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EARLY TIMES: 1962-1967
I was born in 1953, though I can't remember much about it.
I can, however, remember the sounds of Elvis, Patsy Cline, Johnny Cash and the Everly Brothers when they were new and fresh. In those early years, the radio was full of "All Shook up", "I Fall to Pieces" and "Bird Dog" to name a few. Three albums that I remember listening to in the years before the Beatles were Elvis' Golden Records, Jimmy Rogers Golden Hits and Pat Boone's Greatest Hits. Not sure what that does for me among the hip, but there you have it.
My earliest musical memories are of playing "Name that tune" with my Grandmother at Leslie's Tavern in Midwest City, Oklahoma, and singing along to Elvis' "All Shook Up" while sitting on my grandfather's lap, steering his car up the "Scroungy Road" that ran between their house and Leslie's. There was a Wurlitzer juke Box in the corner of Leslie's with Elvis, Everly Brothers, Ernie Ford singing 16 Tons, and lots more.
My Dad had a collection of albums that included the ink Spots, Johnny Horton, Jackie Gleason's Orchestra, Marty Robbins, Dean Martin, the Kingston Trio and the Tijuana Brass as well as the stuff mentioned above. And, though my family was not at all musical, music seemed to be all around me.
I began performing at the age of 10 when my bohemian pal Tom Fleming talked me into putting on a Beatle wig and lip-synching with toy guitars to "I Saw Her Standing There" in front of our 5th grade class. A year later, no longer lip-syncing, we took first place at the Annual O'Fallon Jaycees Christmas Talent Show at the high school.
There were five of us then, billing ourselves as "The Krypt Kickers," not realizing that outright plagiarism of the name of Bobby "Boris" Pickett's band was at best not Kosher. We had his "Monster Mash" album and had learned most of the songs. It was an odd lineup. Four singers and our friend Kas on snare drum. We did "A Monster's Holiday" and a parody of the song "Patches" ("Boris") which I had written the lyrics to but was too chicken to sing. Steve Green covered for me there. But... That was my first songwriting credit.
Pirated name or no, that big win bankrolled us into a series of gigs around the O'Fallon-Belleville-Fairview Heights circut (Al's Bargain Barn, The Sundowner, St. Clare Mother's Club...)
A year later, when I was 12, my grandfather, Guy Levi Ireton, bought me my first guitar, at B&G music in Belleville, Illinois -- just West of the fountain Uncle Tupelo sang about in "New Madrid." It was a horrible guitar. Absolutely un-playable. My guitar teacher ended up loaning me her Harmony "Stella" so I learned on the classic low-budget acoustic. I think the first song I could play all the way through was "The Ballad of the Green Beret." My first "recording" was of me playing that song on a 3" reel-to-reel tape which we sent to my dad, who was serving in Vietnam that year. Maybe the fall of 1965.
My dad's Air Force career had kept the family on the move since my infancy. I was born in Texas, after which we lived in Florida twice, Oklahoma twice, Michigan, Indiana, New Jersey, and three addresses in Illinois... all by the time I was 9. And since one set of grandparents lived near Oklahoma City and one lived in San Diego, we crisscrossed America a dozen times in my first 20 years.
That experience of rolling across the vast American landscape on lonely 2-lane highways during the 1950’s and 60’s left an indelible stamp on my life, and on my songwriting. The rivers, roads, mountains and plains of the American heartland, and the iconic images of American culture are woven deeply into the fabric I draw on for storytelling.
But though I enjoyed music, my mind was not fixed there until February of 1964 when the Beatles performed on Ed Sullivan. After that, it was all I wanted to do. I never even tried to prepare for anything else. I devoured anything I could find -- music, books, magazines -- anything that featured the Beatles got my attention. I wore out my copy of Meet the Beatles and, over my sister's protests, tried to do the same with her copy of "Help!" When Rubber Soul appeared, I just thought I'd died and gone to heaven. I'll go lay my burden down a happy man if I ever make a record so perfect as that one. I still think it is one of the top 10 records of all time. And I'm talking the American record. Not the British. Sorry... the British version was a very good Beatles album... but the American version was an absolute and perfect gem. Hands down.
After Rubber Soul, Revolver was actually a bit of a disappointment. I now really appreciate the original, British version of that record. But I still prefer Rubber Soul. I still want to write and record songs that sound like that.
