John was born in Ketchikan, Alaska, raised in Northern California, and immigrated to Canada in the early Seventies. His musical education was growing up in the Bay Area in the Sixties and absorbing the great music that he encountered there as a teenager. This included the psychedelic bands like the Grateful Dead, and then Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Big Brother and the Holding Company, Moby Grape, Steve Miller, Santana, the Doors, Allman Brothers, Eric Burden and the Animals, Creedence Clearwater, Taj Mahal, Elvin Bishop, the Charlatans, Tower of Power, and many more. Groups like Cream came through on tour, John Lee Hooker, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, Canned Heat, and the hippie subculture in the Bay Area was quickly introduced to Chicago Blues greats like Muddy Waters, James Cotton, Little Walter, Freddie King, BB King, Buddy Guy, and Albert King. He spent hours listening to Bay Area radio stations serving up a tasty mix of R&B and Soul music 24 hours a day. Radio stations like KDIA and KFRC documented the era of the Summer of Love and seemly blasted out every window.Like many of his generation, the inspiration for his musical journey really began with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones when they first toured America. Swept up in the wave of Beatlemania, all the hip kids began to wear their hair long and wore pointy Beatle boots, paisley shirts, beads, amulets, and tight pants. He got his ear pierced and got beat up regularly by the ‘greasers”, as we use to called them. He spent many weekends going to shows at the Fillmore West in San Francisco, hung out at Golden Gate Park and the Haight Ashbury frequently, and attended free rock concerts that were held throughout the Bay Area. He was at the historic Human Be-in at Golden Gate Park in 1968. John’s first guitar was a Silvertone Arch Top that he somehow magically plugged into his mother’s stereo, and then promptly blew out the speakers. John’s music has its roots and its beginnings from his powers of observation gleaned from those magical and mystical times…and from more serious themes while ‘adulting’ as the years passed. His wry and mildly sardonic songwriting is a direct reflection of his own personal experience; the triumphs, pain, and failures of relationships, yet he still finds optimism even in the darkest places where many of these stories lay waiting to be told. Now living in the Slocan Valley, nestled in the mountains of British Columbia, John continues to write songs and play with his band Friendly Giants. They are recording their first LP.