I grew up a child of the 60’s and for that I feel lucky. College wasn’t for me, so I dropped out and went to work for a construction company. Working a Jack hammer, digging footers, mixing concrete, carrying block. I was now a blue-collar worker and would be, for the rest of my life. After a while, I went from masonry to driving nails on a framing crew with a Band of Brothers back from Vietnam. Soon after my family left for an overseas assignment and I found myself on my own. At 19 and now out of college, only a high lottery number kept me from carrying a gun. My luck, yet a burden I carry. Life in the 60’s was all they said it was and more. As was destined Civil Rights had finally come to a head. Riots and Protests, Peace, War, Love, Drugs and Music. A more iconic, epochal time was unfolding before our eyes. We lost Martin Luther and Bobby to a bullet, Hendrix, Joplin and Morrison to the times and countless other good men and women, some of them my friends to a war Like all wars, should have never been. The times in all their fury and innocence went on and after some years I started my own Construction Company and spent the next 35 years running framing crews, framing homes.
Yet early on, sitting in the stairwell strumming my dad’s old Martin, to playing the bars and honky-tonks, on the beaches of Florida, summers in Alaska, it’s always been my music and in later years, my writing (poetry) that has defined me, who I am, and where I’ve been. It’s my peace, harmony and my life. A place where I can escape to find my voice, other voices, my stories and theirs.
My songs are like my kids to me. I rarely, sit down intentionally to write a song; they go thru me, at their discretion, seldom do I feel like part of the process. Other than minor changes most of my original music is finished in hours. With few exceptions my melodies always come first with the music driving the lyrics and stories along. It is my hope that my songs go on after I’m gone. To have the good fortune to leave a piece of me behind, in my music, for others to listen to, play or ponder, exceeds any wonder I could imagine.
MUSICIAN/AUTHOR
