He was a prodigy who fell into addiction. Now KC musician lives for redemption
When you're born, born to be bad, the drugs come quick and the money comes real slow
Only took me 40 years, I finally learned how to just say no.
'Born to be Bad,' Brody Buster
Brody Buster played the blues — in front of millions of people — long before he lived them.
On Aug. 4, 1995, he performed on the 'The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.' He was 10 at the time.
After wailing away on his harmonica, he sat next to 18-year-old Alicia Silverstone, whose hit movie 'Clueless' had been released two weeks earlier, and cracked wise with Leno.
Leno: 'That was great. Now, you're 10 years old, right?'
Brody: 'Yeah.'
Leno: 'Do you ever get the blues? How is that working here?'
Brody: 'No, not me.'
Leno: 'Never been to prison?'
Brody: 'Nope.'
Leno: 'Never served any hard time?'
Brody: 'Nah, but some of my band members have.'
Jail and the blues would come in time, but in 1995 the kid from Paola, Kansas, was riding high in Los Angeles. He was represented by a big-time management company and making the rounds of TV shows: 'Full House,' 'Baywatch Nights,' 'Maury' with Maury Povich and 'Crook & Chase' in addition to the 'Tonight Show.'
He opened three nights for Jerry Seinfeld at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas and recorded with the Four Tops. 'Dateline NBC' even did a story on him.
The kid had amazing talent on the harmonica. So amazing that blues legend B.B. King had called the then-9-year-old onto stage during a concert at the Universal Amphitheatre in Los Angeles and declared, 'Ladies and gentlemen, I'd like to introduce to you one of the greatest harmonica players of our time, despite his age, believe it or not.'
He was a certifiable child prodigy. Of course, his name didn't hurt. Brody Buster was the perfect moniker for a cute, blond 10-year-old harmonica phenom.
It may not be such a good fit for a 40-year-old with a meth addiction.
It's safe to say that Buster long ago lost the sheen of innocence that brought him fame as a child. But as of Easter, he had found redemption.
That's when he celebrated the release of his new blues-infused album, 'Redemption,' at BB's Lawnside Blues & BBQ.
With about 250 people crammed into the Kansas City landmark on 85th Street, most sitting at tables littered with remnants of their Easter barbecue dinners, Buster and his band played all nine tracks from the album. He wrote seven of the songs, sang on them all, occasionally played guitar and inserted plenty of harmonica licks.
The album and the redemption were more than 30 years in the making.
'In looking back at it now, I guess I really didn't appreciate what I had going as a blues musician,' he said. 'And I think in order to find that passion again, I had to leave.'
Buster's journey took him into some very dark places, but it started innocently enough.
His mother, a musician who played with Kansas City blues artist Cotton Candy among others, gave him a harmonica when he was 7. He blew on it constantly and quickly got so good he joined his mother's groups on stage.
'I was so young, man, they just threw me up there,' Buster said. 'I can play, and they threw me up there. I didn't know anything else. ... My parents asked if I enjoyed doing it, and I said yeah.'
Things got serious when his parents, Janet and Curtis Brooks, took their prodigy to Memphis for an extended vacation. He showed off his talent among the many performers seeking fame and a bit of cash on Beale Street sidewalks, and he was one of the lucky few to be discovered. The emcee at B.B. King's Blues Club was impressed enough that young Brody earned an invite to play at the club.
The connection to King led the family to Los Angeles, where he made his many TV appearances and performed with the house band at King's club there, earning the 'one of the greatest harmonica players of our time' praise from legend himself.
After about a year on the West Coast, the family returned to Paola, and Brody took his show on the road. He performed in clubs around the nation and beyond. Perhaps the highlight was the 1996 Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland, where Brody joined Quincy Jones and Chaka Khan on stage and was included on the album 'Quincy Jones: 50 years in music — Live at Montreux 1996.'
All this was heady stuff for a Kansas elementary school kid.
But his parents restricted Brody to gigs at reputable venues, made sure Brody got good grades and tried to keep him away from the kind of trouble that is almost a cliché among child performers.
'I'm sure they saw what had happened to other child entertainers and performers,' he said. 'But just like anybody else, 'That's not going to happen to me.' I'm sure that's what was in their heads. 'That's not going to happen to Brody.''
His mother, in fact, said almost exactly that during an interview with the Los Angeles Times.
'When he's 16 and his peers are cruising and out drinking, I don't think that will hold any attraction for him because he's seen what it really does,' Janet Brody said. 'We always point out the artists who ended their careers sadly and too soon by overdosing or drinking too much.'
Danielle Nicole, an internationally recognized blues performer from Kansas City, provided backup vocals on a couple of songs on 'Redemption' and joined Buster onstage at BB's Barbecue on Easter.
'In my musical opinion, he's one of the best harmonica players alive. Period,' she said. 'Not just for blues, not just for American, not just for regionally, just in general.'
Nicole has known Buster almost since the beginning of his career, when both were what she called 'blues kids' plying their trade at the Grand Emporium on Main Street.
'We always knew he was just insanely talented,' she said.
By the time Brody was 16, however, the national and international offers were drying up. The novelty of being a child phenom had worn off, and now he had the modifier 'former' attached to it.
Growing expectations replaced the fun, stress-free times of prepubescence.
'Coming out after being a child performer or a phenom or whatever you want to call it, even in your later years, people are looking at you to be top-notch,' he said. 'Anything short of that is reason for someone to say something negative. So there's definitely pressure there later on in life because you've got to meet the standard that everybody expects you to be at.'
