My Music Story Part 1: Colorado and Texas

I moved to Vail, CO carrying only what I could fit into a Honda Del Sol: clothes, tv, stereo, guitar, and amp. I had no real aspirations as a musician, but I did want to learn to play and it was fun to do it for an audience.

One day my friend Dave Perron suggested that the two of us put together an act playing the saddest songs we could find to the vacationing skiers. It was a pretty great idea. We called ourselves Psychobilly Cadillac & the Cottonmouth in honor of Johnny Cash's "one piece at a time".  We weren't great, but we had our moments.

Simultaneously, my brother and Dave went in together on a 1966 Cadillac Deville and we would drive that to our gigs. It was a white convertible with ox blood leather interior and it was about thirty feet long. The interior matched my Guild Starfire III, which Dave accidentally ran over and dragged across the parking lot. The guitar survived, and we learned that the clearance on the Cadillac was exactly one guitar high.

After playing music in the Vail Valley for a year, I decided that I wanted making music and performing to play as big a role in my life as film (my degree is in film). At the time, Austin, TX was receiving a lot of attention nationally for its film scene. I had recently met a group of nice people from Texas and I was thinking about checking it out. An old friend living in Austin needed a roommate, so one thing led to another and I moved to Texas. 

I had a fun exploring Austin and I spent most of my free time playing music and writing, it was there that I put together my first recording rig. I was there for just under a year when I was offered a good job and a weekly show in Edwards, Co. I came back and moved to a house with fewer people and a room with enough space to record.