Johnny Dread

Guardiola was born in Philadelphia but his family comes from Cuban origin. His father Felix Guardiola, a known basketball player in Cuba, and his mother left Cuba in 1958 [1] to look for a better life in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Felix delivered papers, milk and sold insurance to put food on their table. The Republican couple worked hard to raise eight children. Four boys and four girls, Juan Carlos being the youngest of the boys.

The basketball legacy carried on in the Guardiola household, and Juan Carlos was not the exception. He grew up in the pews at St. Brendan Catholic Church and the basketball courts of the Big Five Club and Christopher Columbus High. Eventually, his talent won him a scholarship at Florida International University. It was during this period that his love of music came to light and a girlfriend gave him some drum shells as a present. By then he knew he wanted to do music. He sold the books he had purchased for school recently and purchased the missing parts for the drumset, which he then painted red, gold and green. He went over to his FIU coach and confided he would leave school definitely, to dedicate his life to music.

He still had to break the news to his household, and it just happened that his father walked in on him painting and fixing up his drums. Although not in fully agreement, his father accepted his dropping out of school on the condition that he got a job.

Armed with a new set of drums, Guardiola practiced every day, trying to quickly develop proficiency on the drums, however, he got his first opportunity sooned than he expected. He received a call from his girlfriend from a payphone that some people she had met needed a drummer, a reggae drummer. Soon enough they picked him up and he was on his way to pick his future bandmates. This rehearsal ended up being at the house of Cedella Booker, mother of Bob Marley with some members of the Marley family, specifically Anthony Booker on bass, who was the younger brother to Bob Marley. The group of young men created a band which was called Copacetic.

Johnny Dread first rose to musical fame in 1987 with the band Copacetic, where he played with Anthony Booker, Bob Marley's youngest brother. The group had some success with the 1990 album Ghetto Rock, which reached number seven on Billboard charts's top reggae album chart[2]

Shortly after, Johnny Dread parts ways with the band and flies to Kingston, Jamaica where he records his first solo album, "Scarecrow" (1997) with Wilburn "Squidly" Cole, drummer for Ziggy Marley and long time friend. The album's title track, "Scarecrow", was the first song he wrote and recorded. "I wrote the song in light of all the challenges I was facing at the time," states Johnny Dread, "Nobody thought I would ever succeed."[3] After the release of his second album, "Vision: The Book of Revelations - Chapter 1" (1999), Johnny Dread went on promotional tours throughout the US, France, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, and Holland. In 2001, he was the opening artist for the France Tour of Israel Vibration which included 50 shows from Paris to Nice with over 25,000 spectators. The tour included Costa Rica as one of the show dates, and a trip that would have a profound influence on his life as he would visit on a regular basis in the following years. It's between these visits to Costa Rica, Peru and Venezuela that he records "Magnificent People: The Book of Revelations - Chapter 2" (2003).

After a long recording period, he recorded Full Circle (2016) at HeddRockk Studios, produced by Stephen Lashley y Dave Simmons. "The song mas written in the tone of Instant Karma by John Lennon", Johnny Dread commented of the title track, "I wanted to express how "what is done in darkness must come to light", so the song is an expression of how we can ges trapped in the vicious Circle of Life".[4]

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