The Summer of 66 was a wonderland of music to me. It was a long, lazy summer of backyard campouts with Kas and Woody, with Kas's mom -- the indefatigable Marge Kasmarzik -- shuttling us around to Art museums in St. Louis or to the Cahokia Mounds and, basically, about anywhere we wanted to go. She let us be boys... taking over the basement, building strange motorized contraptions in the garage, brewing our own "wine" and mixing up homemade gunpowder for an evening of combustible fun.
It was, for me, one of the greatest years of music as well. And, in terms of classic pop singles... maybe I'm not alone in that opinion. But I spent that summer listening to Rubber Soul and the Paperback Writer/Rain single and then I bought Revolver.
A week before starting 8th grade, not yet having turned 13, I saw my first rock concert: The Beatles came to St. Louis.
Sunday, August 21st, 1966 -- one of the first big events in the "new" Busch Stadium (now, sadly, a memory) was also the first rock concert I ever saw: The Beatles. My friend Mike Haag called me up and said he had an extra ticket because this guy he was going to go with had been told by his parents he couldn't go -- it was the summer of the "Jesus" remark.
So, for five bucks, I jumped at the chance. I still have the ticket stub. They played for 30 minutes. But I loved every note. and at 12, I had no idea that a concert would be longer -- or that it was anything strange that a band played AFTER the Beatles: the Cyrkle ("Red Rubber Ball")
UNCLE WOODY & THE ARMADILLOS
That summer, I also started trying to get a band together. My friend Woody Woodruff and his brother Rich lost their bandleader, Eddie Polatta and so there were a couple of attempts at doing something with Woody and Mike Haag on Bass and Jim "Kas" Kasmarzik on drums. But I only had an acoustic guitar and that didnt cut it. And we had no microphones so we mostly just kind of sat around and strummed the chords to "Daydream" and "Love is Blue" as 1967 approached.
Tom Fleming had joined up with Kent Carson and formed "The Camaros" and they even had business cards. but our little gang just did not have it going. We finally put something together at the end of our 8th grade year, with me borrowing a Gibson electric from Tom. But we still had no microphones so we did an all-instrumental performance on one of the last days of school.
The Nucleus of Woody and the Armadillos had come together, and was to be my "Dream Band" right up through 1973. But that is the next story.
THE BANDS: 1967 to to 1973
In the winter of 1967, the sounds of Sgt. Pepper and Magical Mystery Tour filled my ears, and they will always seem like winter albums to me.
Woody and Tom had gone off to the Catholic high school in Belleville, and on the long bus ride each day had hatched the plan for a new band. I quickly weaseled my way in, when rhythm guitarist Kent Carson had to sit out an important gig due to bad grades. I showed up for practice with a copy of Zappa's "Freak Out," a new and mysterious world of audio delights. We added "Wowie Zowie" and "Help I'm a Rock" to the list and I was in solid.
For the next few months, at Catholic CYO dances and at Moose Lodges in towns like Freeburg and Fayetteville, the Magic Motion Machine played the role of rocking teen combo in the heart of the corn belt.
Somewhere, there still may exist the single recording of that unit; a tape made for a songwriting contest at radio station KXOK, 630 AM. We did an original number we called "Herbie McNally's Cave Overture" A strange mixture of Psychedelic guitars, Beatlesque harmonies... and lyrically influenced by Zappa and "The Who Sell Out," my latest favorite album of the time.
But, My dad retired from the Air Force and decided to move us out to California -- one last long roll down Route 66 to the promised land. On the day Bobby Kennedy was shot, we left Illinois and I left The Magic Motion Machine -- my electric 12 string and Harmony Sovereign acoustic in tow – and a tear in the eye.
Over the next few years, I huddled up in my room alone and listened to Blonde on Blonde over and over again. I discovered Buffalo Springfield, Poco, Neil Young, CSN, The Band, and MORE Bob Dylan. Highway 61 and Bringing it all Back Home. I began to write.
I stayed in touch with the Armadillos and, on summer excursions to O'Fallon, we recorded the epic Wheels of Frog and QuantoQual "albums." In the winter of 69-70 they sent me a massive CARE package that contained the Double-album "Live at Mohair Hall" as well as the Full-weight motion picture "Buttered Spaghetti." Evidence of this outflow from "Fred Productions, Inc.," can be seen in the photos section of my MySpace Site (www.myspace.com/bobryan66)
That summer, the QuantoQual recording of a song of mine called "Ladies of the Glen" got me some neighborhood fame and by the end of my senior year I was playing in a band again. This time a semi-acoustic trio called "Cedar Breaks" (Complex Music from a Simple Band,) with Randy "HB" Weaver on bass (now playing with San Francisco Songwriter Alexis Harte) and Jumping Johnny Wilson on guitar, slide and flute.
