 Welcome to another show of Celebrate Life. My name is Gary DeCarlas, and I'm your host. The genesis behind this program is after reading many obituaries and wondering to myself, gosh, I wish I got to know that person while they were still alive. Well, this show is all about life and life, and we will bring you, as we have for the last couple of years, people that you may know, some you may not know, but they're all very much alive, I can tell you that. And my belief is that everyone has a story to tell, and we have a rich community here with many, many wonderful people who have incredible life stories. And so if you're interested in being on the show at some point, please write me at celebratelife0747 at gmail.com, or if you happen to know somebody, send me a little note and I'll get in touch with them. If you have any questions for the people that I do interview, also write me at celebratelife0747 at gmail.com and I'll make sure that we get that question over to the interviewee. Today I'm honored to have as my guest Todd Lockwood, who I've known for a number of years in different ways, and I'm excited to have you on the show, Todd. Really great to be here, Jerry. Thank you for taking the time. It's an honor. So we're going to celebrate your life today. Great. All right, and you guide us. You take us back and start us where you would like, and we'll go from there. Okay. Well, I was born in Philadelphia, 1951. We lived right across the Delaware River in Moorstown, New Jersey, which is down on the southern end of the state. And I lived there until I was six years old. I grew up in a pretty interesting family. Both of my parents were from quite unusual, interesting families. And my grandparents had a place just a mile down the road from us in Moorstown. So I got to spend a lot of time with them as a young child. That's a nice kid. Yeah, yeah. And so those years were sort of setting the stage for things that would come much later. I think my mother probably recognized this first. I had a deep fascination with things that were electrical. And I was mesmerized by the lights on the Christmas tree, the electric fan that we had in the living room. We eventually got a television. We had one of the first televisions on our street with a little round screen. And I was just fascinated by all this stuff. And so I guess I somehow absorbed some of the language of that area of electrical things. And by the time I was five years old, I was actually drawing electrical schematics. My goodness. And was really into this. Does this have anything to do with Ben Franklin and Philadelphia? I hadn't thought of that, but that's possible, I guess. And I was living in the shadow of an older brother. Eventually there were five of us. And I was number two. And my older brother was, at that time, was clearly the favorite child, which is not unusual being the oldest. And through our growing years, right through high school, he was doing everything really well. That would be the normal stuff. He was really good at sports. He was very involved in his student government and so on. There were a bunch of things that he was doing really well. I had no aptitude in any of those areas. Not at all. I was sort of left to my own devices to just develop my own passions. And I had to, I guess, find the fuel to keep those fires burning internally. My parents eventually, I think probably when I was around eight or ten, my parents started actually encouraging my development in this direction after we moved up to the Albany, New York area, which is where we landed next. What did your folks do, Tom? Well, my father actually worked for a large paper company. It was a company that my mother's father was one of the three founders of. Oh, my goodness. He and two of his brothers. And my grandfather was an extraordinary character, an inventor, a very successful businessman, a super bright guy. I think my father's first mistake in life was going to work for his father-in-law, who was a bit of a workaholic and expected the same out of his employees, sort of the way Elon Musk does today. And so there was always a little bit of friction in the family because of that. And here they are living a mile down the road from us in New Jersey. So during the week, if my grandfather saw my father's car parked in the driveway during the daytime, the next time he was home, he'd pick up the phone and call the house and say, what the hell are you doing there? How come you're not at work? So this played out in subtle ways. This stress played out on everybody. I was certainly included in that. So I was an emotional child, I could be set off pretty easily, not emotional in terms of I was the kid who would burst into tears in second grade sitting there for no particular reason. And it was just something that had built up in me for whatever reason and it just sort of would reach the boiling point. But again, my escape and my salvation were these passions that I had. So later on, the passions started to include music. My parents got me an upright piano and had me playing etudes in the basement every day. I didn't really like it all that much because the music that I was playing for my piano lessons was music that I'd never heard before and I couldn't really relate to it. We didn't listen to classical music in our house. We listened to Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra. And if I had been playing Beatles songs or something, early Beatles on the piano, that would have really got me going. So I struggled through it for about four years and finally got away from it. Also, in Albany, through my junior high school, I got involved in photography. I didn't start with a camera. I actually learned to develop prints before I started using a camera. So I got familiar with the dark room and the various processes and things. My dad had a huge box of old black and white negatives at the house and he