Jesse Michael-Geronimo Valencia is an American musician, author, and actor. He founded the music group Gorky and authored a nonfiction book called Keep Music Evil: The Brian Jonestown Massacre Story.
Biography
Valencia's family moved to Show Low, Arizona when he was 15 years old. He graduated from Show Low High School. Valencia attended Northern Arizona University where he got his BS in Humanities in 2011. He got two master's degrees there, one in English - Creative Writing in 2014, and one in English - Literature in 2015. He has also served in the military police for the Army.
Music career
Valencia founded the indie rock band Gorky in Show Low, Arizona in 2001. In 2002, Ben Holladay joined on drums and has played in the band ever since. The band have self-released three studio albums, including The Gork...And How To Get It!, More Electric Music and Mathemagician. The third album was recorded during Valencia's first semester at the David Lynch Graduate School of Cinematic Arts after learning the Transcendental Meditation technique, and released in April 2019 to coincide with the release of his debut nonfiction book, Keep Music Evil: The Brian Jonestown Massacre Story. Also in April, Gorky embarked on a short tour in support of Mathemagician, where Valencia would host author events at local bookstores and read from "Keep Music Evil."
Author
In 2019, Valencia published the book Keep Music Evil: The BrianJonestown Massacre Story, a narrative that explores the history of The Brian Jonestown Massacre band. Tony Creek of RockShot magazine wrote the book "Presented as a personal narrative that evokes the New Journalism of Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson, Keep Music Evil sets the record straight once and for all, providing close insights into the band’s origins in early 1990s San Francisco, their record-making process, and the full, unexpurgated tale of Dig! and its impact. Featuring rare, candid photographs of the band from throughout their career, this is the first comprehensive study of one of rock’n’roll’s most enduring sagas." The book includes Valencia's work from interviewing over 125 people connected to the band over ten years. It was included in a Vogue magazine article that listed what their editors were reading that summer.
Acting
Valencia made his on-screen acting debut opposite Tom Sizemore in the 2016 independent crime drama Durant's Never Closes, and later appeared in the art horror Bride of Violence and post-apocalyptic short filmThe Mad Man Of Miami. In 2019, he enrolled in the David Lynch Graduate School of Cinematic Arts for their screenwriting program at the Maharishi University of Management.
Advocacy
In 2017, Valencia made a proposal to create a new county in Arizona called Sitgreaves County. Sitgreaves "would remove the districts representing reservations in Navajo and Apache counties and combine the districts in both that represent taxpayers." The project would be joined by Arizona State RepresentativeWalter Blackman. In March 2019, Valencia proposed legislation to create the county in the form of the "Northeastern Arizona Development Act" to the Arizona House of Representatives' State and International Affairs Committee.
