artwork by my brother bill for the st. johns high school newspaper, depicting me and him playing at a school assembly in 1959 (picture added 2015) in repost
I've been pretty ill for about 10 years now. Constant headaches for about 9 of those 10. I find it difficult to concentrate at times when trying to maneuver around this site and spell words correctly. This is my first computer so I'm learning as I go. I felt it was time to tell my story and dig up all the garbage from the past and try and make some of sense of it all. The reason I put things up for free download is to try and combat record companies (who never pay me) from selling my work to people, when I can just give it to whomever may want it. Hell I'm not getting paid either way, but at least I can save somebody a few bucks. As I wrote earlier, my brother Bill and I were rock n rollers from an early age and I was convinced, in about 1957, that I was destined to be a "teen idol" after watching the likes of Elvis Presley, Ricky Nelson, Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry. Of course there were countless others but I think you get the general idea of what I was inspired by. Some people liked science, I liked rock n roll.
My mother and step father separated in 1958 and later divorced. It was the second failed marriage of my mother, and a loss to me. What little adult supervision I had had, became, at that point, even more sparse. Like a boat without a rudder I struggled to find my way, as did my brother Bill, who to make matters worse, suffered from mental and emotional problems. Looking back, it's hard to believe that when you're living in that kind of confusion it almost gets to be normal. Of course later you can see clearly how difficult it made everything. It wasn't all that long after my step father left that my mother moved us all to St. Johns AZ., where I was tossed into a small town environment of Mormons on one side and American Indians on the other. Man, what an unbelievable place to end up. Kind a like the deep south in the 50's. This town was split right down the middle and no one was going to give an inch. Of course my brother and I ended up on the line between the two waring parties and tilted a little bit towards the Indians. This pissed off the lilly white Mormons to the bone. We were immediate outcasts and wondered what kind of hell my mother had brought us too. She ended up Marrying a Mormon named Francis Farr who was also a quadriplegic. This town was in northern AZ, above Flagstaff and got bitter cold in the winter. We lived in an old house with no heat, just a wood burning stove. You'd have to put wood in this thing the night before and then when you woke up in the morning you'd go light it and hall ass back into bed until the place warmed up enough to walk around in. No shit! It was so cold you could see your breath in the house in the morning.