Cedar Breaks did the coffeehouse trade and an occasional private party or Hot Pants competition, and helped me record my first album, "Before the Cattle Drive" consisting of some of my earliest originals and a couple of cover tunes. I was 17 at the time.
Ken Hensley appeared in my life about this time. I had no idea what that would mean to the future. We sang together at school for a special event and he tried to get me into his band, Ivan Saunders. But it just didn't fit. Tried more than once. They were a tight little unit and there just was no space for a loose-limbed Neil Young clone in there.
An opportunity to expand Cedar Breaks way beyond reason morphed us into the 9-member "Friends and Other Strangers" for an evening. The upshot of that gig was a wardrobe change for me and a first time on stage with Hensley doing original music... a piano-oriented "Suite" of songs. It was also the first time ever on stage with a rock band for Rick MacDonald, who then joined the re-constitution of Cedar Breaks as a 5-man electric band doing primarily California Country Rock... until I got at call from the boys in Illinois.
Ken "Uncle Woody" Woodruff and brother Rich "Trapps the Wonder Boy" stopped in for a few days' visit in Riverside, sometime in the summer of 71 with a request that I return to the land of Lincoln and tall corn to rejoin the Armadillos. Having survived high school as a art-rock ensemble doing things by Jethro Tull, The Blues Project, Frank Zappa and Fever Tree, (using names like "Ardor" and "Blind Lemon Jefferson") the Armadillo band had pared down to basics. Woody, Tom and Rich had morphed into a three-man Country Western band billing itself as "Otis Small and the Illinoisians."
A tape arrived within a few days as if to present evidence of the whole affair. And the evidence was all too clear: Tiger by the Tail, Blood on the Floor, Fightin' Side of Me, Okie, Folsom Prison Blues, Settin' the Woods on Fire... It was all there in one grand, glorious hair pomade of sound. I didn't see how I could refuse.
I continued to play with Randy, John and Rick in Cedar Breaks, along with whatever drummer we could find... but I also got a "Straight Job" to put together a little nest egg to get me cornward bound. "Straight Job" indeed: I worked for the city of Riverside Police Department, Traffic & Patrol divison as its only long-haired hippie School Crossing Guard. I loved it. I made a whopping 2.10 an hour -- well over minimum wage.
Hensley and I continued to become closer friends and to share a passion for harmony singing and acoustic music, but the time was not right for more. Other than the desire to play with Ken, I was happy with the more loose and spontaneous feel of Cedar Breaks.
I was also writing quite a lot. By the time I left for Illinois in March of 1972, I had a good number of originals that I hoped we could make something of. Rick MacDonald donated a name for the band -- Rodeo. He also donated a belt to keep my pants up during the rock and roll experience -- and eventually donated himself, when he showed up six or seven months later to add his electric guitar and fiddle to the mix.
Rodeo was a five man electric Country Rock band with five singers, and a range of instrumentation that no other groovy teen music machine in the area could boast at the time. Besides a plethora of guitars playing over Tom's bass and Richie's drums, we also worked in harmonica, Wurlizer electric piano, Electric fiddle, Flute, and both tenor and alto saxes.
Five voices gave us an incredible ability to do just about anything vocally... including some complex Beach Boys parts that were hell to learn but really fun to sing. We did Swamp Cajun Rock numbers, Electrified bluegrass, old time Rock and Roll, greaser ballads, Captain Beefheart and Zappa numbers, blasting, boozy honky tonk country, big Loggins & Messina arrangements with saxes and flute, happy Poco sounds and some fine, dirty Crazy Horse garage Rock. I'm not sure we had a "Sound" but we had a songlist that would not stop.
We did a few of my originals ("Look Out," "Horseshoe Bay Revisited," "Sky Grows Darker"...) but although I was writing more and more, most of it went unarranged. We travelled as far west as Columbia Missouri and as far south as Rolla, as far north as Moline and as far east as the Amish hamlet of Arthur, Illinois -- where we were the first rock band every to play at Arthur High School.
It was a great time: Winter skies and hitch-hiking and a lovely girl named Jane Biscan that I "... left without a warning," as the song "Rachel" recounts. Lots of music. Rick and I doing acoustic Coffehouse things; jamming with Cedar Breaks when Randy Weaver and Gary Cannell came out to hang for a few days. Django and Billie Holiday and the Andrews Sisters and Merle Haggard and the Byrds and Larry Groce's lovely "The Wheat Lies Low" and Eric Anderson's "Blue River" and so many more spinning on the turntable. A good time indeed.
