Songs in the key of Big C
Guitarist Jon Henderson is supposed to be dead a few times over. He's proof that even cancer can't stop rock 'n' roll.
By Vince Darcangelo (editorial@boulderweekly.com)

There's a saying that it's not how many times you get knocked down that counts—it's how many times you get back up. As a seven-year cancer survivor, local musician Jon Henderson has taken the disease's best shots over the years and picked himself up off the mat each time. Since being diagnosed with stage IV metastatic colorectal cancer in 1999, he's undergone numerous surgeries, survived the anguish of chemotherapy and endured a regiment of experimental drugs that has at times severely impeded his ability to play guitar.

But nothing could have prepared him for the events of this past summer.

In June, Jon underwent surgery to remove 10 tumors from his lungs, making him cancer free for the first time in seven years. Jon knew that the surgery would be rough. "What we didn't anticipate was Adult Respiratory Distress Syndrome [ARDS]," he says.

ARDS is a life-threatening lung dysfunction that afflicts roughly 150,000 Americans each year and claims 40 percent of its victims' lives. Jon's case was so severe that he had to be put on a respirator. The trouble was that his body kept fighting the respirator, attempting to breathe on its own, and in order to treat the ARDS doctors had to induce unconsciousness. Here, Jon's journey from cancer to recovery took an unexpected turn.

"The last thing I remember is I was hyperventilating," Jon says. "I couldn't catch my breath, even with the oxygen mask."

He would spend the next 40-plus days in a coma, entrenched in the fight of his life.

This Saturday, Dec. 9, Jon's band, the Henderson Brothers (which also includes his brother David), returns to the stage at Conor O'Neill's for the third annual Beating Cancer Benefit, a fundraiser for the Rocky Mountain Cancer Centers Foundation (RMCCF). Jon will be doing triple duty, playing with the Henderson Brothers, his longtime band SPYZ and the Delta Blues Project. The daylong event, which begins at noon and runs until closing, features some of Boulder's finest musical talent, including Danny Shafer, The Indulgers, Mumbouli, Slopeside and Sleazanardo's Planet Earth (formerly the Analog Quartet).

Most of all, it will feature one grateful guitarist.

"Who knew seven and a half years ago that I would be back doing my old thing? It's nice to come full circle and be doing something that I've always loved doing," Jon says. "Having cancer is terrible. The treatment is awful, and it's a lot of pressure on your family. But good things come out of bad. One of the biggest positives is being able to play music again."

Indestructible

In 1999, after having had 75 growths removed from his body, Jon Henderson believed himself to be cancer free. After all, he'd initially been diagnosed with stage II cancer, which has a 90 percent cure rate, and his surgeries had all been successful. Even after a CT scan revealed five spots in his lungs, Jon remained optimistic.

"I had no idea what I was getting myself into," he says. "I was 40 years old and at the most productive point in my life. OK, I've got cancer. Let's get rid of it."

But the next meeting with his doctor would change his life forever.

"They told me, 'Mr. Henderson, you've got to get your affairs in order,'" he says. "I've never been speechless in my life. I was an absolute basket case."

Doctors were able to remove the five tumors, but then came a steady dose of chemotherapy drugs. The first medication, Oxaliplatin, sent the cancer into remission, but caused neuropathy, which numbed Jon's extremities. He was unable to feel a guitar pick resting between his fingers, so for live gigs he'd attach the pick to his fingers with double-sided tape to make sure he didn't drop it.

"I thought that was kind of mean," he says with a smile. "Thanks for giving me the drug that's going to save my life, but kills my favorite hobby in the world."

Between periods of remission, Jon would try various other medications, like CPT-11 and Herbatux. The latter drug forced Jon into a second puberty, giving him acne-like breakouts and curling his straight hair. Most significantly, Herbatux dried his skin to the point that the skin of his fingers split.

"Again, we have a drug that works great but wants to wreak havoc on my fingers," he says.

In order to play a six-string Jon now needed to wrap his fingers with Band-Aids, which made fretwork a bit awkward and forced him to learn how to play around the inconvenience. But, he says, "If there's a will, there's a way to do it. The alternative is I stop playing guitar. I don't think so."

