Like anyone who met Mark Freeland can tell you, you’ll never forget that first time.

In 1987, I was barely a teenager but decidely a fledgling punk rocker. My sister Amy took me out to my first “club” show. It was a Halloween gig at a smallish room inside the old Connecticut Street Armory. The bands on the bill were the Moment and Electroman, and it turned out to be one of those shows that had a profound effect on me.

I was bobbing my head as I immediately “got” the jangley, Brit-influenced Moment because bands like the Cure, the Smiths and Echo and the Bunnymen were already beginning to rule my young world. Electroman, however, was something else entirely.

It was like the stuff I’d only seen conjured in the wee, not for primetime hours of MTV, or perhaps read about in magazines and heard about from friend’s older brothers. It was my first glimpse into the underground or—more succinctly—the underbelly of rock.

Here was this madman leading a band of nihilistic synths, screeching guitars and pounding drums through a dystopia of punk-powered funk and dark, experimental rock. This guy—who would go from a straight-ahead song of verse/chorus/verse and break into a five-minute, stream-of-consciousness rant—seemed like he was part preacher, part psych-center escapee. And a complete rock star. This guy was, of course, Mark Freeland.

My sister introduced us after the show and my little muffinhead was more than a little intimidated. I had just seen this guy act like a maniac having a nervous breakdown on stage. I waited for him to cut his stomach open with shards of glass and smear peanut butter on himself. When he spoke to me he was completely polite, friendly and gracious, but still a little out of it and still conveying a sense of danger in the not-so-far-off distance.

That is the essence of Mark Freeland. He was a rock star to the bone. In an age when young wannabes primp and posture in an attempt to live out pathetic stereotypes and cut-along-the-dotted-line images, Freeland really was rock and roll. He was an incandescent character, a free, unfettered soul whose every word and action exuded the creative spirit. And he always looked cool doing it. Mark Freeland never had to try to “be” a rock star, he simply was one.

You could take up an entire issue of this paper cataloging the enormous list of Freeland’s bands and musical endeavors. The glam-influenced prog rock of his earliest Kenmore West band, Pegasus, the searing punk of the Fems, the groove and doom of the Funk Monsters and the long-standing experimental rock powerhouse Electroman are just a few them.

Freeland’s greatest musical accomplishment might have been his ability to embrace and create so many disparate strains of rock music and forever challenge his own sensibilities and boundaries, as well as those of the audience. Glam, prog, punk, jazz rock, folk, electronic, hip-hop, sampledelic, metal, mutant funk and beyond: he did it all. Freeland encompassed Syd’s lunacy, Iggy’s bravado, Lydon’s biting charisma, Zappa’s delight for the gonzo, George Clinton’s gift for groove and the chameleon quality, theatricality and impeccable taste of probably his greatest hero, David Bowie.

Stamping Freeland as “rock star” sells him short. Beyond music he was a tireless artist in many media. He fell in love with both music and visual art at an early age, and the two things forever seemed intertwined in his outlandish stage costumes and genius record sleeves. Yet his visual art stood on its own.

His paintings often offered a pixie-like punker (who was without a doubt the artist himself) stumbling through life’s joys, travails, big questions and inanities with profound insight and belly-laugh humor. Everything was a canvas, be it a highway overpass, a two-by-four, the wall of a liquor store or the back of denim jacket. His work was good enough for the high art set when featured at Albright-Knox in conjunction with Rockin’ at the Knox, but it was also for every person that saw the spray-painted graffiti tag “RIP Jimbo” that Freeland Kryloned across North Buffalo and the West Side in honor of his late brother.

Freeland was a sort of a walking piece of performance art—as anyone who saw the Indian in the headdress and pajamas shuffling along on a sunny afternoon can attest—a constant, living work in progress turning anything into something well worth taking a second glance at.

His greatest and most seen piece of performance art, however, was likely his television appearance, in which—alongside fellow Fem Bob Weider—he went to TV court over an invented grievance on the syndicated show Judge Joe Brown.

The Mark Freeland I got to know a decade plus after that initial meeting had mellowed—lived through a fire that almost killed him and quit drinking—but he was still a real character. As was apparent in his paintings, he also had a gift for telling stories. I was among the many he regaled with tales of the history of the local rock scene from the 1970s on, his antics with Iggy Pop or the New York Dolls and the time when Peter Gabriel made him his personal guest for a show. I always wondered if he was embellishing. He never was. He never had to. Rock stars knew another rock star when they saw one.

When Simple Minds were at their height in the 1980s and on a massive stadium tour of Europe, they used Electroman’s epochal “The Vegetarian Song” as their intro music. Psychedelic Furs frontman Richard Butler once inquired to me hopefully, “Will Ween be coming to the show tonight?” referring to Freeland by one of his famed pseudonyms.

Finally, I was there a couple years ago when rock guitar virtuoso Robert Fripp decided to put on one of his infamous fussy English moods. He refused to meet lifelong King Crimson fan Freeland, who was bearings gifts of a personalized painting and a copy of his book, Every Night Is Different. Fripp recanted and regretted his decision within days, later sending a personal note to Freeland and blogging about how great the book was and how he would be hanging the painting in his office.

Perhaps Freeland’s last great bit of art was his final exit. He fooled many of us. Though he’d been battling throat cancer for a year, few really knew about it. When treatment took his voice, he insisted he had laryngitis. He didn’t want sympathy or to have people treat him differently. He just wanted to be who he always was and enjoy life as best he could with his longtime companion, Carla.

Now that he is gone, it’s clear that there’s something big missing from the zest and charm of the Queen City. Mark Freeland was the most beautiful freak to ever step foot on Elmwood Avenue. Don’t wait for another because there won’t be one.