And then, I had to go. Not sure why to this day. I went to see Poco play at Eastern Illinois University and ran into Richie Furay and JD Souther walking through a shopping mall. Shook the hand and mumbled something... but immediately something told me I had to go back to California. It was time. The Armadillo Dream was not happening and I just had to go. I called Hensley and Frank Jacob for a ride home and a month later, I was on I-70 in Frank's bug... leaving Illinois for good.
Hensley, Hensley & Ryan 1974/75
When I returned to California in the summer of 1973, I was stuck without a band and writing song after song out in Bob & Ken Hensley's garage. It was there that Ken and I began to really create our acoustic sound together. Although he was working regularly with his band, Ivan Saunders -- one of the best sounding bands in Southern California at the time -- the two of us began talking about finding a place in Riverside where we could perform an all-acoustic Crosby/Nash kind of thing that would focus on vocal Harmony.
We found it in an unlikely place: a Howard Johnson's Restaurant lounge. The "Rum Keg Lounge" was about as non-Topanga-Canyon as you could get, despite being just outside the University of California campus. But it was there we stumbled upon an acoustic trio – Sexton, Adams & Lamb – playing five nights a week and getting paid. We befriended them, stole their job and broke up Ivan Saunders – the demise of which brought Ken's brother Bob into our orbit... adding bass and a third voice to our unit, which we called "Hensley, Hensley & Ryan" for obvious reasons.
We began performing in May of 1974 with a list of about 10 originals and the rest covers of CSNY, Eagles, Jackson Browne, Michael Nesmith, John Sebastian... the whole California Country Rock scene. Things started out slow, but we drew a crowd and our harmonies -- the main signature of what we were doing -- got tighter and tighter, as we played five nights a week, four hours a night.
Ken had picked up Pedal Steel guitar in a surprisingly short amount of time, which gave us some instrumental uniqueness. We had some originals -- mostly mine at first -- and we'd perform as a trio, or as duets or solo, depending on the song and the mood of the room. Also, the three of us gelled as personalities in a unique way... the audiences enjoyed the onstage banter as much as the music some nights.
In August of 1974, we moved to Phoenix for a month of playing at a lounge across from ASU, back before Mill Avenue became a corporate Disneyland. Returning from that series of dates, we pooled our cash and went into a studio in Riverside to record a 4-song demo, which we planned to use for our assault on Los Angeles, with out sights set on landing a contract with Asylum Records. The tape of original material included my songs "Sadly, Goodbye," and "Bird With a Golden Tail," Ken's "For Jamaica," And Bob Hensley's "L.A.," -- all staples of our then-current live shows.
With that tape in hand we showed up on Asylum's doorstep and tried to sweet-talk our way into their corporate arms. That and a performance at Doug Westin's Troubadour caught the attention of Asylum producer Chuck Plotkin. Next thing we knew we were in a studio with former teen pop sensation Emitt Rhodes at the board, where we produced another 5-song demo on Asylum's nickel. That tape included "Come Along," "So Far, So Good," (mine,) Ken Hensley's "To Embarras Mary," (which featured our good pal Tom "Carpy" Carpenter in the Be-bop middle section,) Bob Hensley's "Let the Hurricane Blow" and an electrified version of the formerly-recorded "L.A."
Our audiences were raving about "Come Along," at the time, and "So Far, So Good" was also very popular, but Asylum did not hear a "hit" in either package. So they simply said "keep bringing us stuff."
That was March or April of 1975. We had hoped they'd see potential and help us financially to be able to keep bringing them stuff. But... they did not. The disappointment of that and the fact that drugs were taking their toll on me, personally, so that by the end of the summer, after a failed attempt to go electric with the HHR thing, (dragging former Armadillo Rich Woodruff into the fray,) the band fell apart. Ken Left town, Bob signed up for school and I went into hiding.
NEW LIFE 1975-1984
There followed a year of wrestling demons, at least for me. Trying to find the key to life. Trying to find out what, as a writer, did I believe in enough to ever want to write about it. A songwriter with nothing to say seemed absurd to me, but I realized I had no idea at all what I believed was true. And, for me, anything not true was not worth writing about ... illusion was not worth living for.
