Jaco went to my
high school and was in the
school band. Interestingly enough, our current band teacher was in band with Jaco during his high school years. The story goes that Jaco would be introduced to freshmen and other rookies with a simple "This is Jaco, he does everything". Jaco was a bit proud of himself, he liked to say stuff along the lines of "I'm John Francis Pastorious III, and I'm the greatest bass player in the world."
The story of Jaco's death, as it was relayed to us sometime in the middle of my freshman year (2000-2001), was something like this: Carlos
Santana gave Jaco an open invite to come onstage with them and jam any time he wanted to. The
bouncer in question saw Jaco (who was, by this time, not in the best of conditions owing to his excesses and drug use as detailed in
numberoneson's write up) assumed that this was just some ordinary
junky trying to get close to Carlos, not knowing that this junky was a
musical genius. So Jaco got the shit beat out of him, went to the hospital, and
gave up the ghost after lingering in a coma.
Our band teacher's drives within the faculty to get Jaco a plaque of some sort has been stonewalled; they seem to think that Jaco isn't an "appropriate role model" due to the end of his life, ignoring the music he created when he wasn't self-destructing. So
Brent Jett, an
astronaut who graduated from this same school, gets the street in front of the school named after him, and Jaco gets (as of the time of this writeup) nothing.