Grasshopper (musician) - Early Years

Early Years

Mackowiak's early years have been colored by a 1991 interview given to music publication Melody Maker, which claimed that he met Rev singer Jonathan Donahue in Camp Sunshine, a reform camp for juvenile delinquents, at the age of ten.

Grasshopper was throwing dead squirrels and rats into a lawnmower when Jonathan met him. The blood spattered over a watching group of retarded kids and they screamed and yelled. They yelled, "Now throw the possum in! The Possum! The possum too!" Muses Jonathan, "When you're younger, these things make a more vivid impression. I remember huge adrenaline rushes as the guts flew and hit people on the legs. I don't know what Grasshopper had done to get in there. He doesn't talk about it much."

The reliability of the story is unknown, though the claim to have met in a reform camp was repeated to the NME in 1998.

Grasshopper was born in upstate New York and was introduced to music by his uncle, an Atlantic Records employee who gave him records by John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman and Miles Davis, as well as novels by Jim Carroll. Growing up close to the border, he was in range of Canadian radio stations, further broadening his musical education.

In the early 80s, Mackowiak was a member of The People's Front (name taken from the Monty Python film Life of Brian), which played concerts in Fredonia, Dunkirk and Buffalo, NY. There was a film made of the band but has since gone missing. The film showed the band in concert and in a mock documentary with the storyline predicting great success not in the US, but "across the pond" in England. The film ends with a crash that was a foreshadowing of the fate that befell the actual guitar player for the group, Kyle Gaszynski.

Grasshopper undertook a BA in the renowned Media Studies program at the State University of New York at Buffalo (1984–1988) where he studied with avant-garde filmmakers Tony Conrad and Paul Sharits as well as Viennese action artist Peter Weibel. He later received a master's degree in the same subject at New School University, 1990-1993.

While studying at Buffalo around 1986/87, Mackowiak began to play bass guitar with avant garde group Shady Crady, an embryonic Mercury Rev incarnation which also featured Donahue, a member of The Flaming Lips until 1991. These formative years brought him into close contact with other members of the Flaming Lips/Mercury Rev sphere, such as producer Dave Fridmann and early Rev singer David Baker, also a media student.

Other activities in the late 1980s included working in the video department of a legal transcription company, as a percussionist for the local Buffalo band Sunny in Chernobyl and as a medical research subject: "I did this thing at a medical school where I got paid to take various drugs they were developing. You're in this controlled environment for 3 days and they give you all these drugs then suddenly stop then watch you suffer," he said.

Mackowiak is most commonly known by his childhood nickname Grasshopper, derived from how his family's Polish surname translates into the Polish language - "from where the poppies grow" - and his hyperactive nature as a child.