Although I'd been raised a Catholic, I had long before drifted far from that shore. Now, I read Alan Watts, Baba Ram Dass, Seven Arrows and Maslow. I put my toe into the Scientology center in Riverside, and nearly signed up for Transcendental Meditation, until I heard John Lennon's voice singing in the back of my head "Nothing's gonna change my world..." and I realized TM had not solved anything for him.
My reading led me into Paraspsychology... Edgar Cayce and who knows what all else, until some hippies in a green schoolbus who said they were "the Children of God" began to hammer me with unyielding words from the bible.
... Well, it's a long story, but Jesus stepped into my life and cleared away the smoke and mirrors and the clouds of madness (not to mention the Children of God!) that had been swirling around me. There's much more I could say about that, and would gladly... but this is a musical biography so, let's get on with that. It's enough to say that God rescued me from Rock and Roll, and for some time, music was just not a factor in my life. There was much in me that still yearned for it, but much else new that God brought in to fill the void for a while.
Not the least of which was that the woman who had been my high school confidant and later my rock and roll girlfriend, became my wife. And a little over a year later, Helen and I were blessed with a child -- Dallas. That was 1977.
Suddenly, I needed to get a responsible job and the idea of trying to form a band and make money playing in bars just wasn't even a whisper in the distance. So for the first time since I was 10, I turned my back on the idea of a life as a musician and I became a graphic artist.
That change eventually became a career. But the love of music never left. Before Dallas was born, Hensley, Hensley & Ryan had a halfhearted return, simply to earn some cash. We played a few months worth of gigs but our hearts were not in it and we finally just stopped.
Three years passed. Helen was expecting our second child -- Jessica. I hooked up with a friend to do off nights at a local bar, but never has anything more convinced me that the life of late night darkened dives was one that would easily end my life if I pursued it. after a couple of months, that too ended.
From 1975, when HHR ended, until around the end of 1979, I really only wrote a couple of songs. Many assumed that, having become a Christian, I would just automatically start writing songs and performing "for the Lord." But God had other plans. The hold that the Rock Star image had on my mind was so strong, so deeply entrenched, that I really needed, I believe, an extended "Drying out" period.
I wrote a wedding song for Helen and I, and I wrote a couple of other tunes that my old friend Carpy and I sang at Calvary Chapel Riverside one night. But I firmly believe God was protecting my life. He simply did not allow anything to begin. I had friends at Calvary Chapel who were making records -- the "Sweet Comfort Band." Drummer Rick Thomson and his bass playing brother Kevin had been friends since high school. They even introduced me a second time to Richie Furay, who had also become a believer.
It was a time when there were several bands doing Country-Rock in the newly forming "Contemporary Christian" music world. But I did not find a place there. My life went elsewhere.
I played for a couple of years, off and on, at a restaurant in Loma Linda, California, near where Helen and the kids and I lived. But it was a very quiet thing. Solo. No fanfare. Just enough to keep me familliar with the Chords.
ARIZONA: 1985 to the Present
And then, in 1984, nine years after HHR called it quits and walked away from our Asylum Records contacts... Our family moved to Arizona. And it felt like all traces of the past had been erased. No one knew me in Phoenix, and I did nothing at all with music for three years. Except writing songs.
Somewhere along the line, I had started writing again. With "Rachel" in 1979... and with the discovery of Bruce Cockburn's "Dancing in the Dragon's Jaws," I suddenly found a voice. And I found I now had something I wanted to say. "Rachel" seemed like the best thing I had ever written, after having written almost literally nothing for three years. And soon after that, a few songs that I still think are some of my best ever suddenly wrote themselves in front of me. Along with "Rachel" three others that found their way onto "the Spirit of Andy Devine" were written between 1979 and 1984: The Spirit of Andy Devine, This Train Goes Nowhere, and Heroes.
In the Late Eighties, as I continued to write new and increasingly better stuff, I started playing Coffeehouse venues in Phoenix. Fiddler's Dream, a completely acoustic venue in town, became somewhat of a home for several years, as I played their about once a month, introducing songs like "Your Wandering Baby Boy" and "The Bingo Bandito."
Still a Christian, I had not found my footing in the Christian world. The songs I wrote, while holding up the ideas of faith, grace and spiritual need, did not strike people as "Christian" music and just seemed to have no place in churches or other kinds of Christian gatherings. My friend John Lynch likes to quote me as saying, shortly after we met, that for years I believed my main contribution to the Body of Christ on earth was going to be my attendance at Potlucks.
But in 1991, Helen and I began attending church at Open Door Fellowship in Phoenix. That was to have a significant impact on our future, and that of both our children.