said, yeah, go ahead and just take out whatever you want to use in there. So I would take these negatives to school and print them in the school dark room. Later on, I finally got a camera and started shooting. And I quickly came to the realization that I had some kind of an aptitude for shooting portraits. I actually began to get commissions to shoot portraits when I was about 15 years old, shooting mostly kids for various families that we knew. And the word would spread around the town that, hey, you ought to get Todd Lockwood to do some portraits of your kids. He's actually pretty good at it. So I became really comfortable with that and it was a way to connect with people because I was living a somewhat solitary life still. So that portrait passions had stayed with me and is still with me today. So the arts were kind of all bubbling up underneath the surface here. Yeah, so my mom was extremely creative, just mind-blowingly. She went to Smith College for a couple of years. Then she transferred to the Philadelphia College of Art and studied art there. And her portfolio from that two years that she was there is just mind-blowing. These figure studies and things that she did look unbelievably good. Not too long after that she met my dad and they got engaged and she got married. She made a conscious decision, I think, to make her children her top priority in life. So she never pursued a career in art. She definitely could have. Doesn't paint her or whatever she wanted to do. Instead, she was using that creativity around the house. Decorating the house for Christmas was one of her favorite things to do. And it was over the top incredible. Really interesting stuff. She had some toys that she had saved from when she was a child, including a Santa Claus that beautifully crafted Santa that stood about this tall that would go up on the fireplace mantel every Christmas with a bunch of these toys. And she commissioned an artist in the Adirondacks to do a painting that included all that stuff. So that painting would be up there with the Santa and the toys. It would be almost as if those things jumped out of the painting in reality now. So as a child, that was really mesmerizing to see that. How did that happen? It was really amazing. Do you have that painting? Yeah, I believe it's in my younger brother's house down in New Hampshire now. And so now this artistic streak on my mom's side, it comes from her grandfather was a well-known illustrator back in the turn of the century. He did a lot of covers for Ladies Home Journal, did like 35 of them actually. And one of those, probably his most famous one, was the cover of the 1903 Easter issue of Ladies Home Journal which has this wonderful, very straight-on portrait of a rabbit. It almost humanizes the rabbit in a way, you know. And it's like staring straight at you, you know. And anyway, he was a contemporary of N.C. Wyeth, Andrew Wyeth's father. They knew each other quite well and they were both in Philadelphia at the time. And so anyway, that creative gene worked its way through the family. My mother had one sister and it's the same thing. Her sister is very artistic and she has several, she also had five children and there's a couple of kids in that family that are also, you know, picked it up. So pretty interesting. And she saw this in you too, I'm sure. Yeah, yeah. So yeah, I was clearly the one. Me and my brother Herb, my youngest brother Herb, he also got it, definitely got it. He was extremely talented and musical and, you know, he was a cartoonist and a poet and he was just a creative guy who tragically died in a work accident in Burlington back in 1987. And so many years later, I pulled together some of his old friends and we created an annual arts prize for the state of Vermont called the Herb Lockwood Prize and that's named after my brother. What a tribute to your brother. That's a beautiful thing. He didn't have the, he had certainly all the creativity in him that I have but what he didn't have was he didn't have the stressful family situation. He was five years younger than the next oldest sibling. So he was almost raised separately from the rest of us. You know, by the time, you know, by the time he was, you know, in middle school, he was the only kid at home, you know. The rest of us were off at boarding schools and college and so on. Wow. Back to your early days, did you have people that you looked up to or you kind of tried to fashion your life after a little? Yeah, there were a few along the way. I mean, you know, certainly my grandfather, absolutely, because he was such a creative, interesting guy and creative in the sense of his creativity was mostly going into business and he was one day sitting at his desk. He was in the paper packaging business with his two brothers and one day sitting at his desk folding a piece of stationary origami style, you know, and folds it into what became the top of the milk carton, the pitcher pour spout. That was one of his inventions, yeah. Yeah, so he was, and a funny story too, we used to, my grandparents used to take us out to restaurants in Philadelphia and stuff as kids, you know, go to ice cream parlors and stuff. And if he saw a waitress opening the milk carton by, you know, sticking her finger in and pulling the thing open that way, he would, oh boy, he would give her the what too, you know. And he'd always have in his jacket pocket, he would have these little flip books that were like something about the size of a pack of matches that was like a little stack of post-its, you know, and you'd flip the thing and you'd see this little animated drawing and it showed the correct way to open the carton. And so he'd give those out everywhere, you know, and so, you know, and it was always fun because the waitress would invariably say, hey, you know a lot about this, you know. He said, well, there's a good reason for that. I invented it, you