Shortly thereafter - about six or eight months into that - my family moved to Washington.  My dad had a position in the Kennedy administration so we went to DC.  I stopped taking lessons then but I brought my guitar.  It was around this time I started getting my Kingston Trio albums.  If you played the guitar, Elvis Presley was around but The Beatles hadn't hit yet, so I knew all The Trio's songs.  I saw The Kingston Trio four or five times in Washington.  I'd make my mother take me, so I tease John Stewart that my mom turned me on to his music.

The Beatles hit hard in '63 and I learned 'When I Saw You Standing There' and stuff like that, and that opened up a whole new bottle of wax.  This friend of my father was a guy from Puerto Rico, Jose Benitez, who was quite a colourful character and a frequent house guest of ours.  My parents would have me sing songs at their parties, and one day he said, "Listen, I'm going to tell you something you may not care about just now but it will come in handy later.  If you have your eyes on a girl and so does another guy, and you can play the guitar and he can't, you're gonna get the girl.  So I'm going to get you a guitar.  Now what do you want, an electric guitar or a nice acoustic classical guitar?"  I said, "I'll take the electric, please."  "Okay," he said, "it's a deal."

Sure enough, about a month later this box came with this cheap little electric guitar in it.  I was thrilled!  My younger brother and I were tearing through all the tissue paper going, "There must be an amp in here somewhere....."  Dad had to get me the amp later.  Some time later I got a call from these guys who were putting together a band.  I was about 13 at the time, but they wanted me because I had a guitar and amplifier and I was the only other person they'd heard of who actually had these.  One of the guys had an electric guitar and the other had drums - no-one had bass players yet.  We'd meet in this guy's basement and try to learn Beatles' songs and other stuff like that.  We actually played a couple of dances.

In fact, I remember my first paying gig.  There were four of us.  We played at a party for adults - a pool party and got paid sixty bucks.  The other guy's father dropped me off at home afterwards, and there I was sitting at the top of the stairs with my mother with a ten and a five.  I'd got paid to play'  This was so great!  We were really awful but you've got to start somewhere.....

That band was called The Royals - we had cards made and everything, but we eventually broke up.  Then when I was 15 I got into a band called The Londonheirs.  Now this band was going places - they had long hair.  My parents weren't too thrilled about this particular phase.  We had these double breasted pin-stripe coats and tight, black pants and the boots.  Combed our hair all down, wore flowered ties, very slick.  We did club gigs.  We were making five hundred a night in some places.  This, of course, was a helluva lot of money.  15 years old and I walk out of a gig with a hundred bucks.....I don't make that money now!

So we were kind of happening on the local scene.  Played with some of the top bands around town at these dances and whatnot.  Eventually my parents pulled me out of this band.  They thought it had an unsavoury element, and as one of the guys is dead from an overdose now, so they were right in a way.  I went from that into another group and it was starting to get more professional by now.  Kids today are much hotter players than we were at the time because their elder brothers, who were my age, would show them.  You can go to McCabe's and study rock guitar, which you couldn't then.  We were all learning from each other, buy songbooks and learn the chords, stumbling around trying to learn licks off records.  It was a lot of fun and much like sports, really, the way it fit into your life.  It was kind of a team thing.  I didn't really have aspirations of being a professional musician at this point.

Then for my last years at high school I went away to boarding school - Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachussetts - and got into a band there, too.  We had a captive audience situation in that every weekend different dorms would have dances.  The girls' school would bus in the girls, which made it a horrible social event.  There were three or four bands on campus, so we all had work.  Once again, we were making money, but in the second year the administration put a ceiling on what the bands would get paid.  Once again, it was becoming more serious but you had a lot of academic work to do at Andover and, in fact, I was a good student.

In my senior year I was in a small house with seven other students, all of whom are still good friends.  Two of the other guys and myself started a trio in addition to bands that we had.  We were very influenced by Buffalo Springfield, The Byrds, groups like that, and it was very vocally oriented.  One of the guys had a really high voice and a beautiful falsetto, the other guy had a low voice, and we could handle harmonies real well.  We were also writing songs as well as singing.  I had started writing songs when I was 15.  Not a lot, I'd write a song and write another one a few months later.

We graduated from high school, then it was time to begin our college education.  I was going to Yale; one guy, Chris Hardy, was going to the University of Michigan; the third guy, Tom Church, was going to Union College in New York.  From my class about forty people went to Yale, so you knew people there.  Yale started a couple of weeks before Union College, so Tom came and kinda crashed in my dorm.  We used to go out and sing on campus, a lot of people did, take our guitars.....He and I kept up a musical relationship all that first year in college.  We were doing coffee houses in Boston, a real folky number just with guitars.  We'd do gigs at Yale and at Union, various things.

Chris Hardy's father ran the Aspen Music Festival Colorado, which is a big deal, and they have a house there.  I said, ''Why don't we go out to Colorado for the summer?  We'll try to get a gig in Aspen and we'll stay at Chris's," so we did.  I got there a few weeks before Tom and then ran out of money.  I couldn't find work because it's a popular resort, a lot of people show they want to have some kind of a gig, then go hiking everything else.  I had to beg this German guy for a job.  He made me promise I'd work through LabourDay and I said, "It's a deal."