It required an effort that was equal parts courage and creativity, but through dogged perseverance, Jon had been able to continue playing the guitar. More importantly, he had managed to stay alive well beyond the nine months he had been expected to live in 1999. So in 2004, approaching the fifth anniversary of his diagnosis, Jon decided to throw a party. He had cause to celebrate; he'd been given a less than 5 percent chance of living that long.

"For whatever reason I've been very good at fighting cancer," Jon says. "But to beat that statistic, to get to that five-year mark, I just wanted to make sure that all the doctors out there knew that I made it five years. Take that."

So he got some friends together and organized a week's worth of concerts at Conor O'Neill's, as well as a month-long charity drive. With that, the Beating Cancer Benefit was born.

Beyond cancer

The Beating Cancer Benefit has since become an annual event at Conor O'Neill's. The proceeds go to the RMCCF, which provides emergency financial assistance for cancer patients and their families. This includes help with everything from medicine and transportation to food, rent and paying utility bills. The first Beating Cancer Benefit raised a couple thousand dollars, and the second one, in the summer of 2005, raised almost $5,000.

Susan Ash-Lee, a social worker at the Rocky Mountain Cancer Center (RMCC), says the importance of the event transcends the amount of money that's raised.

"The benefit that Jon is doing for the foundation is an incredibly inspiring and hopeful event," she says. "For families and patients that are either new to treatment or have just completed treatment, it's definitely an event where you'll feel inspired to keep moving beyond cancer and into life. I think that's the power of Jon's music and this benefit."

For his brother David, Jon's being able to perform again shows other cancer patients and their loved ones another side to the cancer experience.

"We're really trying to share our positive experiences with other people, to give them a success story, because there [are] not a lot of success stories [with cancer]," he says. "It's a horrible disease. You never win the war. You just continue to win battles and keep moving forward, but the threat of it coming back is always there. So this is a way to hopefully be some kind of a light in someone's life who's on the bad side of the battle and try to help them out. I think Jon getting up on stage and playing music after all he's been through is a testament to that."

That impact carries over to other musicians. Danny Shafer, a longtime friend of Jon's and a regular performer at Conor O'Neill's, is doing a gig in Summit County on Saturday, yet is driving two hours to come to Boulder and play a set at the Beating Cancer Benefit.

"For me, it's about celebrating that Jon is doing well and just enjoying that we can all get together and see each other through," he says. "I'm psyched to be there."

Says Cody Culver, guitarist and vocalist of Slopeside, "Jon's a miracle to be walking right now, let alone singing. For him to be alive and giving back to other people, there's no words to describe him."

Culver's life has also been touched by cancer. When he was 2 years old, he was diagnosed with kidney cancer. He went through chemo and radiation treatment in Denver and finally, at the age of 7, the cancer went into remission. Today, the 22-year-old Culver works at the RMCC as a Lab Medical Assistant.

"I wanted to give back a little bit," he says. "A new patient comes in, and they're scared shitless. They have no idea what's going on. People just flip out, and I try to talk to them. I've gone through it, and you see me standing here. You can get through it, too."

But for all the success stories on hand at the benefit, the Henderson Brothers recently received a grim reminder of the deadliness of the disease. On Nov. 30, the group's bass player, Chris Filben, lost a cousin who had battled cancer for 13 years.

"We're going to recognize him at the benefit, at least dedicate a song to him," Jon says. "Sometimes the reality of cancer is you might lose the fight, but it's about the fight you put up. Thirteen years battling cancer? That's a hell of a fight. That's a hell of a man. We certainly will remember him as someone who beat cancer for 13 years and think positively about that and hope that he's in a better place and not feeling the pain that I'm sure he went through the last month of his life."

Waking life

The minutes turned to hours, days to weeks, inside Denver's Presbyterian/St. Luke's ICU ward. The calendar flipped from June to July—40 days had passed—and Jon Henderson still hadn't woken up. He'd had a tracheotomy. Thirteen different kinds of drugs, including ones that induced amnesia, snaked into his body via IVs. A 24-hour vigil had formed at his bedside, led by David and one of Jon's closest friends. Family from all across the country flew into Colorado to be with him... just in case.