know. Amazing. Yeah, really wild. You saw this as a kid. Yeah. You saw him interact with the world and create. And the kind of cool thing about my dad's job, even though, you know, working for his father-in-law was a risky enterprise, was that he was largely an evangelist. He would go around to family-owned dairies up and down New York State. And the eastern strip of New York State from Messina down to Kingston and as far west as Syracuse. And he would visit these family-owned dairies and he'd have to convince the dairy operator to start doing milk cartons because everything was still in glass bottles at that point. Right, right. And it involved a pretty big investment on the part of the dairy because the machine that you'd need to fold and seal the cartons with milk was, you know, like a $50,000 investment, which back in, you know, 1960 would have been a huge amount of money. Right, right. And so my dad was really cut out for this. He had a, you know, he was great at making friends and he had a great sense of humor and he, you know, he could ingratiate himself to a dairy operator very quickly. Wow. And he often drove to those dairies in a 1938 Cadillac convertible, a roadster with a rumble seat, this white, classic thing, you know. That wasn't all that. He, you know, he bought it as a junker, you know, found it in a barn in Vermont and somewhere and got it all redone, put a modern engine in it. And so he'd show up at the dairies often in that car, which would right away get the owner of the place outside, you know. What a business card. Anyway, yeah, so, yeah. So there was a lot going on, you know. I can remember as a, I think when I was 10 years old, my parents felt that I was, you know, stable enough to be able to go on a big trip by myself. So they put me on an American Airlines jet in Albany and I flew all the way to Phoenix to visit my grandparents. They had a winter home out there. And that was really an amazing trip. My mother had pinned a $100 bill to my undershirt just in case I got in trouble. I'd have a way to get back home. And so there was a dude ranch right next door to my grandparents' place in Arizona. And we did these wonderful breakfast rides with the dude ranch where you'd get on horseback, you'd ride several, you know, a few miles out into the desert where they would be waiting for you this big breakfast spread, you know, being cooked over an open fire and everything, you know, with a couple of hands there doing all that for you. And it was just awesome, you know. So there were a lot of cool memories like that. I remember my grandparents taking all of us kids to Disneyland out in California at one point. And what happened at Disneyland for me, and also happened to me at the New York World's Fair, was I came away from those experiences with ideas for things that I could build in my workshop in my basement, you know, because that's where I spent a lot of my time. I'd get back in Albany. I would get home on the school bus. And the first thing I'd do is go down to my basement workshop and start building stuff, you know, or start tearing something apart to see how it worked. And maybe I needed the motors in it or the lights or whatever from this other toy I needed for another project that I was working on. So that was a place where a lot of creative things were going on. And then I started building these more elaborate kits that you could get. I built a shortwave radio and where I was able to hear radio stations around the world. And I built a little FM transmitter that allowed me to broadcast to nearby FM radios. And on the front of the instruction manual, it said, according to FCC regulation part 15, blah, blah, blah, do not in capital letters connect this device to an antenna longer than 10 feet, a wire antenna longer than 10 feet. Well, I looked at that and I said, well, that sounds like an invitation. So I strung a 100 foot antenna in the backyard between two trees. And every day after school I would turn the thing on and start broadcasting to some of my nearby neighbors and they all knew to tune in on their FM's. And I had a little turntable and it was spinning records. I had maybe eight songs that I was rotating. And I'd get on there until the latest news about what happened at school and what the ride on the bus was like and stuff. How old were you when you were doing this? I was in junior high school, so I must have been 11 or 12 years old. Wow, amazing. Yeah. And again, that was a way to connect with people. Where I had a little more sense of control. Because at the same time I also had to be looking over my shoulder all the time because the bullies in the neighborhood, they could see me coming a mile away. They could sense that I was a vulnerable kid and so I'd make an easy prey for them. So there was always this balance going on. Interesting. So you get to college at some point here? Yeah. What did you major in? Well, to back up just a little bit, I went to Northwood School in Lake Placid, which is a boarding school. I actually was a day student there, so I was living at home because our house, we lived in Lake Placid at that point. We moved up to Lake Placid from Albany full-time when the summer before I entered ninth grade. So I entered Northwood. I was a day student there. My older brother had been going to Albany Academy in Albany for his first two years of high school. So he entered Northwood at the same time I did, but he was two years ahead of me, which by the way sort of continued the legacy that was already in place there. He quickly became... He was voted most likely to succeed in his class. He was Czech captain of the soccer team. He was editor of the school newspaper. It was hard to compete with that. So again, that sort of from experience, I knew that I should just simply concentrate on my passions, which are completely different things than what he was into, and not try to compete with