Tom Church showed up and we'd run around and try these little clubs. By then Crosby, Stills and Nash had their first album out, plus there were groups like Poco, and we had all that stuff nailed in addition to our own songs.  It was, I think, the last time my own personal taste coincided with what was really commercially popular and successful.  We were trying to throw out some ideas for a name.  One day a friend of mine said, "How about Wheatstraw?''  Weren't sure but we kinda liked it.  That night we went to do an audition at this club.  We were standing at the edge of the stage and there's some hippy MC who turns and says, "What's the name of your group? "  ''Wheatstraw.''  ''Wheatstraw?  Far out man!''  He introduced us, we did our six songs and got the gig playing four nights a week.  We were also smoking tons of pot so we enjoyed the association there with our new name.

So we had this gig playing the Blue Moose in Aspen for the entire summer.  We were coming in late at night to Chris's parents' home.....we all had the attic.  Of course, we were sneaking up waitresses and all this kind of stuff, so us staying there didn't work out.  But we were making some money, so Tom and I went into the store and bought a tent and sleeping bags and drove out of town up Castle Creek.  We chose a site, a little platform coming off the hill out of a torn down fence, put our tent on it and that's where we lived for the rest of the summer.  It was one of the happiest times of my life.

The road went north out of town parallel to a creek and there was a big fallen tree over this creek which we had to cross to get off to where we worked.  We'd play at night, go back up there and find our tent.  The sun would wake you up around ten or eleven and we'd go down and hop in the creek which was very cold, glacial run-off, clear, clean water.  We'd jump in and hold onto this branch and it would plane you out.  Jump out and lather up, get back in and you would wake right up.  It was a beautiful summer in the Rockies and we had money in our pockets.  You can remember those times, it was the summer of 1970 and very much flower power.  The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band was playing in another club and they'd go, ''Listen, after you guys have done tonight we're having a thing at so-and-so's bar.  Come on out and we'll take care of you."  We'd go out and sing and really have a fabulous time.

Came back to school and my heart was no longer in it.  In fact, even during my freshman year I had made a decision I really wanted to be a musician.  A funny thing happened at the end of my senior high school year.  I was my class president at this time and I was attending some alumni function.  There was this guy there, about 38, and he was asking all about myself.  I thought I was going to the University of Virginia at that time.  I said I was going to law school.  He said, "Well, you've been talking all about this music that you do.  If you could really do anything careerwise - forget what it takes to get there - what would it be?"  I said, "I want to be a singer, really."  He says, "Well, that's what you should do.  I'm in the printing business and I love it.  It's no big deal but for eight years I was working at something I didn't like to do.  Now I'm doing what I like and it makes all the difference in the world."

It took me the better part of my second year in college to get up the nerve to drop out, to tell my parents.  Technically it took a leave of absence, that's what they tell you to do.  After a year if you decide you don't want to come back, it's a lot easier administrationwise.  Tom Church dropped out of Union College.  During that second year we were performing a lot in Boston at weekends and we got a bass player.  When we left we decided to move up there because we had been working there and that's where the bass player lived.  It was as good a place as any and there was a lot of work.

We went up there, got together with the bass player and tracked down a drummer.  We crashed, literally, in people's apartments most of the entire summer.  We also decided to go out on a limb.  We borrowed money from Tom's father and built ourselves a PA.  The bass player was very handy. In fact, he is now an engineer for Polaroid.  Anyway, he was very handy and industrious and we decided to do booking for ourselves because we'd get more for our money, so we did.

We then found a house outside of Boston, a big old house that bands had lived in before, so we rented it and moved in.  Big long living room that was our rehearsal place.  It was a typical post-sixties communal lifestyle.  We were Wheatstraw and, basically, we had no work.  This was now the summer and fall of '71 when we got the house and then started to get some work.  Any money we made on the gigs went into the kitty.  It paid for the rent and food, and we had duties we shared around the house. We couldn't afford to pay ourselves any personal money.  I would rely on ten bucks in a letter from Ma for razor blades and shaving cream, almost literally.  But it was okay, we had a dream.

Then one by one various members left and we moved out of that house.  Finally, Tom Church and I had a parting of the ways, he couldn't handle it anymore, so he left which made me de facto the leader of the band.  It had been very much a democracy, in fact Tom did most of the lead singing.  We had hired a steel guitarist - there were still not many to be found - but we weren't doing straight country by any means.

