to start a tour with my brothers Steve Soto and Aleks.
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