Longtime drummer of Modest Mouse, Jeremiah Green, has been diagnosed with stage four cancer.
"Please send healing vibes for my son, Jeremiah Green, who is battling stage 4 cancer," Green's mother, Carol Namatame, wrote on Facebook. "He’s is so strong and so brave and hanging in there!"
Radio DJ and friend Marco Collins made another Facebook post and revealed that the Teeth Like God's Shoeshine drummer is currently undergoing chemotherapy treatments. "Just found out my friend Jeremiah Green (Modest Mouse) has pulled off the band’s tour because he is currently undergoing chemo treatments to battle Stage 4 Cancer."
Collins added, "Despite having a stage 4 diagnosis, his prognosis is good! Also his oncologist is a big MM fan (so he’s got that in his corner!) Sending him nothing but love & healing energy! Get well buddy. We’re all pulling for you!"
Due to his diagnosis, Green didn't play at a run of Modest Mouse shows that celebrated the 25th anniversary of their seminal album, The Lonesome Crowded West.
In 1993, Green co-founded the band alongside vocalist and lyricist Isaac Brock and bassist Eric Judy and has experienced the longest time in Modest Mouse besides Brock. Green briefly departed the band between 2003 and 2004 and therefore didn't play on their 2004 album, Good News For People Who Love Bad News.
In a 2015 interview with The Music promoting the band's appearance at Bluesfest and accompanying sideshows, Brock offered: "But truly and non-butt-lickingly, I fucking love playing Australia. I like Australia – I’ve only hung out on the crust, but the crust is nice! I’m not sure about what goes on 30 miles inland at all – I’m guessing iron mining and a couple of kangaroos – but it’s great there.
"One of the first times we ever went there I took a week or so afterwards to up to the Great Barrier Reef and around that area, and I was in the ocean and there was no one fucking around, no one on the beach for miles in each direction, and I’m flailing around in there by myself, just going, ‘This is amazing! What’s wrong with these people? Do they not know this exists?’ But the sign that I’d kinda glanced at when I walked down to the shore apparently warned of a crazy box jellyfish eruption right around then and you were not supposed to be in the water.
He added, "It was the only time in my life – and might be the last time in my life, unless some wonderful very proactive plague hits the planet – when I get to be on a badass beach without a whole bunch of other people. More of that please. Bring on the plague that affects nothing involving me!"