However, at around the same time as Tom was leaving, I started to become very interested in Nashville country, Hank Williams and this kind thing.  There was this little country joint near where I lived just outside of Boston called The Turtle Lounge.  It had been a country joint for twenty years.  I went in there one day, talked to the guy, and he hired us for a couple of nights in midweek.  They had another band, The Al and Patty Show, a husband and wife team, during the weekends.  We didn't know any country material but we walked in the first couple of nights and kinda faked it.  People would send up requests on napkins which I would bring home.  I'd buy these country greatest hits albums and we'd learn 'Green, Green Grass of Home' and 'Silver Wings.'  In the meantime I was buying Merle's Greatest Hits, Tammy Wynette's, Hank Williams', Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys....This was around 1973 and it began a real submersion course in country for me and I just got totally into it.

We were also just starting to play a club in Boston called King's, which later became called Jonathan Swift's.  For some reason the clubowner decided to do this country thing but with young bands.  There was no reason in the world for him to do this.  It wasn't happening comrnercially yet, but there were several bands coming out of the woodwork.  We played King's, but other than that all we started doing was country gigs for 30 or 40 year old people.  None of my friends could believe it.  They'd go, "Why are you doing this?" ''I don't know," I'd say, "I just love this stuff."

I wanted to learn something really inside out, a style of music.  Blues was really happening in Boston at the time.  I liked it and I liked to play it but I was never gonna be a blues guy.  Country really spoke to me and I went headfirst into it.  It had been around when I lived in Iowa.  I'd heard 'Your Cheatin' Heart' and all that stuff.  This was there, it was a fact of life, but I didn't think much about it.  'Blue Suede Shoes' was a little bit more where I was into.....I was young.  But through folk things I had done when I was 18 to 19, through the coffee house circuit in Boston, roots music was becoming the thing to be reckoned with.

There was a phenomenen also that this level of musician we were into now, you almost had to pick something.  We had all grown up in a generation that had played a lot of different cover stuff - everything from Jefferson Airplane to The Kinks - and many of us were hungering to learn an idiom and envious of musicians who really had an idiom down, and country became mine.

It was all very innocent and unpretentious for several years.  There was a big country booking agent in Boston who had these gigs all over New England.  You'd go to a club and play for two weeks, five or six nights a week, and you made a living of sorts. To me, it was very exciting because I'd become so obsessed with country music.  We'd play these clubs where Hank Thompson, Hank Snow and George Jones in the old days had all played, and they'd all have their pictures on the wall.  It felt like - if you were a white blues player - playing the clubs in Chicago where Muddy Waters plays.  There was this sense of integrity, almost, and you were becoming a part of it.  We had to wear uniform shirts and all this kind of stuff and we were really learning our chops.

Then in '74 and '75 in Boston about three of us long haired country bands were becoming somewhat of a club commercial phenomonen and really catching on with the college age crowd.  We started playing all the clubs around town that the rock bands were playing.  Jonathan Swift's was becoming a very successful club in and town and the country groups really ruled.  In the pecking order of things, my band was really number two.  John Lincoln Wright, who is still back there, kind of ruled the roost.  A big turning point for me was in 1975 a whole bunch of us went to Nashville for what they call the DJ Convention.  All the bands are in town and the labels have showcases where everybody plays.  It was my first trip to Nashville and I was so excited driving into there.  Some of Lincoln's guys came in too.  Walking in all these bars and we'd sit in a little bit, stuff like this. I was very, very excited, very taken by the whole thing.

Came back and started making the decision that I was going to disband Wheatstraw and move to Nashville.  We were also playing somewhere in New York at the time, which was also very exciting.  The band was on an upswing and the momentum was building, but I decided now was as good a time as any.  I was really dedicated to my songwriting at this point, and I thought that was what I should do.  So we came back from Nashville and at a New Year's gig in New York I announced to my band that this was going to be my decision.  We had another month of gigs and we decided we would just have a ball for a month, which we did.  Went back to Boston and all our shows were packed because we were breaking up.

I was approached by this guy who had a business finding and selling rare and hard to find records.  We had been doing these four track tapes and this one radio station in Boston, WCAS, would play them.  He was a fan of the band who came round and said, "Listen, if you can get me tapes like that of that quality, I will press a record.  We'll do five hundred of them for fans and friends and collectors."  I said, ''Great!''  It was going to be at his expense and we had this basement studio that this friend of ours had where we did the tapes for free.  We also decided we would tape some things live on our last couple of shows.  Invite all our other friends and record all this stuff for posterity.  So we did that and called the album "Last Straw," because we were breaking up.

He then contacted Barry Glovsky who had a record review publication called Pop Top, to say, "Could you help me get this record into the stores around town?" because that's where this publication was distributed.  Glovsky came down and heard us play, along with his music reviewer, Steve Morris.  Steve, who is now the Music Editor of The Boston Globe, was very big on us and had written about us in Pop Top.  Barry was interested and kind of got involved and decided this was a project that could go somewhere.  He came into the sessions and started putting up a little money.  We got the cover worked out and all this kind of stuff.  We did our last gig and the group was disbanded.  There was postproduction done and I agreed that when the record was out I would get together a little something and do a few gigs around town.

