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A lot of wonderful things have happened since then. That energy company helped a lot of needy people. Joe decided to run for Congress and I became his Campaign Director. When he won, I went with him to Washington to be his Chief of Staff. I did that for four years then spent eight more years in Washington working on public policy for an environmental services company. Then I moved back to Boston and started a firm with 5 other partners that invests in sustainable technologies

The Campaign and The Last Campaign

So once again, I made plans to play out my final Wheatstraw gigs, I flew out to LA to find a place to live – a great little bungalow in Santa Monica – and prepared for the move. The Nashville sessions had turned out well, and it wasn’t too wild a fantasy to think we might get some national airplay. And then Larry called. His financial backer had backed out, meaning the label was not going to fly but Larry would do all he could to get my single picked up by another label. I hu

The Wheatstraw Days

The Wheatstraw Days

In 1971, Tom and I moved to Boston and started a group we called Wheatstraw. Like in our Aspen days, we played a little bit of everything and started to sprinkle in our own tunes. Though the first year was beyond lean, we began to get some traction on the college and club circuit in New England and eked out a living. In those early years, the band all lived in the same house and we pooled our gig money to pay bills and buy guitar strings and divided evenly what little was lef

The Start of The End

The Start of The End

For my last two years of high school, I went away to boarding school in Massachusetts. I fell into a band there pretty quickly but the transformative event there was dorm life. Several guys had stereos in their rooms. Everybody had albums and it explosively blew open the door to new music. That’s where I fell in love with Buffalo Springfield, and though always a Byrds fan heard their country-tinged “Sweetheart of the Rodeo” for the first time, which would prove to be pivotal

DC & Culture Shock

DC & Culture Shock

It’s safe to say that the move from Dubuque to Washington was a pretty big change. It was a major international city, it was wildly more racially and culturally diverse, and as a practical matter, we all had to start from scratch to make friends. As in Dubuque, we all went into parochial schools and found there were a lot of kids in exactly our predicament – new to the city, new to the school, and their parents had just taken jobs in the government. Early on I became friends

Dubuque & The Barnstormers

Dubuque & The Barnstormers

I grew up in Iowa. A Midwestern town like Dubuque in the 1950s was a pretty idyllic place. We walked to school, we played in the woods, we rode our bikes to the swimming pool. My parents signed me up for piano lessons when I was 8 and I hated them. I shared a bedroom with my older brother and we would go to sleep with the radio on. The radio station in Dubuque, KDTH, played an eclectic mix – Pat Boone, Bill Haley, Elvis, Hank Williams, Ernest Tubb, Frankie Avalon. I became de

Origin Story

Origin Story

I was born in Dubuque, Iowa in late 1950. Dubuque sits along the banks of the Mississippi River on the Iowa-Illinois border. My father was born in a farmhouse outside of town, the youngest of six. He grew up on that farm, was schooled through 8th grade in a one-room schoolhouse (I’m not making this up), graduated at 14, worked his way through a local college in Dubuque and then law school at the University of Iowa. The man had an incredible work ethic. Later in life, my Dad w

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