Goodbye to Justin Greeley: St. John’s musicians remember one of their own

I mean, we’re all devastated, but I will say to you that Justin’s strength through all of this has been incredible. You know, aside from his music ability, he was just a man of great character and strength and kindness. You know, for anybody who doesn’t know his music, For me, Justin has the most gorgeous voice. Once I heard him, I just knew that I wanted to play with him and I invited him to a couple of shows and we did a couple of shows in Calvert and we went on there to do some shows here at O’reilly’s and just made an instant connection and had a chemistry musically. And this is the last place that you performed together here at O’reilly’s. Yeah, yeah it it was, it was probably the 8th and we did a show here like sorry 7, seven to 10 I think and it was it was great. I just, I really adored playing with him because he was so good and and I even felt like I was listening lots of times when I was performing with him. I was on stage with him and I was playing along, but I was just, I was in awe of his voice and I was just thinking like how did I get here to play with him because he was so good and I don’t think he had any idea how good he was done it. I will run Jordan COVID. Actually, the beginning of COVID. My birthday was early April and he called me up that day. We were all locked down, you know, locked in. And he called me up and sang me a song for my birthday. Right. So that’s that’s the kind of guy he was. She was through the Corning down to the river. How long have you known him? 20 years. Yeah, for sure. I mean, when he started Release Real, they actually helped me out of the Vine one weekend. I didn’t have a band. A band had cancelled me last minute for whatever reason. I was stuck and someone said, did you ever hear this band really is real? And I end up getting a number and I called up and they bailed me out and they’ve been playing. They played her ever since and they actually retired from playing a couple of years ago, but Justin didn’t. He started doing solo acts and duos and trios and joined other bands and used to be another band called Jack Easy. And yeah, so he’s been playing here regularly for 20 years. I mean, he’s young fella. He looked like he had everything in the world in the palm of his hand and he was having some health issues and turned out to be colon cancer. Very surprising. It’s almost not believable. Yeah, I’m just 39 years old. Yeah, 39, too young. And this event that’s coming up on Sunday, that was initially A fundraiser, right? It still is a fundraiser. Of course. You know, the bills have been piling up and and his family needs some support, of course. And so, But Justin wanted it to be a celebration of life. Well, I meant to call you just before I left Go away. So Sunday we’re doing a fundraiser, a celebration of life for our friend Justin Greeley and his family. And we’ve got a great line up. What a line up of musicians is amazing when it’s the proper time of day, for we never get together anyhow. For us as musicians, it’s really important for us to share the music that’s going to happen on Sunday. And you know, I’m just so thankful that it’s still going ahead. Justin wanted that to happen. He knew that we were planning the the benefit. And you know, toward the end he made it very clear that he wanted this to be a celebration. So we are going to continue and I will tell you that I want to pack this room and I want to just make the rafters ring here for him because he’s so deserves it.