I talked to Rocky Stone, who was the country guitar player around Boston.  He'd been a Nashville session player and played in real straight country groups and he was kind of a friend.  Then we got together with the bass player from the album and played a local folk club - no drums.  When the album was released we added a drummer and played about six gigs around town which were pretty well attended.  Then I got in my van with my girlfriend and took a trip around the country.  It was something I wanted to do and we had a good time.

Came back to Boston and was making my plans to move to Nashville, when all of a sudden we were starting to get all these reviews.  The one that really started it was in The Village Voice by this guy, Robert Christgau, who was a very respected rock journalist.  He'd come across the album and given us quite a favourable review.  (In his book, "Christgau's Record Guide," published in 1981, he wrote of ''Last Straw''....."As befits a Yale dropout, McDermott makes country music with an edge of educated subtlety - the comic sendups of cars and compulsive consumption sound quite a bit more political than Jerry Reed's, the forlorn laments a whole lot more existentialist than George Jones's.  Yet Jerry Reed and George Jones are definitely the comparison; McDermott may sound like Phil Ochs or Keith Carradine in their country personas, but his voice is stronger and more country.  The drawback is the ragged backup from Boston's finest, who sound like folkies who have not yet developed any viable equivalent for slickness."  He gives the album a B plus grading which is, "a good record, at least one of whose sides can be played with lasting interest and the other of which includes at least one enjoyable cut." Ed.)  Once that happened the Boston press started to hop on it.  Not only that, we started to get airplay.  Not just in Boston, we were in the top ten on a country station in Boulder, a place in Santa Barbara and a place in Arizona.  They were playing 'I Can't Appreciate Automobiles,' which was the single, and 'That's Where I Draw the Line.'

I had agreed to do a second album for these guys, Back Door Records, at the time we were doing the first.  I figured when I got to Nashville I'd get funds, get together some players and we'd just do it.  But because of what was happening critically with the band I decided to put together Wheatstraw again and really go for it.  Try to get a record deal with one of the top country labels. I signed a management deal with Barry G1ovsky, lured Rocky Stone into the band and auditioned drummers.

Jim Messtel was playing in another band called The Rockabilly Shufflers.  They were playing The Turtle Lounge, almost across the street from where I lived at this time, and I used to pop in there.  They were just starting out and I was kind of a big shot on the scene.  "Come on over the house, you guys, after the gig....''  We became friends and I had Jimmy play on some of the "Last Straw" sessions, so I had him join the group.  I had written a bunch of new songs, we rehearsed and came bursting back on the scene in the summer of '76.

We were on quite a roll.  We were playing all over New England, opening for everybody who came through town.  We were becoming quite popular in New York in this club, The Lone Star Cafe.  There used to be this little club called O'Lunney's, which is still around.  Then this guy opened The Lone Star Cafe and we were right in on the ground floor.  It became the place to go.....stars, celebrities, and just packed.  800 people a night would go through that door, jammed in there.  We would do about a weekend a month and I still run into people who saw Wheatstraw at The Lone Star and remember me from that.  We opened for a lot of big artists there, too, and every time we would accumulate press coverage.  Capitol Records flew up one of their A&R guys to spend the weekend watching us, but he couldn't make up his mind.  Here was this long haired country band from Boston.....my songs were idiomatically country but there was a little twist, and no-one was sure what to do.

Then we put together a big tour. I think this was 1977.  We had been venturing down to DC, as far south as Arizona, Virginia. We put together a tour that started in New Orleans and worked all the way out. What we did was we played at The Lone Star, packed up the equipment.  We were very roadworthy.  We had a little truck for the equipment with a sleeper compartment, and a van with a bed.  We packed up at three in the morning and started driving to New Orleans, non-stop, thirty hours, switching drivers, catching some rest, the CB in the van caught fire.....

Fulled into New Orleans, go to our motel , which doesn't have our reservations!  There was, like, a Moonie Convention and in New Orleans there was not a motel room to be found.  We finally find a place and throw our bags in the rooms, go to this club, set up, do a sound check because we're gonna be the live concert that night on the hip FM radio station, 500,000 people listen to it.

We're totally exhausted but we play another set because that was part of the deal. Then a guy from the club we are gonna play the next night is there and starts buying me drinks.  To make a long story short, I nearly killed all of us on the way out of there in the van.....whited out behind the wheel and we crashed.

But we did about a week in New Orleans and then went to Atlanta and so on, and in each place we were getting radio play and doing interviews with the press.  Also on the same trip we stopped in Nashville and played The Pickin' Parlour, and that was going to be our showcase.  Everybody showed up, a lot of musicians really dug the group, there was enough different, and they're all tired of having to do the same thing.  Once again the labels couldn't decide what they wanted to do, it was too left for them.

So we came back - there were a few other irons in the fire and we were playing all around but I thought, 'I'm wasting my life, I'm running in circles here.'  Either I went to Nashville which, by now, I didn't want to do, or New York, which didn't look like a good town to be poor in.  I felt Nashville was too much of a clique, there was too much of a brotherhood down there.  Before they accept you - some of it was a bad taste from the Wheatstraw experience - you have to be there to become a part of the town and a part of the musical community.  Then maybe you get it.  I thought, 'Hey, I don't want to do that, I don't want to work at that speed.'

