Restless Heart - 25th Anniversary

Music:

Member Since: 10/24/2005
Band Website: restlessheartband.com
Influences:

Colorado Weekend - June 2008

Colorado Springs, Craig, and Denver - 3 nights in a row......

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A Buckin’ Good Time: RH Spurs Silver Anniversary Tour Out-of-the-Chute at Wildhorse Saloon

Restless Heart didn't wait until CMA Music Fest to start the party in Nashville. They saddled up to launch their 2008 Silver Anniversary tour Music City-style Sunday, June 1, at the famous Wildhorse Saloon.

“It was a great night with a lot of our friends,” said lead singer, Larry Stewart. “We celebrated the 14th anniversary of the Wildhorse with our tour launch party."“It was our second show in Nashville in the last two months,” Stewart noted. “Playing for the hometown crowd is a great way to get the summer started.”

In April, Restless Heart headlined the WKDF Birthday Bash at the Sommet Center. According to the station’s post concert survey, Restless Heart was the favorite act of the eight hour concert with an overwhelming 57 percent of the vote!

This was the band’s first performance in the Wildhorse Saloon but certainly not the first performances of their multiple Top Ten songs. It’s rare an aspiring country star on the Wildhorse stage wouldn’t include a few Restless Heart songs in their playlist, as many have done and then gone on to make it big in the music business.

IT WAS A PARTY AT THE WILDHORSE SALOON..... _______________________________________________________

RESTLESS HEART

Larry Stewart: Guitar, Vocals

John Dittrich: Drums, Vocals

Greg Jennings: Guitars, Vocals

Paul Gregg: Bass, Vocals

David Innis: Keyboards, Vocals

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SPECIAL OFFER:

25th Anniversary Collection

Experience 25 incredible years of music and memories in this new special collection. For the first time ever, you can purchase:
Still Restless, 25 & Live, and The Video Hits for just $34.99
(a 40% discount, price includes shipping). If you don't own this collection of RH history, now is the time to buy.

This limited time offer contains:
Still Restless CD: The only studio album with the original five members in over a decade. This album will no longer be printed so pick up one of the final physical copies before they're gone.

Video Hits DVD: The complete collection of video history with songs like The Bluest Eyes In Texas, When She Cries, Dancy's Dream, Tender Lie, Fast Moving Train and many more.

25 And Live CD: The first and only Live CD ever recorded by the band - now in its 2nd pressing. You get 14 favorites, including 7 number 1 hits and 13 Top 10's. Proving that their unique, awesome sound is just as good now, as it ever was.

**BONUS: Order today and receive a never before available, 8 x 10 photo autographed by all 5 members of the band!

This package is available only through this offer and only while supplies last.

TO ORDER, CLICK HERE

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Larry Stewart - his heart doing Hard Time...?

What was the crime? Well, there really wasn't one.....but still he's paying the price. On June 5th in Beaumont, California, a railing across the front of the stage made the perfect setting for this amusing photo.

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TORCH OF FREEDOM VIDEO

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Drummer On a Quest To Uncover His Past

Restless Heart musician seeks info on biological relatives

(June 1, 2008 - Press & Sun Bulletin - Binghamton, NY)
Millions of people are fans of John Harman Dittrich. He's drummer and a lead singer for the country rock band Restless Heart, which has put songs like "When She Cries," "I'll Still Be Loving You" and "The Bluest Eyes in Texas" on the radio and on the charts for 25 years.

Millions of strangers know him -- but his biological family does not.He has been combing the country for them, but with no success. John, who lives in Nashville, hopes that by telling his story here, a reader might hold the key to unlock the mysteries in his life.

Here's what he knows for sure: He was born at Springer Hospital in Johnson City on April 7, 1951.Six days later, Frederick Dittrich, a Navy physician stationed in Norfolk, Va., and wife, teacher Mary Lou Credit Dittrich, adopted him, possibly having heard about the baby through their extended family in Endicott.The Dittrichs were told that the infant they named John was the third-born of a 24-year-old woman, information John has since been able to confirm with the New York State Department of Health's Adoption Registry. So his birth mother would have been born in 1927, possibly then graduating from high school in 1944 or '45 -- and John has at least two older siblings out there somewhere, if they're still alive, although they may not know of his existence.

That's where certainty ends and conjecture begins.Which high school his birth mother attended, John has no idea. But it makes sense that she might have lived near the Springer hospital.She may, in fact, live in the area still. She would be 81.The Dittrichs were also told that the woman was a piano major at the Eastman School of Music, but the New York info makes no mention of an affiliation with the school, so John can't be sure. As the ongoing struggles of other Springer adoptees have demonstrated, the hospital wasn't known for the accuracy of its records or the reliability of information given to prospective parents.

The Eastman School possibility makes sense to Sylvia Ackerson, whose online N.Y. Adoption Mailing List has been a catalyst to many reunions. If hospital authorities had wanted to sway the Dittrichs with the birth mother's background, they might have said she was a medical professional, as Dr. Dittrich was, Sylvia postulates. "I told (John) there was no way that the woman at Springer would have known when he was born that he would one day be a musician!"And if the woman had given birth twice before 1951, her education might have been interrupted -- therefore she could have been a student at the time of John's birth.

John's (adopted) uncle, Lee Sheerer, used to be manager of the Binghamton Symphony Orchestra, and may have been the connection between his birth mother and adoptive parents."The theory was put forth that if indeed my mother was a musician, Uncle Lee might have become aware of a girl being pregnant at Springer," John says. He called their son Ben, now an attorney in Cleveland, who remembered being aware that John had been adopted but had no further information.

John knows nothing whatsoever about his father. The Dittrichs had been told he was on a college football team. Maybe so. Maybe not.So many maddening maybes, so few solid facts."They call us hillbillies down here in Nashville, but they've had an open records law since the '80s and it seems to me New York state is one of many states that's still in the dark ages as far as adoption goes."

John and his brother, Peter, who came into the Dittrich family in 1954, knew from their earliest days that they were adopted."I don't remember having a lot of questions about it," John says. Now that both of his adopted parents are deceased, any other knowledge they might have had is buried with them -- although John is fairly certain they had already told him all they had been told themselves.

His own body has given him a few clues: When he needed his gallbladder removed, his doctor commented that it was an unusual medical condition in a normal-weight male his age. Then John almost died from cancer of the bladder.Did others in his natural family have similar medical histories?His heart raced when he connected with a family to whom he bore a close physical resemblance.He even got a DNA test done.

He had a mitochondrial DNA test done, which enabled him to follow his DNA group and subgroup and discover that his earliest American DNA relative was Mary Fowler, who lived in New Hampshire in 1650. Seth Fowler, born in Avon, N.Y., was 200 years later in the lineage. Another Fowler was born in Marcellus -- a city John had lived in as an adolescent."It came back negative," he says. "That was a huge letdown for them and for me. I thought I found it ..."

"There I was a century later, after one of my DNA ancestors had been there ..." he says,He traced the line to Batavia, but those individuals had moved to Utah long before his birth.So much information, so little value thus far in his search.

"But it's 1,000 percent more than I knew before," he says. "Sylvia also told me a woman from Avon has just joined the NYA group list who is very into genealogy and historical research and is going to try to ask her to follow up on the Fowler connection there."The search goes on. Can you help?
(Valerie Zehl)
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(Site Administrator: Brent Hodgkinson)
Record Label: Formerly with RCA; KOCH; Currently Unsigned
Type of Label: None