“Future Shock.” " Hawks last touring Interview 2002
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As Jerome " Hawk " Freeman prepares for a new chapter in music and life with Manager : Beto de Leon Music producer / Manager / Promoter in USA, Spain, Brazil, Uruguay! Beto is launching a new company! And we;re all excited!

Future Shock ! It was a feeling he himself lost for a time, but is glad he recovered. During this interview, Freeman lived in a restored windmill — the “Hawk’s Nest” in Bowling Green Ohio, where he is continually inspired to write new music, much of which reaches back to his small town Alliance Ohio roots.

“I have to leave the windmill not to write songs,” he laughed.
He believes music should fuel optimism, love and laughter, not self-destruction. “Music is about healing,” he said. Devils lurking at crossroads need not apply.

Legendary blues musician Robert Johnson allegedly found his inspiration beside a fog enshrouded crossroads at midnight, where he traded his soul to the devil in return for guitar playing skill.

Former Alliance Ohio resident now Colorado Immigrant Jerome “Hawk” Freeman is also inspired by a crossroads — the unlikely intersection of his passion for playing the blues and his career as a mobile and computer systems
administrator.

And like Johnson, his steps have occasionally been dogged by deviltry.
“Music is a byte,” he puns, explaining his dual fascination with both streams of musical notes and computer data. The connection becomes clearer, he said, when digitized music streams across a computer terminal. “Each song is a program I’m trying to decode and send to you.” Freeman, was a technology support specialist at Bowling Green State University, and moonlighting at Lockwood Records of Cleveland, where he was developing the company’s digital
division. His goal is create a better system of sharing music over the Internet, one that would include personalized audio messages from artists and extra material with each paid download. ( As we all know this is exactly where the industry went )

Freeman is also one of Lockwood Record label’s artists. “The Bed U Lie N,” a release by his band, Strange Fruit, is currently available as a free download.
“I just love a good song,” he said, with a guitar draped across one knee in the front room of his parents then home on Arch Avenue, where he was visiting earlier this week. As if to prove it, he segued smoothly from a hard-luck blues riff of his own into Harry Chapin’s “Cats in the Cradle,” which soon transformed into “"Hotel California” by the Eagles.

Freeman has gone through several transformations himself. Born in Ravenna, he grew up in the 1960s with grandparents Charles and Cora Freeman in Windham and Alliance Ohio, but traveled back and forth between the Carnation City and Chicago, where his mother and step father ( Pops Hillard Odd )lived.

In Alliance, he was exposed to traditional gospel in local churches, do-wop music performed by his father’s band The El-Torros, and country-western tunes on the television program, “Hee Haw.” and other local musicians.

In Chicago, he was exposed to the great Chess Records artists, to live performances by the likes of Robert Lockwood Jr. ( My Mom would take naps and I'd be gone to Record Row haha ) “Chicago gave me that big city exposure. The great Gospel & Blues sounds were there.

But I value where I’m from,” he said. “Alliance, Ohio, is a beautiful place to grow up.” His computer career had its roots in Alliance. During a trip to the Rodman Library Bookmobile, he discovered a book, “Future Shock” by Alvin Toffler, that predicted technological advances. His teacher thought the book was too advanced for a seventh-grader, but still let him check it out. It made a lasting impression, as did several Radio Shack electronics kits that paved the
way for a career change twenty years later.

During his sophomore year, Freeman dropped out of Alliance High School. His grandfather was terminally ill, and Freeman was afraid of the additional responsibility he would have to shoulder in the family. He joined the Job Corps, where he learned to mud and tape drywall and texture ceilings. In 1976, he went to work for American Steel Foundries. For the next ten years, he worked steel
by day, hearing music in his head as he worked, and played guitar in various bands by night. He married and had a daughter, Heidi.

The marriage went south, and Freeman temporarily turned to alcohol and drugs for solace. On Thanksgiving 1989, sensing it was time for a change, he pulled up stakes and moved to Columbus.
There, he answered an Ohio State University advertisement that sought people to place computer chips on mother boards for $5.75 an hour, a substantial decrease from the $12 he had earned at American Steel. He passed the skills test because of his regimented foundry work and because of the many Radio Shack kits he had assembled as a child.

At Ohio State, he touched a computer for the first time and heard about something called the Internet. The new technology was a way to make “Future Shock” a reality. He realized that proficiency in computers would take as much effort as proficiency with a guitar. “I knew I had to stay humble and teachable,” he said. Over the next nine years, he learned as much about computers as he could, installing hardware and working as a network technician for several Columbus companies and schools and soaking up information about different systems and configurations. Gradually, the pay improved.

Freeman lived briefly in Alliance while doing consulting work in Cleveland in 1999. After moving to Cleveland, he and his band, Coalhouse Walker, released a CD where he played guitar, provided lead vocals and performed four of his own songs. In 1995, Freeman unexpectedly talked with one of his boyhood heroes, Robert Lockwood Jr., while trying to sign up his band for a blues festival. The phone call led to a face-to-face meeting, and now Freeman frequently plays guitar with his idol and works for the record label founded by the musician, who in recorded history is the stepson of Robert Johnson himself.

The music industry, he contends, is doing a disservice to today’s children.
“There ain’t a rap song yet that talks about getting a degree,” he said. “The music that’s being pumped into their heads is totally detrimental.”
The romanticized gangster image presented by most rap artists is faked, according to Freeman. “No one wants to be born in the ghetto and shoot their way out.”

Freeman would rather see young people fill their heads with knowledge of their own potential and “a whole lot of dreams.” He wants them to feel the same thrill that he did when first reading “Future Shock.” It was a feeling he himself lost for a time, but is glad he recovered and is back ready to peform, record and tour.