We were doing a winter swing through Maine and New Hampshire, a two week thing in the snow.  We pulled into some gig in Maine.  I hadn't played this joint before but it was on the circuit.  We had the address, we pulled in and it's in the shopping centre.  It's a basement club underneath a beauty parlour.  I walked in there and the manager's a 28 year old biker, half his teeth missing on this side.  I looked at this dingy club with its stage in the corner and that was it, the straw that broke the camel's back.  I just said, "I can't do this anymore. I'm quitting."

I borrowed some money from my father.  Through whatever contacts Glovsky had I'd certainly zero in on LA, I was going to see what I could do.  I was even willing to get a job at a record company.  I'd been gigging for nine years now, more or less, and I was ready not to play for a while.  I flew out there and ended up getting an offer from this particular guy named Larry Bonnack who was doing a new record label with this big country manager named Jim Halsey.  The Jim Halsey Agency books everybody.  Roy Clark's a big client, Tammy Wynette, George Jones, Freddy Fender, Barbara Mandrell, The Oak Ridge Boys.....they have a big office on Sunset across from The Roxy.  Halsey wanted a record label which his own acts could be on. Larry Bonnack had been a vice-president at ABC Dot Records, which was a big country label that MCA had just bought, and this was an opportunity for him to have his own label.  He had heard Wheatstraw tapes and liked them.  I came out and interviewed with him and he offered me a job to help him and be an artist for his label.  I was going to be his assistant, and for me it was a very attractive salary.  I flew back to Boston thinking, 'Bango!  It could be happening now!'

Once again, I had about a month of gigs to do.  I was due to start work on September 1st and the last gig was the end of May, so I had the summer to blow.  This was the summer of '79 and the record business was really going through a tailspin.  Bonnack called and said, ''There are some bad things going down that I don't want to hide from you and if you want to back out you can." I said, "No, I'm not backing out.  I don't care, I'm getting out of this town anyway.

He flew me down to Nashville and I recorded three songs, two that he had found and one of mine, to be released as a single on the label.  I came back to Boston and got myself together, moved out here with my girlfriend.  I had flown out again to find a place to live, which took forever until I found this place.  Came out and saw one pay cheque before the record company went under.  The distributor went bankrupt and Halsey pulled out the money, so it just didn't happen.

I told you my father had been in the Kennedy administration.  Well, in Washington I went to school with a lot of politicians' children, among them Robert Kennedy'e children.  His elder son, Joe, and I were very good friends growing up and I used to work for Kennedy on summer jobs.  Uncle Teddy Kennedy was running for President at the end of '79.  My family's from Iowa and Iowa's the first event.  My father was very politically involved with Jack's campaigns out of there.  When I heard Teddy was going to run I'd called Joe and said, "If there's any way I can, I'll help.''  I was really thinking on a fund raising line, trying to get rock groups and so forth.

Joe called me one morning and said, "I want you to come out here and work in the field.''  It was a paying position and I was really broke.  It was exciting, something I'll do once in my life, nothing else was going on so I said, "When do I start?"  He said, "Can you be here for a meeting tomorrow at 4 o'clock?''  I walked right back in the bedroom and informed my girlfriend I was going to Iowa for six weeks.  The campaign ruined that relationship, but that's okay!  I had to leave at midnight that night to get the right connecting flights.  I parachuted into this political operation about which I knew nothing.  The guy who was going to be tactical field manager in Iowa just campaigns for a living, a very tough Philadelphia guy.  He says, "What do you do?"  He wants me to chart out my political background, right?  ''I'm a musician from LA.....''

I worked for a year on this campaign, went all over the country and, really, I had a great time and worked real hard and met a lot of people.  It was very stimulating work and it was very good to do something other than music for a while.  In the meantime, Larry Bonnack had these tapes I'd done in Nashville.  Following the dissolution of the record company he's trying to sell the masters, and he gets a deal for me to release it on MCA/Curb.  I'm going, 'Hey, I've got a record deal, this is beautiful!'  And here I am in Chicago.....

I come back and this record deal's getting very complicated.  Curb's involved, Halsey's involved, I'm involved.....I started to put a band together.  By now I'd been away long enough that I was ready to play again.  It took a long time, I didn't know anybody. I put ad's in papers and got the worst players you could imagine.  At the same time I was dating Laura, my future wife, who gave me Dennis Kenmore's phone number.  Called this guy up and went out to see him play and found out we knew some of the same people in the business.  He was in Goose Creek Symphony and knew a lot of the Nashville scene.

We decided I would rent a little rehearsa1 space in Hollywood.  Dennis knew this bass player, David Batti, who came over and is still in my band.  By now, Jim Messtel has moved out here and is crashing in my laundry room.  Jim had called from Boston and said, "What's going on?''  I said, "Well, I'm trying to put together a band.  I really have nothing to go on but if you want to come out and play if I can get a band together, whatever....."  So he came out and lived here for almost six months in this house. We had the nucleus of a band, then I also got a guitar player that David knew, and it started to roll.