SHARKEY: 1992-2004
The first big thing there was a drama group called "Open Door @ Nite" which had begun as a skit/comedy group performing on Saturday nights, but was just then morphing into a serious theater company doing original one-act plays that looked seriously at the place of faith and of Christ in the modern culture. With stories set in Bars, prisons and courtrooms, and with an unusually talented group of volunteer actors, directors, writers and tech people, OD@N created and performed some 25 original one-act plays over a period of fourteen years.
I first came in as pretty much an "extra" in a play called "An Evening At Capinetti's Bar", where I had only one line, and that like I blew when the time came. But over the years, I wrote music for the shows, learned to act and direct and contributed in a major way to the script writing. We eventually produced four separate shows at the Herberger Theater Center in downtown Phoenix, the city's most prestigious theater arts venue.
Open Door @ Nite (later, Sharkey Productions,) took up so much of my time, and so completely engaged my creative gifts, that I stopped the Coffeehouse gigs completely after 1995. But both the coffeehouses and the plays began to draw more and more songs out of me. Having a venue for performance made all the difference, and songs like "One More Story," "No Distance," and "South Dakota Bound" came out of that period.
RECORDINGS: 1999-2007
Somewhere in the 90's, my friend Gordon Barr helped me record some demo-level versions of my songs, which I just did to preserve them for posterity. However, I then met longtime Phoenix recording producer/engineer Jack Miller who had worked with Duane Eddy and Lee Hazelwood and was even an engineer on the Rolling Stone's classic "Satisfaction." Jack introduced me to Billy Williams.
Billy had done the producing on most of Lyle Lovett's records -- including the grammy award winning "The Road to Ensenada." He lived somewhat near me in Phoenix and had a small home studio and was willing to help me record some tracks at a very attractive price. The five tracks I did with Billy and several others from the Gordon Sessions eventually made up my first CD collection "Down here on the Surface," which was released in 1999. Just a homemade affair that a few friends bought and a few others didn't buy.
"A Prison in the Heart."
In 1995, my wife Helen and I had the opportunity to work for 2 weeks doing humanitarian outreach in a refugee camp in Croatia during the civil war that was still raging in Bosnia. While there, we met a family that was being relocated to Phoenix. When they arrived in our city, we hooked up with them and began to help them acclimate to America. Within the year, we were connected to a wider community of Bosnian refugees, as Phoenix had one of the highest Bosnian refugee populations in the country.
Over the years of making friends with Bosnian people in Phoenix, eventually travelling to Bosnia multiple times and hearing the stories of those who had been through the war there, I wrote a small group of songs that summed up my experience -- and theirs.
Then, in 2002, a church in Sarajevo asked if Sharkey Productions would come to Bosnia and do a theatrical production in the city. Rather than perform ourselves, what we did was to write a play and stage it in Sarajevo, using Bosnian young people in the roles, directing them in English while they performed the play in their own language. Not an easy task.
The play, I titled "A Prison in the Heart" and it dealt with the issues of forgiveness and reconciliation -- a message so needed in that still divided country. It was an amazing experience.
Two years later, Sharkey Productions staged an expanded English-language version of the play in Phoenix. Another amazing experience. For that play, I wrote a set of instrumentals to use as background music or scene transitions and recorded them with Billy Williams.
Along with those, I recorded most of the other songs I had written that spoke of the Bosnian experience and those recordings became the 2nd CD I released: A Prison in the Heart. It was much more coherently produced than "Down Here on the Surface." A darker set, but with some really good songs as well as the instrumentals. I'm proud of most of the work, I sold about 150 copies. But it was not a manufactured disk -- rather it was a "burned" cd -- and I did not market the thing.
It was after the release of "Prison" that my old bandmate Bob Hensley lit the fire that became "The Spirit of Andy Devine." His encouragement and assistance with that project is something I will never forget and can never repay fully.
Billy and I began recording that one in June of 2005, laying down 25 scratch tracks. From that, and with the assistance of my son Dallas, Ken and Bob Hensley, and my pal Steve Larson, I selected out the 14 that eventually became the record.
And now you're up to date. I'm playing gigs again and trying to market the disk. It's been an up and down thing. I have no idea what God wants in this, but I'm moving forward one step at a time. I have about 7 or 8 other albums worth of material I'd love to get out there, but... its the era of the free download. So until I win the lottery, I hope you enjoy Andy Devine, and I'll see what I can do about more recordings.
Thanks to all of you who have encouraged and inspired.