His home situation didn't help.
Brody's parents had broken up, with his mother moving to Ireland and his father remarrying. Meanwhile, John Tvedten, a battalion chief with the Kansas City Fire Department who was Brody's uncle and one of his biggest supporters, died fighting a warehouse fire in 1999. (Brody's grandfather and Tvedten's father, John Sr., also a department battalion chief, had been killed in the 1981 skywalk collapse at the Hyatt Regency Hotel.)
After living briefly with little adult supervision at his stepmother's house, Buster returned to California with a friend when he was 17, finding gigs where he could. Within about a year, he was back in Kansas and graduated from high school, then attended Johnson County Community College.
That's when the lure of rock 'n' roll took over.
'I was just done with the blues personally at that point,' he said. 'I wanted to try other things.
'As any 18-year-old kid does, experiment with different things, I was experimenting with new music. Understandably, a blues festival wasn't going to hire a rock 'n' roll band. And I was OK with that. Unfortunately, during the time off, I got involved with bad people and drugs.'
For most of the next two decades, Buster lived in Lawrence, worked at Papa Keno's Pizzeria and played in a variety of bands that performed at bars around the region. He also fathered two children and twice spent a few days in jail.
In 2010, a bandmate made a documentary called 'How Did This Happen,' an account of what was then called The Brody Buster Band.
Buster's first words in the film: 'I was cursed. Look at this life I'm leading.'
Later: 'I was on 'Full House' and look where it got me.'
And, 'I must have murdered someone in my last life to deserve this ****.'
It was an honest, if not flattering, portrayal of a band of 20-something guys surviving at the very bottom of the music world. Among other things, Buster is shown doing cocaine and ranting about a barkeeper who refused to waive his beer tab.
But don't get the idea the documentary showed him at his lowest point.
'That wasn't even the worst of it,' Buster says now. 'The dark stuff happened after that.'
Before the worst of it came a brief resurrection.
In 2017, Buster developed a one-man-band act and qualified for the International Blues Challenge in Memphis, where he took first place in the harmonica category and second in the solo/duo category. That led to gigs on the West Coast and throughout the South, plus a date at the prestigious Montreal Jazz Festival.
'That got me going a little bit for a while,' he said.
He did drugs regularly at the time, but not when he was on tour.
'So I would use drugs when I was at home, and then I'd get on the road and I'd get clean. And then I'd get back home.'
When COVID hit, there was no more touring — and no more getting clean. Living in a trailer in Lawrence, he did drugs — mostly intravenous meth — and not much else. Buster's life was further battered by a bad relationship and the death of his brother Tom by suicide.
By the time the pandemic eased and gigs returned, he was in no shape to go onstage, showing up late or not at all.
'I never really gave up playing music,' he said. 'But I got to a point where no one would hire me because I was such a mess.
'At that point, you wonder about the decisions you made and choices you made. At that time in my life, too — and I think it's partially because my mom went to Ireland at such a young age — I was really looking to be loved by someone, and I wasn't finding it anywhere. I guess ultimately you've just got to learn to love yourself.'
On July 16, 2023, his girlfriend, Tania (pronounced ta-nee-a) Zagalik, issued an ultimatum: Give up drugs or say goodbye to her and his two kids.
'I told him I was willing to move overseas to get away from him,' she said.
Instead, Zagalik and her two daughters got a recovering addict for a roommate at their home in Lee's Summit. Buster went to Lawrence to retrieve his belongings and returned to Lee's Summit the next day.
'All he had was some old clothes, a beat-up guitar and his harmonica, and a cat named Huggie Bear,' she said.
He's been clean since living with Zagalik, her daughters and two cats, including a much heavier Huggie Bear.
'I didn't go to any programs or anything, I just moved away from Lawrence, Kansas,' he said.
'It's a great town. I can go there, and I play shows, no problem. I still have friends there. For me, I had to get away from people that were doing drugs. That was my way to do it, just leave that environment.'
He now regularly sees his own children, a 13-year-old son and an 11-year-old daughter, and has resumed a relationship with his mother, whom he had cut off for years. He and Zagalik flew to Ireland to visit her last year, and he's saving up to return with his kids.
Meanwhile, Buster is focused on staying clean — he's closing in on 700 days. Keeping busy helps, he says, so he's doing just that, playing almost nightly around the region with his band or as a one-man band. He also recently performed in Deadwood, South Dakota, and Oklahoma and has upcoming dates in Colorado and St. Louis.
'I'm on a push to do what I've always done, which is play music and play music for a living,' he said. 'I don't necessarily care if I ever get famous, but I want to be a working musician the rest of my life. And I'd like to be a touring musician.'
Buster has a lot of people pulling for him, including childhood buddy Danielle Nicole.
'When you hear him play harmonica, you know that he's meant to be a musician,' she said. 'So to be able to see him releasing music and feeling good about being sober and be in a good place, it just warms my heart.'
There's also the unwavering support of Zagalik, who continues to help him stay on track.
'His past is his past. I don't hold it against him,' she said.
'I have zero reason to think he'd go back. He also knows he'll always be an addict.'
I finally crawled out of the dark and back on stage
I feel the struggle but I done turnt the page.
'Can You Hear Me,' Brody Buster
Note: If you need help fighting addiction, call the free and confidential treatment referral hotline (1-800-662-HELP), or visit findtreatment.gov.
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