Then I went and begged for a gig at this club in Malibu, The Lone Star Saloon, which is no more.  It was a country joint.  From the Wheatstraw days I had rather an impressive press kit, so they gave me a shot.  Using my campaign tactics I got everybody I knew in town out to those gigs.  We did two shows in December, two weekends right before Christmas time.  I had a friend at Elektra came out to the second show we did and seemed to really enjoy himself.  Said, "Hey, when you get something going....."

The next morning Jimmy and I got on a plane and flew to Boston.  I was going back to DC for Christmas but we had arranged through Glovsky and Charlie Irwin, my old bass player, to do a Wheatstraw reunion back at Swift's, plus Barry had set up two TV shows.  It was just an excuse for me to pay my way back to Boston to visit my old friends.  We fly in and I get this call from the guy at Elektra saying, "I talked to our country guy.  When you get back we're putting you in the studio to do demos."  I think, 'Is this happening, or what!? Two gigs!'

We did those gigs, burned the candle at both ends for about a week, then went down to Washington and was just on top of the world.  Flew back and we went into the studio for Elektra and cut four songs.  Their country guy in Nashville says, "I want to hear more," so we go in to do six more songs live to two track.  He goes, "I like the voice, I'm just not.....''  Once again, the same thing so that one didn't happen.  We were still gigging around, some good gigs - with Newton at The Country Club, with Ricky Skaggs at The Country Club, stuff like that.

Now, right around this time Maria Shriver, who I knew from the campaign, introduced me to John Stewart whom I'd met ten years ago in a high school graduation which Wheatstraw played at.  She's having this party for her mother who's in town.  She invites me and does a bunch of stuff, "Chuck, you've got to meet my friend.  He's a musician, too, and you should get together." So I'm at the party and here's Stewart, bigger than life.  Maria says, "John, this is my friend Chuck, and you two should really talk."  John says, "Come into my office!" and we sit right there on the couch.

I tell him what's going on with Elektra and a little bit about Wheatstraw.  Dick Whitehouse at Curb, who was involved in my ill-fated single, knows John and we get talking about the Kennedys and what-not.  We sat for three hours on this couch and we didn't get up.  People were walking by looking at us.....we hit it off, we could tell we were going to be friends, so he says, "Here's my number, call me, I want to hear your tapes."

I met him for lunch in Westwood and we shot the shit.  Then he came down to The Lone Star and heard us play.  He liked what I was doing and got up and sat in.  This was 1981.  He says, "I'm playing The Palomino.  I'll talk to the manager about you opening up."  My folks came out.  They hadn't seen where I lived so it was a big excuse to come out.  I opened for him several times at The Pal' and we were becoming better and better friends all the time.  He was recording a lot of demos, the 'All the Desperate Men' tapes, and invited me to the studio.

With my own band I was doing my version of country, some country covers, and a little bit of rockabilly started creeping in, too. If I was doing The Pal' it was my own material, but also I'm starting to wonder what the hell I'm doing.  Do I really want country anymore?  What I hear on the radio I don't like, by and large.  It felt like there were so many rules.  Coinciding with that, now, was the growing relationship with John.  I was spending more and more time with him.  I'm in the studio and he says, "Why don't you sing something?"  We play guitars at his place. Now I'm playing guitar in his band, too.  It provided me with an opportunity....I chose it to be an opportunity to forget about who I was and what I wanted to do for a while.

John did the Stevie Nicks tour all by himself and then semi-seriously, said, "Hey, let's work up a duo, go and play some ski places - pick up some good bucks and go skiing."  We never did that, but he went on, "I don't want to play with some half-assed bar band.  This is what I do best, this is what you do."  I said, "Great, let's go!"  We worked on it and spent much of the year playing as a duo, and in the studio a lot working on "Blondes."

So at the same time I'm listening to all his new songs I'm exposed to hearing John in the studio.  I'm the playing the clubs and doing my thing, which is really hard to put a finger on, but hopefully we were entertaining people, and through Stewart kept the band together.  Then about a year ago I started writing songs like 'Turning of the Wheel.'  I began to get an idea of where I fit in thematically, and it revolved around.....why don't I write about my peer group?  Essentially, thirty years old, children of 'The New Frontier' who were convinced when they were 18 that the world was going to be a certain way.  Now they're 32, got a little kid, and they're wondering about the compromise between their old goals and dreams and current practicalities.  It's the inspiration for 'Turning of,the Wheel' and other story songs like 'Working Day.  I like narrative-type writing, like it to be visual.

Then, in trying to flesh it out I felt at times it needed some lighter touches, and a song like 'Perilous Love' is really guy and girl stuff.  I'm really happy with it because it allows me to be the most myself.  I am all of those things.  I grew up in the mid-West, I have touches of that.  I went to boarding school and college and I have that, too.  I don't want to have to shun either part of those but by being country I did have to.  I had to accentuate the Iowa kid over the Yale student.  This allows me to let myself be whoever I am, in as much as I can figure it out.  In fact, the songs are not terribly autobiographical always, but it's very personal.  The characters I'll use or the way I describe them are very personal.  I feel I have my stamp on those characters.

