For much of our twenties, Mike McCoy and I were young and bulletproof, and the whole world was ours for a song.
After our college group, The Morning Ride, we landed a job singing for beers, ski tickets and dinner on Saturday nights up in the mountains. That lasted until The Brothers Four asked me to join the group. Not a lot of thought went into that decision. But it was an interesting time. The other guys were eight to ten years older than me, it was the era of "don't trust anybody over 30," and the music that had meant so much to me as a kid seemed to be losing its meaning in the late '60s. When I was offered a songwriting position with Tree International in Nashville, I decided that if I was going to stay in this business, I would first make it as a songwriter.
Through all of it, Mike was there. He showed up at my very first solo concert and sang a song or two with me, and in the '70s the two of us spent a couple of months singing in Sun Valley, two different times. Mike still remembers the songs we chose, songs that captured what was going on in the world at the time. Fifty years later he still hears them on the radio and thinks back to those nights.
Those were the days. And here we are now, still singing somehow, when the moment is ours for a song.
