I grew up drawing, writing, and playing music. My family attended a lot of Finn Fests around Michigan, where musical performance was a prominent tradition. At 15 I was the editorial cartoonist at the Anchor Bay Beacon, in New Baltimore, and making animated super 8mm movies.
At age 16 I discovered a bunch of 1950s rock'n'roll compilation albums that changed my life. Sam's Jams record store "in Fashionable Ferndale" became one of my favorite hangouts, and it marked the beginning of the decline of contemporary music in my life. Not that the "old" music I listen to isn't contemporary! If I'm playing it, it must be contemporary in some sense, right?
In 1991 I joined the staff at WCBN-FM in Ann Arbor, the best freeform radio station I ever heard. Rob Miller handed over "The Rockabilly Show" to me ("Here kid, don't blow it!"), so he could move to Chicago and start a record label called Bloodshot. Hunting for records every week, reading Kicks magazine, and tracking down local kats like Don Rader, Casey Clark, Eddie Jackson and Jack Earls wised me up. Then I met Willie Lewis, of Denver, Colorado's Rock-A-Billy Record Company. Over the course of many moons and 3-hour phone calls, he turned me into some kinda egghead.
I left 'CBN in 1995 and moved to a pay-for-play station in Oak Park, called WHND-AM. Named the program "The Rockin' Bones Rockabilly Show" and met a lot of cool people. That's where my nickname came from, thanks to an old doo wop kat named Bo Brown. I LOVED the sound of radio on the AM band. Listeners followed me over to WDTR-FM a year later, and I was on for 2 hours every week, through 1999. "The Rock-Billy Roll Call" at 'DTR broadcast out of central Detroit and reached most of Southeast Michigan and some of Ontario and Ohio. I had in-studio guests (the Ranch Girls from Holland played a set), profiled and interviewed musicians recorded on the phone and in person, and developed a monthly newsletter with Dave Stuckey (writing from California) that was mailed to over 100 listeners who wrote in to request it (in the days, hours, minutes before the Internet became popular). I left the station about 5 years before Detroit Public Television changed the call letters to WRCJ and began programming classical and modern "jazzy" music (it don't mean a thing, cause it ain't got that ...). I still miss WDTR's "Old & Gold Show" – it was Detroit's longest-running program (25 years) that covered mid-century R&B, blues and rock'n'roll.
In 1996 I was a founding member of the Big Barn Combo, and wrote most of our original songs. In 2001, the band won a Detroit Music Award for our album. Unfortunately, the band broke up before then, and I cooled it for a while. Kenny Bruce, the last bass player in the combo, and Marv Weyer made sure I kept practicing my guitar, and we recorded as the Sun Dodgers, a primitive rockabilly trio without drums. Graham Tichy of Troy, NY, joined us soon after, and the band hit the road when we could get it together. See the band's MySpace page .
Returned to radio at WSDS-AM in Ypsilanti, where my friend Keith Jason was program director. He helped run a killer-diller commercial station, playing classic country, mostly pre-1970, and he produced a weekly country variety show live in the studio with local pickers called the Radio Gang. I filled in a Friday night DJ slot with my "WSDS Friday Night Frolic." My favorite moment was interviewing and presenting the long-lost rockabilly gal Laura Lee Perkins, who lived just a few miles up the road from me (after all the years that I'd been playing her music on the radio)! That was my last show, and I haven't been on the air since.
Now Keith and I are working on a book to document the lost history of country music in Detroit. Been doing research on the subject for 15 years, and have amassed more materials and info than most people can probably imagine ...