I have to go through a lot of self-evaluation all the time because you're getting to know a lot.  It forces you to decide how you actually feel about things.  I've decided that those kind of songs are my talent, if I have one, and that's just going to be tough if people on certain levels think it's too foregn or heavy or something like that.  In this business it all turns around.  Once the rock world decides you're okay then everybody likes you.  This is what I am and this is what I'm gonna push.  I feel good having reached some of those decisions because it's black and white to me now, there is no grey.  Grey is what gives you ulcers.  Grey is what tortures you.

I'm in the position now that it's selling time and the only way you sell something is by totally believing in yourself.  Play on the buyer's paranoaia, the buyer in this case being record companies.  Nobody wants to sign a turkey, nobody wants to pass on the next big artist, and I think a really honest belief in yourself is what sells.  It's what accentuates the feeling that this will happen. It's easy to have self-doubt, and I wonder about things myself, but ultimately I've already gone to the borders with myself over what I want and how I feel about it. I feel that I'm ready to go.

I don't know if there's a big market for what I'm doing.  You take a group like Talking Heads.  I would have thought in one sense there wouldn't have been a big market for that, but there is.  I'd be happy with that size of an audience, certainly.  I don't really care to top the charts, I don't care to be big as The Police are right now.  You take a guy like Elvis Costello.  He is successful enough, commercially, that he continues to be able to make records and videos and all the things you want to do on that end, plus he can go ahead and play Amphitheatres.  He's got an audience that really cares about his music and that's really all I ask for.

I'm not in it for the perks or fabulous wealth or adoration, as much as I'm in it to keep being able to indulge whatever creativity I have.  That takes money, the funding of a label or something.  It takes a certain number of people buying your records, keeping the machinery oiled so that it continues to move.  Right now it's down to getting dealt a hand.  If you asked, "Is my stuff really commercially viable?" I think it is.  I think it could be played on the radio and with the right producer and good players it would sound good.

One asset I think I have is that songwriters who write like I do (meaning they're not just writing little love songs) generally get the benefit of attention from the press.  That can help you at least establish a core audience and on a local level now that's the first I'm gonna take my crack with.

I should mention the "Hot Dog" movie I've got involved with.  I don't know if the movie is any good - I don't even know if I get a film credit - but if I didn't and the movie's doing well, I'll just hire the same PR service as the girl who did all the dancing in "Flashdance."  John wrote the songs. It's 'Dreamers on the Rise' - me just singing it alone - and another song he and I just recorded for his new album, which is called 'Bringing Down the Moon.'

John knew the screenwriter, who approached him for a couple of songs.  It's written in the movie that this guy is a ski racer and he picks up a guitar a couple of times.  The actor they chose for the role wasn't a strong enough singer to pull it off, so it was a matter of using someone else's voice.  John suggested me and we had this really goofy meeting at the producer's office.  John and I go in, the director and actor come in, and they tape record us talking to each other.  The actor sang a little bit and I sang a little bit.  They decided okay, let's go do it.  We recorded it and sent down the finished tape and the actor has to lip synch to my vocals.  Stewart and I will be on the floor, it'll be a riot.  That was John's involvement - he was nice enough to throw the ball my way.

What John and I have realised is that even though our ages are different and our careers are very much different, we share a similar musical outlook.  The ways you approach a song, arranging a song, things like that, and we were becoming good friends so it was real comfortable to work together.  Comfortable, too, for John to have another set of ears there.  He's in the phase now where he produces himself but - not to speak for him - I think it was probably more comforting than helpful to him to have someone else there.  To turn round and say, "Now what do you think?"  It just helps to be convinced he's either right or wrong. I think that's part of where it's coming from from his angle.

For me it was a tremendous situation.  I got to sit at the elbows of this guy who, one, is a fabulous songwriter.  His aestheticism and approach to songs helped me in my writing.  I'm not gonna try to write John Stewart songs, but it provided certain ways to look at things and certain aesthetics I have incorporated into the way I look at songwriting.  Two, John's real good in the studio and it was a great situation for me to sit there and watch what was going on and get hands on experience, too.  Towards the end of ''Blondes" he'd go, "Okay, you try the first mix."  I'm sitting there twiddling all the knobs, and studios can be very intimidating until you just do it.

And we were buddies, we enjoyed spending time together.  We had a lot of fun, a lot of laughs, so it was a great relationship and certainly a great situation for me.  I've learned a lot.  He calls me his 'alter ego.'  I don't know what that means!  We're really good buddies, and as friends are we can get involved in each other's lives.  I think perhaps the alter ego part is that he can turn to me for certain things.....opinions, feedback, support, those kind of things.  We met and became really good friends, and we can work together professionally, which is really nice.  You get, maybe, a couple of those in your life, I think.