that. So one of my passions that had really taken root by high school was the portraits, shooting photographic portraits. So by the time I got to my senior year, I did all of the seniors in my class. There were only about 50 of us. This whole school only had maybe 150 students at that point. But I did all the seniors, but did them all differently. They weren't standard senior shots. For one thing, because there were so few of us, every student in the class got a full page in the book, in the yearbook. So I had a lot of freedom to work with the space and try different things. So we've got a few examples that I can show you. Yeah, some of the people, there was one where I turned the guy's image into a connect the dots thing. Oh my goodness. Just a goofy idea. A number of them were taken on location in different spots around, like Placid in the village, with some of the locals sometimes. And just a lot of different things. I sort of had a kind of a license to kill there in a way. And that was the yearbook's pictures. Yeah, yeah. And at our graduation, I won a special award for the work I did on that. Oh my gosh. That was pretty neat. That's phenomenal. But also while I was at Northwood, I had a wonderful English teacher by the name of Bill O'Neill. He would be in the list of mentors when you're asked about mentors. Absolutely. Because he recognized that I had a neck for language and for writing. And one of the things he did with us, I had him for my first three years as an English teacher. In all three years, he did the same thing where every weekend we had to write what he called a theme, which might be a short story. It might be something else. But he'd give us some parameters. And it had to be 500 words typically. And so I started cranking these things out. And he was like, wow. He was often using my work as the example for the class and reading it to the class. And I was going, wow, that's pretty cool. So I was getting some validation there, which was really great. And that added writing to my list of passions. I realized I've got a neck for this. I ought to do this once in a while and maybe even get more serious about it. So I ended up going to RIT, Rochester Institute of Technology. At the time, and this is in 1969, it was the only school that offered a four-year program in photography at the time. There are many, many now. There's probably hundreds of colleges that offer bachelor's. Codec in Rochester. Codec once had a bit to do with that school by the time I got there, it really didn't have much to do with it anymore. But it was the only four-year program in the country. And so it seemed like, well, yeah, I guess I want to go there. Years later, I realized that I probably should have been at Pratt or Rhode Island School of Design or somewhere like that. I should have gone to an art school instead. I already knew how to take pictures. I already had a pretty good understanding of the technology and the tools and all that. What I needed to learn more of is how to see and how to conceptualize the work. How to capture a certain thing with a photograph, a certain idea. I came up with this little thing. In my 20s, I came up with this little thing that went, a picture is worth a thousand words, but an idea is worth a thousand pictures. And it was sort of expressing, by the time I got to Vermont, I had a photo exhibition here in Burlington right after I got here and right after I got to Burlington. It was sort of the purpose of the show, and it was explained in the write-up on the wall that it was sort of celebrating my exit from photography, because I had sort of hit a dead end with it. I decided, you know what, it was that very problem. The ideas that I wanted to express were bigger than what I could do with portraits, which is mainly what I was doing for photography. Years later, I got back, in fact, 30 years later, I got back into portraits again with the suggestion of my daughter, my 13-year-old daughter, at the dinner table one night. It goes just out of the blue. Dad should start shooting portraits again. It's like, what did that come from? She lit a little flame in there that really started catching about a month later. I pulled out my Hasselblad camera and dusted it off and put a sheet up on the wall in the basement and got my younger son, Cooper, who was 10 years old at the time. He came to sit for me, just to do some lighting tests. In that group of test shots is a picture of Cooper that was just so interesting. There's something about it. He looks like, or not looks like, but your impression is that he's very wise. Even though he's only 10 years old, you get this sense of, wow, there's real depth to this kid. That just really got me thinking about portraits again. I launched a brand new series of work. It was a 30-year hiatus between giving it up when I first got to Burlington and when I started doing these portraits. It was 1977 versus 2007. I ended up doing a series of portraits where I concentrated on friends, on people I know because I found that if I knew the person, if I got them in the studio and I knew them, there would be a rapport immediately and the person would be more likely to let their real self shine through and they wouldn't be putting on some sort of a facade for me. That was truly the case. Then I did a few people that I didn't know personally but I thought I could probably work with. For example, in that series, I did a portrait of Madeline Kuhnen that she is funny. I loved it. She was sort of not crazy bad. She thought it made her look a little bit old because my technique I use is that I'm actually trying to bring out the wrinkles and things because those are... Well, as Richard Avedon used to say, those are sermons on bravado. That's real stuff that you can't get when you photograph a 20-year-old. They still have their baby face. Those are rings on the tree of life. Exactly. Anyway, 10 years after I