JOSH SCOTT JHS PEDALS
“It’s almost like Mars,” says Josh Scott, founder and proprietor of JHS Pedals, of rural northwest Alabama, where he spent his childhood. “If you’re familiar with that life, it’s a fun and awesome one. But you live out on land by yourself and there’s not a lot else to do, so you develop hobbies. My dad raised horses; I was a total basketball nut.”
To put a name to it, “out” means Belgreen, Alabama, a small farm town about 30 miles south of Muscle Shoals. This was definitive country life, where Scott attended the same school from age five to 18, and graduated with a class of 30 students.
“If you’re an introvert like me,” he says, “you just kind of pick a thing and you have blinders on and do it. I’m 6’6” and I loved basketball. I grew up watching the [Boston] Celtics with my dad – Larry Bird and all that – and that’s what I thought I was going to do.”
Ah, but how many youthful dreams of sporting prowess have been irrevocably pierced by the discovery of that age-old, hormone-addled teen-corruptor, rock ’n’ roll?
COMING ALIVE
And, so often, that dream thief is let in through the window by a worldly older sibling. In Scott’s case, it was an older brother who lived in ‘town’, such as it was, with whom he’d often stay during summer.
“I’d be sitting on the floor,” says was sitting on a pile – with Depeche Mode, The Cure, all the stuff he listened to – and I put it in, hit play, and it was the song . I just remember loving the sound of the guitar and then the solo part, which, in hindsight, is like Jimi Hendrix meets grunge, you know, the Mike McCready thing.