Performing together kind of evolved in a way.  For starters, it was JOHN STEWART.  I was a sideman for the first time in my life, which I really enjoyed.  It's easy!  I drool on my guys because I know how easy it is.  You just stand there , you try to read the other guy's mind, play as best you can, and be there to support him.  You know what I mean?  It's much easier than having to go out there and front the group, decide what you're gonna play next, what you're gonna say after this song....it's a piece of cake!

Of course, when I first started playing with John I didn't even know the songs.  We were learning how to play together.  That happens with my band, too.  For instance, Dennis knows if I look a certain way it probably means watch, because I'm gonna do something different.  It takes a while to get all that down.  Plus we weren't incredibly well rehearsed, either, at the beginning. Also, we were trying to figure out how to play those songs with just two guitars, which we eventually figured out.  We got an approach down.  Towards the end of that we were really a good duo.  It had drive and everything else.....not just two guys strumming acoustic guitars.

We had already demoed a lot of the songs which ended up on "Blondes" with drums and stuff.  Most of those versions never ended up on an album, though.  ''Blondes'' started out to be a representation of what we were doing live, very acoustic with no drums.  Then it became an issue of whether or not that was a smart idea.  Some songs needed drums.  Also, I think when you're doing a record there's a strong temptation to try to include a few things that might very well be played on an existing radio format, so you do that kind of thing.  The album kinda shifted gears.

The Swedish "Blondes".....the first money to come through was when Polygram in Sweden said, "If you've got masters that you're free to sell, then we'll buy them."  John didn't already have a domestic deal.  He said, "I'll get some stuff together and you can have it."  He sent them several works in progress.  That's why there are different songs on there.  They wouldn't let it go without 'All the Desperate Men,' for instance.

'All the Desperate Men' is one of John's songs I use in my sets.  The approach is somewhat similar but I use a different instrumentation.  I love John's version - I think the way he delivers the vocals gives it a nice irony.  You've got a man who is resolved, is accepting he may never love again.  That produces a certain angst.  My approach was more someone who is lashing out a bit against the fact that he may never love again.  They are two valid ways to read a song, it's like actors with a role.  I think John's packs a punch because of the understatement.  I didn't understate it, I just got punchy.

While all the stuff with John was going on the Chuck McDermott Band was marking time.  Really, the band was quite patient although it produced a situation where The Chuck McDermott Band wasn't important.  Eventually, I came around to where I could go in and say, "Hey, guess what?  It's important to me again, so I'm serving notice that it is.  I understand that it's a stylistic change.  We were more or less a country band and now we're not gonna be.  Try to go with me on this.  If you don't like this stuff then let me know and we'll find someone else.  If you think you get it, then let's really throw ourselves into this." And they are happy with it, it gives everybody a chance to stretch a little bit.  It expands the roles for each person.  For example, it puts more burden on David Batti than when we were playing country.  'Inspiration Point' is a hard song for a bass player to play and he's really got to be on top of it.  But that's the kind of thing most players want.

At this point I'm trying hard not to have direct, overt influences.  Like Lindsey Buckingham says, "All songwriters steal.  It's just some get caught at it," and I'm sure that is true.  I'm trying not to be too terribly influenced by anyone or any group of writers.  I did see Elvis Costello recently and was very impressed by him.  It reaffirmed certain ideas in performance and ambition in terms of writing that I believe are valid.  He shoots very high, I think, artistically, and it's nice to have that reaffirmed, which I think he does.

Sometimes as you're writing a song you're developing arrangement and production ideas.  Nowadays, I have some multi-tracking equipment at the house, so I have an opportunity to get my own fingerprints on the song's arrangement before I bring it to the band.  I think it is a great situation for singer-songwriter, bandleader types.  It helps you define your style and have a thread of consistency running through a body of songs.  Sometimes I have what I want from the band pretty closely worked out.  It also varies instrumentally.  The way it's been happening of late is that I will come in with a demo I've done at home - drums, bass, keyboards, guitars, backup vocal arrangements - as a starting point.  Then if someone has an idea on their instrument we'll try it.  Other times I'll have bigger grey areas and say, "What do you think?  There's an idea, how does that feel?"  If anyone has an idea, we'll try it, it's not that authoritarian.  I get the final say!

People probably remember The Whisky-A-GoGo, which isn't anymore, and The Roxy, which really doesn't do music.  There are other clubs springing up in LA, such as The Music Machine, to fill the void.  They have local bands, some of whom have record deals, some of them don't, who work a kind of rock circuit.  We've chose to go circling into those clubs to try to get some exposure in the same areas.  Present ourselves alongside the other bands in LA who are considered contenders.

I've given myself deadlines before and never stuck to them.  Having to believe and accept the fact that I'm a musician, this is what I'm gonna be doing the rest of my life, means I can stop with the damn deadline.  I tell my father I have one when I borrow money, but that's about all the deadlines are good for - when the car's broken down.  It's just.....this is what I do.