Bio

Shown at right: my Acoustic Guitar magazine interview
with Jack Johnson at the 2008 Outside Lands Festival

The Athens of the Prairie

Before moving to the Bay Area in June of 1989, I spent my first twenty years in Columbus, Indiana, a town so renowned for its architecture that it was nicknamed "The Athens of the Prairie" by Lady Bird Johnson.

Columbus was fine place to grow up. But the winters were hell. One January in the late 80s, I took a trip to Lake Tahoe, CA to ski with my college buddy and original guitar mentor, Jay Hodson.

After a few days on the slopes, we took a side trip to the Bay Area. I can still remember sitting in that bayside restaurant in Sausalito, eating sourdough bread, looking out the window at seagulls hovering over the yachts on a gorgeously sunny January day and thinking: I must live here. As soon as got home, I started packing.

And though I came west for the weather, I stayed for the music. That's because in 1991, my friend James Lee Harris, Jr., introduced me to the Owl and Monkey Cafe.

Their Thursday night open mic was a gathering place for folks who weren't just making their own music, they were also listening to the music made by their friends, going to see each other's shows and helping each other record demos and get gigs.

That supportive community became a breeding ground for talent like I'd never seen before - Box Set, Noe Venable, and many others came out of that scene, which eventually migrated to Les Wisner's much-loved Bazaar Cafe.

The days of handstands and giant swings
Before moving west, I spent a large part of my life upside down - in handstands on the Still Rings or giant swings on the High Bar. I went to my first gymnastics camp when I was 10, and for the next ten years devoted most of my waking hours to either working out, or thinking about working out. (Basketball is the sport they worship in that part of the country, but I was too short to be a hoopster.)

At our high school, the next best thing to being a hoopster was being a gymnast. Our coach, John Hinds, was one of the most successful high school gymnastic coaches in the country. He guided Columbus North to something like 13 out 16 State Championships. He was a local legend, in a way. I think he even served on the Olympic Committee for a while.

Mr. Hinds was the one who convinced me to take the sport seriously enough to train year 'round. By the time I was 14, I had traveled across the country to compete in the AAU National Junior Olympics in Santa Clara, CA, where I won a silver medal in the All Around.

When I was in high school, I won the State All-Around Championship my junior year and the State Still Rings Championship my senior year. My scores qualified me for All-American status.

Summing up those ten years in a few paragraphs feels strange to me now. It's like looking at a 4th grade picture of yourself in a sweater you wore every week and wondering whatever happened to it. Even though it seems like a past life now, I remember what a big deal it was to me at the time.

In fact, I chose my college based on the strength of their gymnastics team. Back in the early 80s, Iowa State had placed in the top 5 in the NCAA Championships for a few years in a row. So I went to Iowa State as a walk-on, and eventually earned a full athletic scholarship my junior year.

Unfortunately, that year began and ended in injury. While warming up on floor exercise at a meet in Chicago, I landed on my head and broke the spinous process of the C2 vertebrae. Had to wear a neck brace for a few months. After recovering from that injury, I competed again for a few months, then broke my leg in practice while dismounting from the parallel bars.

After that, I decided to take the summer off and decide what to do. It was my first vacation from the sport in 10 years, and it was liberating to have so much time outside the gym. I decided to spend my last year of college doing other things, such as writing the "Words" column from the Iowa State Daily.

Making the flip to verbal gymnastics
It was about then that I started to notice my love for language. That year, I was lucky enough to have two truly inspiring professors, one of which was Jane Smiley, the author of A Thousand Acres, which won both the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics' Circle Award.

Back in 1986, before Jane was famous, I had the great pleasure of having her as my creative writing professor. Good times. One of my stories was about a man who had an intense fear of corduroy. I think Jane was both freaked out and amused by it. In general, I remember that class as feeling more like a talk show than a writing class at times. I laughed a lot more in that room than I ever did in say, my Economics Class.

The other professor who made me realize my love for language was Faye Whitaker. Her enthusiasm for John Donne and George Herbert was contagious. She could give metaphysical poetry a pulse and feel vibrant, even to a 19-year old small town midwestern kid with no prior appreciation for anything literary. She basically inspired me to be a writer. Even if what I learned in her classes doesn't inform what I do for a living, it improved my life and my songwriting. So thank you, Faye.