In the beginning I was born in a notorious west coast town, but my family moved from there, so I never really lived there. My family settled down in the San Francisco Bay area but still moved around constantly, so I lived all over the peninsula - San Francisco to San Jose.
All of the moving I think made me creative and gave me a different view of life at an early age. I was always the new kid in school (every year I went to a different school) and this made me a loner and forced me to live in my mind. As I got older my parents fell in love with Phoenix, Arizona. So off we went to Phoenix.
My music career started at a young age. I played drums in grade school and then I actually got formal music training playing the accordion. Then I taught myself guitar. You could say I started my musical endeavors as a ghost writer and teenage street musician playing in several parks (Golden Gate. etc…) Then I moved on to playing street corners in the Bay Area, and on the well-known Haight St. Then I stepped up to playing around the colleges and coffee houses (both Berkeley and Phoenix). There is another whole story here about hanging out with Marty Balin (Jefferson Airplane), Phil Lesh and Jerry Garcia (Grateful Dead) and assorted other musicians and bands, but that is for another story time.
I was introduced to the local Phoenix folk music scene while I was attending Phoenix College. I met a professor named Herbert Shelling who was starting a class in American Folk music, and he asked me if I would get involved in it. He introduced me to Joe Bethencourt, and I started to play at Funny Fellows and several other coffee houses. At the College I also met Blonde Bruce Thorpe who taught me open E tuning and bottleneck slide. Then I met Buffalo Rick Galeener who showed me some new fingerpicking styles and introduced me to the music of John Prine and Tom Paxton.
The local gigs started in Phoenix when my then hippie girlfriend talked me into going out to Tempe Arizona to a little club called the Library Bar and check out this guy Hans Olson who was doing a solo act. She said he reminded her of me. So, I went out to hear Hans play and he was incredible. Hans let me sit in at the Library Bar for a while and then we even started to record a few songs at his apartment on 5th Street in Tempe. After playing a while at the Library Bar I moved on to other bars around the Phoenix metro area. I had grown out of the coffee house venue and was missing San Francisco. So, after a few months playing in places like Perry’s bar, Panini’s Warehouse, the Blue Goat Pub, No Name Saloon, Grand Central Station, Uncle Albert’s, Serendipity’s, Snoopy’s, etc… I moved back up to San Francisco. Things had changed while I was in Phoenix, and I found myself moving to Sonoma County north of San Francisco. I found a home in Cotati and started playing at a club called The Inn of the Beginning. This was a great club for me. Many well-known musicians popped in and jammed, so I found myself playing with old friends from San Francisco. Sonoma County was a great place in the early 1970’s. I was writing music by the truck load. I found myself playing a steady gig at a little place called the Trolley Stop Inn in Freestone. But after they closed down, I decided to move back to Phoenix.
Back in Phoenix I looked up Hans and fell back in to playing the local bars. But times had changed, and Disco was here. I found myself back in the coffee house venue and taking on day jobs to pay the rent. At this point the opportunity came up for me to do an album, so I contacted Hans and asked him if he would join me in the studio. He was finishing up some recording on his first album too, ``Western Winds’’, and he said okay so we went into the studio and recorded my first album ``Stuck in Phoenix’’. This gave me a boost playing in Phoenix, but it was short lived. I found myself on the road playing as a warmup act and with several bands in northern Arizona, Texas, Colorado and then I ended up in Southern California.
It wasn’t time for me to be in Southern California, so I went back to Phoenix. My first album had sold out, so I was being considered for a second album. I had a ton of material for the second album from my time in Cotati, but I was having trouble putting all the songs together into a single theme for this album until I met the Daughter of the Moon, and everything fell into place. After this album was done, I felt it was time to be in southern California. This leads to the next chapter of my life in the mid 1970’s.