Then on July 27, Jon woke up.

"I don't recall ever waking up and saying, 'What happened to June?'" he says with a laugh. "I recall having a moment of waking up and being acutely aware that something had gone very wrong and that I was not in good shape."

Jon was alive, but he was facing a long road to recovery. His body had atrophied from a month and a half of inactivity. His muscles were so weak that he required two weeks of physical therapy before he was able to take his first steps—and then only with the assistance of a walker. He was moved from ICU to a specialty hospital for rehab.

The process didn't stop when Jon was released from the hospital. He still relies on an oxygen tank when doing any activity that involves exertion, and because of the trauma his lungs endured, it could take up to a year for them to recover fully. There's a chance Jon could need the oxygen tank the rest of his life, but so far he is making strides and functioning without it on occasion.

"He was just over for dinner the other night, and the oxygen came off," says David. "He's a walking miracle. That's my brother."

For Jon, the healing process has required a whole lot of patience.

"There's really not anything you can do to accelerate the time table. You've just got to sit back and be patient," he says. "Everything's a small victory. Being able to go to the supermarket and shop, just doing that kind of thing. Being able to drive again. Being able to go see a concert."

And being able to perform in one.

In November, the Henderson Brothers took the stage for the first time since May. Jon would need his oxygen tank in order to perform, and he was exhausted just from setting up his equipment before the gig.

"We didn't know if Jon had enough energy to make it through an entire night," says David. But for Jon, once he plugged in and started playing, adrenaline took over and carried him through the set.

"It was just a very nice night," he says. "To play with my older brother and the guys again was just great."

Adds David, "That gig was Jon's statement to the world that, 'Hey, I beat it again, and I came back. Here I am. Come get me again.'"

The Big C

At times throughout his recovery, Jon Henderson has survived at the cost of his true passion: music. "With the hard-ass chemo, there is no music," he says. "You're sitting on the couch forcing yourself to eat."

Ironically, it was the sickness that first renewed his love of music. Jon had spent his 20s trying to make it big in L.A., but when he'd turned 30 he'd given up that dream and moved to Atlanta to "pursue a career." At the time of his diagnosis he'd given up playing for nearly a decade.

"It wasn't until I got sick that I had the thought or the opportunity to play again. I found out that I loved it just as much as I used to," Jon says. "Even with all the neuropathy and cuts, it didn't matter. I enjoy playing guitar. I enjoy interacting with other musicians. I'm just very lucky that I got a second chance to do that."

This second time around his objective isn't a platinum-selling record or a hit song, it's a DVD/CD project called Big C for people newly diagnosed with cancer. Whereas other cancer-related media, such as inspirational memoirs, tend to focus on the long view, the Big C is designed for patients who've just been diagnosed.

"I've read all of Lance Armstrong's books and the books of a lot of great people and their stories. But when I first got cancer, my first thought wasn't to go read a 300-page book by someone who has a different kind of cancer than I do," he says. "It's something that someone can sit down with for an hour and hear from 15-20 people who've walked the walk and talked the talk and tell you what you're going to get into."

The hour-long documentary will feature commentary from cancer patients and professionals sharing first-hand experience and offering advice. The film contains 16 chapters, each focusing on a different aspect of the experience, such as dealing with the immediate fear, dispelling cancer myths, discussing the impact cancer will have on close relationships, and facing mortality. Each chapter will feature a corresponding song written by Jon and performed by his band SPYZ. The DVD/CD will be given free to cancer patients through the RMCC, which is producing Big C, and proceeds from online sales will benefit the RMCCF.

"I see a lot of educational materials for people who are newly diagnosed or wherever they are in the spectrum of cancer, and I've never seen one that has married both the information with music," says Ash-Lee. "I think it's going to be a very clever tool for people that want to see how the healing arts play a part in their journey and in their healing process. It's going to be an incredible tool for people who access the world through music."

The music recording for the project began two years ago at Boulder's Immersive Studios, and Jon is currently finishing up the mixing at his home studio. Filming will begin early next year, and Jon hopes to have the entire project finished by the summer of '07. He describes the film as a cross between Let It Be and Scared Straight for cancer patients.

"I'm going to try to make it into a bit of an arty film," Jon says.

