Stereo Embers: The Podcast

“Grandfather Courage” Fantastic Negrito may have been born in Massachusetts, but he’s a Bay Area guy through and through. The 8th of 15 kids, he moved to Oakland as a twelve year old and immediately immersed himself in the sounds of the 510 and the 415. He was no stranger to punk rock clubs like Berkeley’s Gillman or the underground hip hop clubs of Oakland. He liked it all—metal, indie rock, soul, punk and jazz and the legend goes that he learned to play by sneaking into the music classrooms at Cal, even though he wasn’t a student. Using his birth name of Xavier, in 1993 he signed a deal with Prince’s former Manager’s Lexington House Records who had a distribution deal with Interscope. Three years later he put out his debut album, simply titled Xavier. A horrifying car crash in 1999 nearly killed him but after waking up from a three week coma, he started to see his career in a totally different way. That new angle wouldn’t take hold until 2014, seven years after a self-imposed exile of not making music anym