I come from the southern side of a northern town, the Gold Coast subdivision of Calumet City, Illinois. That's a southeastern suburb of Chicago, right on the Illinois-Indiana state line. For most of the 1960s, Gold Coast's pride and joy was my junior high school's award winning marching band. Musically, it was a good place and time to be a trumpet player or a saxophonist or even an oboist, if not an aspiring rock & roller. For the aspiring songwriter, however, it was a great time and place to be alive. The early and mid-60s were the golden years of Top 40 radio, a cultural phenomenon long-derided by people who never heard it as being filled with novelty tunes, screaming disc jockeys, and being decidedly unhip. Such callow individuals are, as they say in Memphis, “ignorant to the fact” and should be ignored and avoided. Top 40 radio brought the world The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding, The Byrds, The Lovin' Spoonful, Wilson Pickett, Motown, The Beach Boys (among many others) and crossover hits from Johnny Cash, Buck Owens, Frank Sinatra and Dusty Springfield (among many others). All these artists were mixed in together, unlike today's radio. So, y'know . . . later on that “unhip” tag. Plenty of good starting points all across the AM dial. In the late 60s, magazines specializing in the new bands started appearing, which meant interviews with musicians whose influences went back to people like Blind Willie Johnson, the Louvin Brothers, Howlin' Wolf, Chuck Berry, Hank Williams, Muddy Waters, Bukka White and Robert Johnson. Old hymns and spirituals, both African-American and Anglican. That's tapping into The Source, there. And there was another channel: the late 60s also brought a revival of movies from the 1930s and 1940s which featured scores by the Gershwins, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin and Hoagy Carmichael. Elegant stuff, to be sure. And all of it tumbling down into and around a kid who was as wide open as the Great Plains themselves. That sounds wonderfully romantic, doesn't it? Indeed it does. The facts of the matter are, however, somewhat more prosaic: I am now and will forever be a guy from Gold Coast who plays guitar, a songwriter who wraps his lyrics around those traditional American music forms, and hopes for “better days, by 'm bye.”