took that portrait of Madeline Kuhnen, she used it on the front cover of her autobiography that came out just a few years ago. And now she looks at that picture and goes, I really like that picture. Funny about that. That's wonderful. So clearly the portraits have been a theme even though I backed away from it for a good period of time. During that 30-year hiatus, I got very involved in music. When I first came to Vermont, I resumed playing the piano, which I hadn't touched since I was probably 11. And at some point, I was writing my own little compositions and singing and just really playing hours a day. This started when I first got to Vermont. When I first arrived in Vermont in 77, I actually rented a house down in the Woodstock area and I lived down there for about a year and a half. But I was coming up to Burlington almost weekly and there seemed to be a lot more going on up here. And the music scene and stuff here was still really bubbling. It temporarily died when the drinking age went from 18 to 21 because most live music was happening in bars, of course. But you'd go down to Hunts on Lower Main Street and there'd be amazing local bands would be playing in there. So anyway, I was sort of hitting the end of that sweet era before the drinking age dropped. And back in Woodstock, I had a rented piano initially and then when I got to Burlington, I finally sprung for a baby grand Yamaha and put it in my apartment. And I actually got the piano dealer to teach me how to move the piano, how to move this six-foot baby grand piano around. It required just two people. And my brother Herb was living in Burlington at this point. He had moved here. And so we could easily have that piano packed up safely in the back of a U-Haul truck in under 15 minutes. Yeah, easily. And then anywhere we wanted to go, we could set it up. So I played in City Hall Park. I played in Battery Park. I played in the Black Rose Cafe in Winooski on and on and just over in Lake Placid. Took it over there once. What kind of music were you playing? You know, it was kind of a... It was mostly all my own compositions. Yeah, with some of them with lyrics, some not. And sort of somewhat Neil Young inspired. He was definitely one of my favorite songwriters and still is. But there was also, you know, the music that I was around when I was really little was coming through subtly. You know, the Frank Sinatra or, you know, just earlier pop music, you know. And so that... It got to a point when, after I got to Burlington, it got to a point where I wanted to start recording my own music. And so I bought a little bit of recording equipment as people commonly do now and set it up in my apartment. It got to a point where I started getting calls from other bands in the area who wanted to record there, wanted to know if I could record a demo for them, you know. And I said, well, I have no idea what I'm doing, but sure, come on over. And so I was learning by doing. I didn't have any training in music recording, but I was learning by doing. I also rented time at a real fancy studio that at the time was down in Sharon, Vermont, out in the woods was this million-dollar studio, this gorgeous studio where a number of well-known bands had recorded. So I was going down there when they had downtime. I'd go down and, you know, be in there for half a day or something and working on one of my own songs. And I would just grill the engineer who worked there. I'd grill him with questions constantly, you know. How does that work? How do you do that? How do you plug that in, you know? And I was building a knowledge just from being in a really top studio like that. And so I was learning. We recorded, you know, in my carriage house apartment in Burlington on, this was on Willard Street. We recorded some terrific albums, an album for Pinhead that was quite good. We recorded the End Zones in there, we recorded Nancy Bevin's album in there. A bunch of projects. Did you have your name for that studio yet? Early, yeah, very early on I decided we got to a point after a couple of projects, a couple of small projects were done, just demos. I said, okay, you know, this is turning into something. I got to give it a name, you know. So I'm over in, I just happened to be driving down the north way over in the Adirondacks. And I pass an albino crow standing next to the guardrail. Something you don't see every day. Pure white crow. And I said that's, there it is. There's the name of the studio right there. White crow, white crow. It ended up being white crow audio. That's what we called it. And it stuck. Yeah, good name. Yeah, yeah. So white crow, and then white crow grew. We, you know, eventually I had the opportunity to expand, you know, an investment I'd made in real estate out in Colorado when I was living out there right after college. I finally paid off and I had some money and I thought, you know what, it's time to really do this. You know, really do it now. You know, go to a scale that will attract artists from outside the state. So I rented an unfinished warehouse space down in the Pine Street neighborhood and then hired an architect. And we, you know, put a brand new interior building and built a studio, a real studio and upgraded all the equipment and everything. And then by stroke of luck, Fish, who was really starting to, you know, get some traction, they put their headquarters, their business headquarters, was in a building a block away from us on Pine Street. And they ended up recording their first two albums for Electra Records with white crow. And that caused a whole bunch of other bands who want to record with us, bands from Boston and Montreal and Toronto and L.A. and you name it, you know. So it really grew quickly and it was pretty exciting. We did a project with Alice Cooper at one point, having him in Burlington, that was just wild. And we did a Christmas album with Odetta, a wonderful, you