"HE NEVER CEASED TO CREATE MUSIC TAHT TOUCHED MY FUCKING SOUL"
James Owen Sullivan was born in Tustin, California, on February 9, 1981 and his family soon moved to the idyllic seaside city of Huntington Beach. He spent his early days at the beach, boogie boarding with his two sisters, practising WWE moves in his bedroom and, of course, banging the ever-living hell out of his mother’s pots and pans. It was almost as if he felt his calling from the start…
“He was the happiest kid you ever saw in your life,” remembers his mother Barbara. “And everything was funny! When he was growing up, you would try to reprimand him, but he’d be laughing so hard that it would be really difficult to tell him to stop. You’d say, ‘Stop it, that’s not funny!’ and he’d say, ‘It’s funny to me!’ Ha ha ha!” This roguish charm and fiery rebellious streak would come to define the young man, who would one day be called ‘The Rev’.
With his moppy bowl haircut and gangly figure, Jimmy (call him ‘James’ at your peril), made a strong first impression. Future A7X bassist Jonathan Lewis Seward, aka Johnny Christ, was only five years old when he first met The Rev, who was friends with Johnny’s older brothers. “He was like this skinny, long, lanky dude and he was wild!” he recalls. “Right off the bat you could tell that he had a ton of energy and that he wanted to destroy shit! Ha ha ha!”
Jimmy had a fairly ordinary upbringing; he went to school, hung out at the beach and played sports for most of the year. “Jimmy was a tremendous athlete,” says his dad, Joe. “As a kid, he really loved his basketball, man.”
Throughout his life, Jimmy enjoyed the unwavering support of
