Four:
MasonProffit

Terry and I began to prepare for this new venture. We listened over and over to the radically groundbreaking album,Sweetheart of the Rodeo, by The Byrds. We also listened to Poco’sPickin’ Up the Pieces, and The Flying Burrito Brothers. I went down to Arthur’s Music Store in Indianapolis and purchased an Emmons pedal steel guitar. We flipped a coin to decide who would play it, and I won—or lost, depending how you look at it! After being shown some basics, I started to learn how to play it. But I also got out my banjo and found a way to connect it through an amplifier. Terry set out to write some country rock songs, and I added the finishing touches with pedal steel and banjo changes.

Years earlier, Terry had been the one who taught me how to write songs. He was taking a poetry class in college to hone his lyrical skill, and he shared a lot with me. He had me write a song a day for almost a year. Then he would go through them, tearing them apart line-by-line and note-by-note: “Why did you use that word here, or that chord there?” he would ask. It was devastatingly painful. But it was absolutely necessary, and I owe him for sharing that discipline with me. Without Terry, I would not have learned how to be a songwriter. I first used some of those skills with Mason Proffit.

Next, we called the band together to practice. The final slate of The Sounds Unlimited had settled with my school friend, Tim Ayres, on bass, and Art Nash on drums. We tried to include my sister, Eileen, who had been part of The Sounds Unlimited, but she had been very sick and was reluctant to join. We had become a very tight-knit group of brothers. In rehearsals, the band immediately got the feel for the new material, with Tim and Art setting an airtight groove behind our instrumentations and vocals. They were the rhythmic heartbeat of the band. It had to beat steady and sure, and drive like a locomotive during bluegrass songs, but be as tender as a child during love songs. We also added a third singer to add the fifth in the vocals. And it sounded very good.

After a few gigs, the crowds were absolutely fascinated by the change. In fact, they went wild, first with musical intrigue, then with unbound enthusiasm bordering on mania as the band whipped the crowd into a frenzy. That was what happened when we played bluegrass numbers over a rock rhythm section for a song called “Two Hangmen,” a ballad with a counterc