know, historical figure there. It happened that she brought a bass player up from New York, an upright bass player who she had worked with and it was Spike Lee's father, Bill Lee. Oh my goodness. So the, you know, things were getting more and more interesting just by being in that realm, you know, working in that realm. Wasn't there a local politician that you also... Oh yes, indeed. So yeah, so we opened in that new location in 1985 and in 87 things were really starting to cruise along. I started thinking up some ideas for local projects that I could do and we already had a small record label called Burlington, which I released Nancy Bevan and the End Zones on and several other projects. They were all local bands, you know, and it was a way to get local music involved with White Crow at this new level, you know, which they wouldn't have been able to afford to come in there on their own, you know. So we were fronting the studio time just to make the projects possible. Wow. And I was coming up with ideas for projects and one day I thought, you know what, what if we were having a staff meeting at the studio and I said, what if we got Bernie in here and put a band behind him and had him sing his favorite songs? Wow. What would that be like, you know? Wow. And I had no idea at the time whether Bernie was musical or not. Right. It turns out he is not only not musical, he is un-musical, okay. He's helpless. He can't even tap his foot to a beat, you know. But we all know he's an excellent writer. He's an excellent public speaker. And so we capitalized on those things and sort of blended the music and his speaking ability into a thing, you know. So it's almost like rap. You're hearing Bernie talking, you know. He's talking the lyrics, not singing them. But in the Brooklyn accent, of course, you know, it's really effective. And so that album, it was only released on audio cassette back in 87. It sold like hotcakes in the area. It came out a month before Christmas and it was like the Christmas gift to get back then, you know, in the local area. Both by people that love Bernie and by people that, you know, were Republicans that would never have voted for him. But they were buying it as a gag present, you know. And then years later in 2015, Bernie had not yet announced that he was going to run for president, but I had a pretty good hunch that he was going to. I could kind of feel it coming. So I took the chance and we remastered that project and re-released it on CD and got it out. I believe it was out by Christmas in 2015. He announced about three or four months later that he was going to run for president. And then it just took off nationally. It was a snippet from it. It was played on every major TV talk show, all of them. Sometimes with Bernie on there live at the same time, you know. And sometimes not. Yeah, the thing just went crazy. And Bernie actually hit the Billboard charts under top new artists. Oh my God. He was number 113, I believe it was, for a couple of weeks, under top new artists, you know. So, yeah. Pretty wild. It is wild. Pretty wild. But so, you know, the studio play, you know, as a business it had, in that new location, it had about 10 good years. And then I could see the business starting to falter because the nationally the record business was faltering because of digital downloads. And people were, part of this was the record, the record industry's fault by making CDs way more expensive than 12-inch LPs were before that. You know, a typical LP would be eight or nine bucks. And when CDs came out, they were charging $16 for them, you know, or $20 even. And it was nutty. They were shooting them, you know, they were, and people were saying to hell with that, I'm not going to pay that kind of money for an album, and then they would borrow it from a friend and copy it, you know. Exactly. And that sort of ultimately killed the industry for a while. You know, and it was bands like Fish, they came into the business realizing that there was no money to be made in selling records anymore, where the money was really made, it's in live shows. So Fish started producing these fantastic three-day-long extravaganza, you know, and making a lot of money doing that. And people were more than happy to pay 150 bucks for a weekend thing, you know. And so it was a whole new business model. Fish really was one of the first bands to realize this. They were also one of the first bands to really use the internet in a big way. The only band that did that before them, I believe, was The Grateful Dead. Nobody else recognized the power of the internet yet. And Fish had one of the first truly successful websites where they were selling merchandise and maintaining a connection with their audience through the website, you know. But White Crow as a studio started to... Yeah, I could feel it slowing down. And I had to make the tough decision to pull the plug. And, you know, I was really sorry to see it go. It was a cool thing to have in Burlington. There was nothing else remotely like it around here. And it was pretty cool to have that here. But I was sort of facing a financial reality there. And I really had no choice. And then, you know, other things started filling that gap in my life. I had three kids along the way here. And I guess when I closed up White Crow, my youngest hadn't been born yet, but the first two had. And, you know, so my family definitely became a priority for a while. Well, still is, really. Still is a top priority in my life. My kids have really benefited from having a really supportive set of parents, you know. So that's something I'm really proud of. Do they have that creative gene in them? Any one of the three? Yeah. Well, my older son Foster, by the time he was four years old, he was pretty fluent on the Mac, on the Mac computer. I mean, he was really cranking, you know. And then while he was at Burlington High School, without