I was born in Northern Minnesota, and soon after adopted by a loving mother and an FBI father (no kidding) and raised in rural Virginia. My folks did the best they could. But military school seemed to all involved to be the best place for me to spend my high school years. Being in the starting five varsity basketball team and endless hours of marching with a 10 lb. rifle are some memories I'll always have -- but the most important of these was learning to play the guitar and writing my first songs. Now these were songs about love lost and found and life in the early '60's. Two other guys at school played and sang. Our trio was born, and I was in love!

I remember my first tentative steps toward trying to involve the audience... trying to let them know who we were, what this music was all about and where it came from. In fact, music was the first thing I actually remember fully understanding. It awoke me from an adolescent slumber with such volume that I had little time for anything else - I listened to everything and learned from everything - Tennessee Ernie, Limeliters, Kingston Trio, Peter, Paul and Mary, Harry Belafonte, Dylan, Beatles, Elvis, Tammy Wynette, Brenda and Peggy Lee, Patsy, Otis, Brother Ray, Howlin' Wolf, Getz and Bird. I mean, I was hooked. I still know every word and chord on Harry's first album. In order. Side one. And side two.

In '64 and '65 music was a way of life for a lot of us, as vital as eating and drinking and breathing. I soon found myself in Southern Ohio, studying painting and sculpture at Ohio University. The first day I was there, a guy, Malcolm McKinney, hears me playing the guitar and says, "hey, hold on, I'll get mine." We were together in different blues bands, rock bands and folk trios for flve or six years, in company with another fellow student, Joe (Whatsamatta You) Dolce. We went to gigs in a bread truck, playing under names like The Finite Minds, The Headstone Circus and The St. James Doorknob. I was mostly the lead singer, sometimes the drummer or the bassist whenever one band member or another didn't show up.

We found our way to Boston in June of the Summer of Love and started to pay dues to the Gods of Hunger and The Music Business. Miraculously, we survived and built a healthy following throughout New England and New York, playing our own music. We'd rehearse and write material on Malcolm's parents' farm between chores. We soon felt like the house band in every nightclub, roadhouse, roller rink and ski area in New England. We changed our name yet again, to Sugar Creek, and bang we were in the record business. We were signed to Metromedia Records, whose big act was Bobby Sherman. They even let me design the cover - I drew portraits of the band members! To make a long story short, Bobby Sherman records went out in Sugar Creek jackets, which had been printed so dark anyway that one booking agency thought we were a soul band and booked us into a tour of Black nightclubs.

We kept getting louder and louder and bluesier and bluesier. We'd play "6-40's" -- six forty-minute sets a night, and I'd get in to my hotel room late, tired from a night of being a front man, and I'd pick up my old Martin guitar, strum a few chords and think, "Yeah! Now that's what I love. " I wanted to hear bronze on rosewood, not steel on magnets and one night I finished the show and as we were packing up, I said I was going home to acoustic music. They said goodbye, and I was on my own.

I spent all that summer on the shore of a lake in Massachusetts writing songs. By autumn, I figured I was ready to rent a van, borrow a PA system and hit the road. Problem: no gigs. No problem - create the gigs. I got out my New England road map and circled each college listed. I'd drive to a college and set up in every dorm lobby and Student Center and play until Security would come and end the free concert. The crowd of students listening would boo Security and I would get in trouble, but I got a following. Soon I found myself doing the same show in front of the Allman Brothers, Poco, Rod Stewart, Loggins and Messina and Tom Rush. Actual bookings! Actual audiences! I was flying!

In 1970 someone came up with studio time, and I started recording my first album -- just me and my friends -- the way I'd always pictured it. We had a great time, but just as we were finishing up, disaster struck. A song we had completed, called "Please Find Me" was accidentally erased. I went in with a new tune, called "Sunshine," which we hastily recorded to take its place. All the players had gone home, so I played all the instruments myself, and sang the harmony. It sounded pretty good, so the next day Rich Adelman came in and overdubbed drums. Bang! A gold album and a top-five hit on my first solo release! Big black Limos! Airplanes! Red carpets, blue nights, green money! It was a blast, but I was pretty much content to stay the same, and not let the rush of success and popularity change me -- I was happy travelling around the country playing music for people -- my music -- what a dream come true!

I played about five one-nighters a week for about three-and-a-half years, totally in love with what I was doing and where it was taking me, but where was it taking me? My second album, Honky-Tonk Stardust Cowboy, was a real country record, and I was on a label that had a great reputation for rhythm and blues. It certainly didn't have a reputation for country. Again we had a great time making the record, and I was in love with my friends and the music we made and shared, but when we gave it to the label we were met with a lot of blank stares. There was confusion, there was head scratching, there were meetings, but there was little promotion, less distribution and fewer sales.

Two more albums were released before I figured out something had to change. In 1975 I moved to a small farm in Nova Scotia called Fiddlenote Farm and started to learn how to do other things besides sit on a tour bus, things like raise a family and grow a garden and breed and train horses and live close to the land. My idyllic, agrarian lifestyle lasted almost exactly nineteen months.

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