The Goodies bring their separate reggae roads together

The Goodies, known up until recently as Jus Goodie, are Justin “Goodie” Goodman and a collaborator who calls herself Zan. Between them, they’ve hung their hats in Chula Vista, Ramona, South Park, Mt. Helix, El Cajon, and a few other hoods. But it was music from an island some 2663 miles to the southeast that set them — separately — on the path to their eventual collaboration. “We had a family friend that hosted a company trip to Jamaica every Christmas,” remembers Goodman, “He told us that we could join the trip that year for just $100 round trip. There were beach balls being tossed around midflight, and when we landed, someone yelled from the back, ‘Get out your rolling papers,’ and the whole plane erupted in laughter.”

He describes Jamaica as “like being on another planet. I did not understand the culture or language at that point. At first, I felt lost, but as the days unfolded, I quickly fell in love with the vibe, the culture, the people, and of course the sweet reggae music. The other part to this story is that, less than a year before I took the trip to Jamaica, I lost my dad to a tragic accident. During this time, I was grieving deeply, and completely lost as a 14 year-old kid. Somehow, the bond I developed with Jamaica and music helped me through it.”

Zan came by her irie vibes much closer to home. “I remember my oldest brother babysitting me as a kid; he would be in his room smoking weed and playing reggae as loud as he possibly could until our parents came home. When I was old enough to walk to school on my own, he handed me a Pato Banton tape and said, ‘Listen to this on your way to school.’ Reggae is what got me through all the good times and bad times in my life from that point forward.”

The new self-titled Goodies EP rolls out after a year or so of work with Lewis Richards at Costa Mesa’s 17th Street Recording Studio. Says Goodman, “Our first single, called ‘The Maze,’ is a deep song about my struggle with depression and sometimes seemingly being stuck in an endless maze. The song was heavily influenced by Nirvana, who had had a major impact on both Zan and myself.”

The current single, “Runnin,” came from a long night’s work at the kitchen table with one guitar. It tells the story — good, bad, and unnerving — of Zan’s real life on the road. “I was completely obsessed with VWs as a teenager,” she recalls, “and I somehow talked my parents into buying me a 1973 Westfalia as my first car. My stepdad taught me how to drive stick shift, which I’m still very proud of to this day. When I finally started cruising in my bus, he said, ‘If you can drive this thing you can drive anything.’ I had big dreams of going on road trips across the country, fixing my engine myself when it broke down, traveling to play music, and being a rare girl that could run barefoot pushing the bus down a grade, jump in and pop the clutch, and get the bus moving.”

Around the same time her parents realized that they’d bought their daughter a motel on wheels, she moved out. She was 17. “I dove into heavy drug use, and lost my way for a few years. I had to decide at some point, after some really scary experiences, whether this was really the life I wanted. I found some crazy internal strength to choose life over death, and the road led me to San Francisco, which was an eighteen-hour trip because my bus kept overheating. I spent a few years in San Francisco and sang with a local reggae-calypso steel drum band. I missed San Diego so much though, and definitely the weather, so I cruised back, driving a U-Haul this time, with my bus in tow.”

While Zan was puttering her Westfalia to any coffee shop that would have her, Goodman was gigging with E. N. Young and Tribal Seeds. The two “randomly met at a bar in Oceanside called Cabo Grill, no longer open,” he remembers. “I had played a gig that night, but Zan came too late and didn’t catch the set. We ended up talking and drinking tequila until they kicked us out. The rest is history.”