even telling his mom or me, he went and took a couple of courses in writing C++ at Vermont College, you know. And for my community college on his own, you know. My goodness. And so by the time he got to college, he went to Tufts. He was, you know, getting pretty good at all this stuff. He was already beginning to write apps for the iPhone. Wow. And had a really good run at Tufts. But when he was at BHS, he and a few of his friends started a co-ed acapella group that still exists. Really? It's called the Burlington's. And they still have it there. Maybe they just replaced the students that graduate, you know. Right. And Foster was one of the founding members of that group. My daughter was also in the Burlington's when she was three years behind him. Great name. Yeah. Yeah. They were great. They were really great. So he ended up in the, he got accepted into the co-ed acapella group at Tufts, which is big time. Wow. With like Ivy level acapella, which is very, very competitive. Right. And there were 200 people, when he was a freshman, trying to, you know, applying to get into that group, there were 200 other people trying to get in. There were only four openings. Wow. And he managed to score one of those openings. Yeah. And so at the little gathering where they announced who the new members were, they handed him a sheet of paper with the lyrics to the National Anthem on it. He said, you got to learn this by Friday. We're singing live on national television at Fenway for a Red Sox game. That was his first gig with them. That's great. That's great. Unbelievable. Oh, geez. And then my daughter, Anna, she went to NYU. She went to the Gallatin School there where you design your own major, basically. Wow. And you come up typically with three different areas of study that are usually not related to each other. And what you're trying to do is defend the idea that these things are related. And that's what you ultimately write your thesis on is how these areas are related. So her three areas were comedy, writing, and women's studies. Wow. Those three things. Yeah. And so she got involved in the sketch comedy group at NYU, which also is pretty big time. They get audiences that include a lot of people that are outside of NYU. In the city, yeah. And she was not only in the group as a performer, but she, because she had been in a bunch of plays at BHS who had some stage experience. She was not only a performer, but she wrote a lot of the material. And so that was pretty amazing. I was going down. Every time they had a show, I'd go down there. I'd fly down on top on JetBlue and go down to the city to see their show. And it was just amazing. And then my youngest, Cooper, he is interesting. He had a very different situation at BHS. He was not into theater, and he wasn't into music. He really had his own passions. So sort of like me growing up, had his own passions. Exactly. And he had a small group of very close friends where Foster and Anna both had big communities of friends. And he and one of his buddies, Junior Year, they both made the decision to go into the Marine Corps, which is wild because I never served in the armed forces. My dad did, but in terms of my generation, none of my siblings did either. And so this was like all new territory. So my Cooper went into the Marine Corps about, I think it was about a year after graduation from BHS. He worked construction before that and did some other, did some traveling as well. Did some world traveling. We got him on a couple of adventure tours where you go with a group of kids of your age. And so he already had a little bit of international travel experience under his belt before getting to the Marines, which was great. And after the Marines, he ended up deciding construction was something he was really passionate about and really interested in. So he ended up majoring in construction engineering at Cal Poly out in California. He just graduated this May and he got hired immediately by a large construction company based in California and he's off and running. Good job, dad. Thank you. I'm super proud of all three of them. They're really great people. They're really wonderful people. And I'm just so inspired by them. It's pretty wild to think because I was inspiring them when they were younger. But to have them inspiring me now is just wild. I didn't see that coming. It's really a great thing. I think of that, your daughter at 13 Saint Dad photography. Yeah. There you go. Yeah. Yeah. My mom had passed away about six months or a year before that and before Anna came out with that. And I often thought that it might have been some way or other. It was my mother speaking through her because my mother would have loved to have seen me go back to that. She always loved my portraits. She thought I probably should have gotten away from it. But it had run its course. I did a lot of writing when I got to Vermont. While I was standing at Woodstock, that first year in Vermont, I was writing short stories and getting them published in an arts weekly over in the Adirondacks. And really enjoying it. Really finding it inspiring. And I've been doing some fiction writing in the recent years up here. And so I intend to keep that going too. So we're near the end of our show. But a question for you. Yeah. A couple of questions for you. One is with all these different creative pieces to you. Do you ever get in a situation where which road do I go down? Or do they seem to just fall in place as the next? Yeah. They seem to coexist pretty well now. I do remember points in the past feeling like I need to do one thing. I thought maybe I was a victim of being a jack of all trades and a master of none. And I think I've come to learn that it's really all the same thing. It's just different ways of expressing it. I have this wealth of experience now to draw on. And I can put that out in any language that I want. The electrical