Aaron Ruscetta
I saw in the moment we met that David Faggioli was a truly unique human being, and I loved him for that -- immediately knew we had a great deal of compassionate morality in common from our shared atheist world view. My friendship with him has a 50 year history, starting in my late teens and early 20's when I was a customer and fan of his Round Records head shop on 9th South and 9th East in Salt Lake City. About 1 out of 5 of the 300+ vinyl LP's still preserved on my shelves came through Dave, and he greatly influenced all my musical and cultural journeys since then, expanding appreciation for eclectic underground art, improvisational musical expression, erudite people and unique recording artists like King Crimson and Brian Eno. We briefly played in a Zappa cover band together -- him shining on sax and me sadly attempting to channel Ruth Underwood on vibraharp -- though his most notorious music fun was satirizing life in the delusional ZionnoiZ land of Moroni with the Plague of Locusts group. We lost touch for a few decades when I moved from Utah, but he looked me up and reached out from Hawaii about 2016, seeking help with reclaiming some of the Plaque's recordings and web archives, which are currently available on my web host at < https://xarxaion.net/_faggioli/ >. Their satyrical creation "Utah, Gateway to Nevada", became a popular entry to the Utah State Song contest in 1985, and the archives include videos of TV news features and Plague performances.
I'm happy to have enjoyed regular phone conversations and email exchanges with David over these past several years, sharing news of family and info about old friends, discussing mycology from his lifelong passion for fungi science, laughing at Stephen Wright jokes, sharing angst about the rising national tides of christianazi cult fascism, slamming repugnant con political figures, and reporting on trends in the world of underground comic art and classic rock concert poster collecting.
The 2nd to the last email exchange we had was on Nov. 4th, 2024, 16 days before he passed. He was offering to send some items of screen print art made by a mutual Salt Lake friend, Arlen. He kept offering to send me collectable albums and art as a way of paying back a small financial gift I had shared to help him through a housing crisis. Wish I had been able to accept some of them, but I already have so many shrines to the sacred parts of my past in this house, like the ashes of my life partner of 30 years, or the giraffe posters still on the walls in our daughter's old room, or, just as meaningfully, stacks of import LP's from Round Records. A few days later, after the flood of putrid maggot bile terrorists, arsonists, vandals, thugs and nazis were set loose to drown America and destroy the future of humanity, I received David's final email to me... a link to a collection of 19 brilliant, humorous quotes and life observations made by the inimitable Frank Zappa. Sadly, they weren't enough to keep David from leaving us. I think he simply didn't have the strength left to continue fighting for reason and sanity and joy and compassion in the perversely twisted and senselessly cruel Orwellian world we find ourselves in now.