Big C opens with a song called "Bombs Away," an appropriate expression to describe the moment the doctor first delivers the news.

"That doctor comes into the room, and all the sudden he's not smiling anymore," Jon says. "The conversation becomes very terse. There's not a good feeling in the room. Then he drops a bomb... When you first hear those words, you're just absolutely floored."

For Jon, the completion of Big C won't be the ending; it will be just another step in the process of recovery that has been going on for seven and a half years. As he points out in "Bombs Away," the cancer experience is not just one bomb, but a series of life-altering explosions, from diagnosis to surgery to treatment and beyond. And he knows that, though cancer free at the moment, his fight is far from over.

"When you've been in the game as long as I have, you become realistic about what's going on," Jon says. "Right now I'm cancer free. Am I thrilled about this? Yes. But I know in my heart of hearts that when you have a metastatic disease it's at the cellular level. I'm not hoping it comes back. I hope we got rid of it. But I know that in three months, six months, a year from now, I can be back in that room and [the doctor] walks in, and he doesn't have a smile on his face."

In the blood

Throughout his 48 years, Jon Henderson has always been involved with the entertainment industry in some capacity. In the '80s he and his band SPYZ tried to make it in the L.A. music scene, signing deals with Capitol and Polygram that ultimately fell through. ("To this day I don't know what happened," he explains with a shrug.) Jon also worked in the television industry as a writer and producer before handling marketing and publicity for FOX Television in Atlanta in the '90s.

Show business is obviously in Jon's blood, but it might also be in his genes. His mother was a dancer on American Bandstand and his father ran a number of broadcasting companies when Jon was growing up. Jon fondly recalls his father making it into an episode of 60 Minutes in which he's going toe-to-toe with another industry exec. In addition to being an excellent negotiator, "he was very principled about his broadcasting values," Jon says.

His father died in his arms when Jon was 30. Jon performed CPR, but was unable to save his father's life. This past year it was another Henderson brother called upon to help an ailing family member. When Jon was recovering from his coma, his brother David was his lifeline.

"He has been with me every step of the way and has done all the heavy lifting," Jon says. "I can't thank him enough for all he did."

Another avenue of support has been what Jon calls the "Cancer Club," the fraternity of patients and loved ones who've been bonded by the disease. He recalls an elderly couple that he'd see at the RMCC each week. Then one week the wife wasn't there. She had passed away, but still her husband was at the center, talking with clients and staff and showing pictures of his wife from before she was sick.

"He wanted to show [the pictures] to everyone there at the RMCC because he wanted them to see his wife the way she was in perfect health," Jon says. "He came over and sat next to me and told me the whole story. For the next hour he was giving me a pep talk: 'Don't you quit, Jon. You can beat this shit.' These are the people. They get the snot kicked out of them, and they still want to come back and root you on. There's very much a fraternity."

"There's no way you fight this disease by yourself," adds David. "I think the key is you need a real strong family and friends, a support group that gets you to fight through this."

Jon feels that he's got another support system pulling for him as well—one with connections in high places: his father, the ace negotiator.

"I think he's probably up there looking down at all this stuff," Jon says. "And any time his honor up there wants to bring me home, he's got a very good negotiator up there saying, 'Hey, Jon's a good kid. Leave him alone.' I do believe he's watching out for me."

Beating Cancer Benefit

The Third Annual Beating Cancer Benefit featuring the Henderson Brothers, Mumbouli, SPYZ, The Indulgers, Sleazanardo's Planet Earth, Delta Blues Project, Danny Shafer and Slopeside, benefiting the Rocky Mountain Cancer Centers Foundation, begins at 12 p.m., Saturday, Dec. 9, at Conor O'Neill's, 1922 13th St., Boulder, 303-449-1922.

Conor O'Neill's will donate 10 percent of all sales (food and beverage) to the RMCCF, and Guinness is providing prizes for a raffle with all proceeds going to the RMCCF.

For more information on the Rocky Mountain Cancer Center and the RMCCF, visit www.coloradocancercenters.com, or you can make a donation by mail to RMCC Foundation, 1683 Red Poppy Dr., Suite 100, Brighton, Co. 80601.

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