schematics that I was drawing when I was five years old, that was a language that I had somehow absorbed. And I was able to speak that way on paper. And then I think my sort of innate writing ability, I never, well again I studied, the only place I studied writing was in high school. And I think that was largely from my mother who read to us like a lot when we were young. When we were really little, we'd be on the couch with her and she would be reading us stories. And it wasn't just reading the same book over and over and over. She would have different things. And I think it was building that language muscle inside of me. And being able to speak in a printed word. Any words of wisdom that you want to share with the audience about life? Yeah, I guess my advice would be to young people especially is find your passion and stick with it. And it doesn't have to be just one thing, but whatever it or they are, stick with it. And keep digging. Time is the thing you can't control, but it's the most important thing. If enough time goes by and you're still passionate about something, you're going to get good at it. You're going to get really good at it. And that only happens if you stay in the game. So I think it's super important to stay with it. I felt a little bit conflicted growing up because I often felt like I had to make businesses out of my creative passions. Which sometimes got in the way, trying to make money at something isn't necessarily the best way to go. Sometimes it's better to be working an ordinary job to support your art. So you can then not have to compromise. Put that much pressure on that. Right, and not compromise your art. It depends on who you are and what your situation is. If we have just another minute, this is an amazing story. A guy that I went to elementary school with in Albany. We were in the same class from first, second, third, fourth grade. We became good buddies. We lived in the same neighborhood. And then we sort of lost track of each other when we got into high school and stuff, because I went to Northwood and he was in school down in Albany and so on. He became a very proficient hockey player. And his father had been a professional hockey player. So it was all pointed toward hockey. There was no question this guy was going to be an NHL player at some point. So he went off to a New England boarding school and was on a full hockey scholarship and so on. He got to his senior year and he couldn't figure out what he wanted to major in in college. His parents were insisting, even as good as he was at hockey, they were insisting that he keep his education going and go to college and study something. But he couldn't figure out what he wanted to major in. And during that senior year he had one required art class. And the teacher the first day handed everybody a sheet of white paper and a pencil and put a vase of flowers or something up on the front table and said, give it your best shot. I know most you've never done this before. So he just starts, you know, he's just not even trying. He's just sort of almost scribbling on the paper and creates this masterpiece. He didn't know he had this. He said, how did I know how to do that, you know? And the teacher looked at it and said, young man, you're looking at your future right there. So he went to Bowdoin, major in fine art, still played hockey because that got him a scholarship. The hockey got him a scholarship at Bowdoin. But there was a famous artist in residence at Bowdoin at the time. I forget the artist's name but he was from New York City and as soon as he saw what Steve was capable of, he took him under his wing and said, I'm going to work with you. And then after Bowdoin, he got a master's in painting at Smith. Oh my God. He was amusingly, he was the only male student at Smith at the time and a pretty good looking guy. So it was a pretty interesting situation there. But the same thing happened. There were two sisters teaching at Smith who were both well-known painters and once they saw Steve's work, they took him under their wing as well and they just wanted to make sure he didn't do anything dumb and head off on some side road that wasn't going to go anywhere and encourage him to strengthen certain aspects of his eye, his ability to see and so on. And so by gosh, probably within 10 years of graduating from Smith, I'd say, I think it was maybe eight years, he had his first solo exhibition in New York City in Soho and he's a landscape painter. So he was doing landscape at a time when it was the last thing you'd want to be introducing in New York City. Nobody else was doing landscape in the 80s. It was like, why would you do landscape? But he stuck to his guns. He stuck to his guns. He didn't let the prevailing wind blow him off his passion. So he stayed with landscape. He is now considered, I mean, and for some time has been considered one of the most important painters in the U.S. and has works. He has 10 and he paints huge. Some of these paintings are 10 feet wide and they're magnificent. They're just incredible to look at. His name is Stephen Hennick. And he lives down in the Berkshires. He has a big studio at Mass Mocha down there. And he's represented by the Marlboro Gallery in New York, which is the top commercial gallery in New York City, you know. And it just took that one class. Yep. And so he's, yeah. So it just happens, his daughter went to UVM and just graduated this year. So for the past four years, he's been up here a lot and we've gotten to sort of rekindle our reconnect. Oh, that's wonderful. Yeah, it's been fantastic. And really interesting life he's had, you know. Wow. Fascinating. Absolutely fascinating. This has been a wonderful session with you. Yeah, really, really, really. We haven't even talked about the Broadigan Library. Oh, yeah, yeah. I have to do a part two here. Okay. Thank you so much. You're welcome. Very good. Thanks.