I live on Route 66 in northern Arizona in the small mountain town of Williams, the gateway to the Grand Canyon.
To Carlos Rego! Thank you for the very thoughtful questions. I would like to write a short story based on these questions.
The endless summer 1968, I was living on the beach on Lake Michigan drinking beer, smoking pot, and dropping acid at sunset.
This inland sea is bigger than the United Kingdom. It’s great for surfing and sailing.
Little did I know, I would be the last hippie standing burned out from fast living. Every acid trip was outrageous except for the last one, it was a bummer. I did not know I had a soul until I lost it. Drifting aimlessly in the void, I waited for the sun to come up hoping to end this bad trip, but the nightmare was just beginning. I could not recognize friends and family, nor could I articulate a sentence.
I wandered about like an empty body for a year. I could not hold a job or function normally. I did something I never had done in my short little life; I prayed, hoping God was real and not just another hallucination of my own creation. I needed proof and I got it. The experience was beyond dead religion. All I know is that there is something beyond this existence. Desperation caused me to reach out. Apparently that is what it takes to reconnect. A new spirit came into me and I began to write songs to communicate in metaphor the journey from darkness to light. The words of life are the songs of the Harbinger Lp with a folk band of harmony and instrumentation. This body of work was recorded with no echo that accounts for natural sound. I was no longer alone and had like-minded friends.
A group of 300 people came together around these songs and slowly morphed into a religious cult. You don’t know you’re in a cult when you’re in it and I unknowingly slipped away from what I knew to be true. After seven years, I left the group and was alone again and reconnected. Freedom is loneliness.
My biggest musical influence was the Moody Blues and the late great Gordon Lightfoot.
I continued writing songs with no audience to present them to until the las ten years. These songs are not necessarily for entertainment but for soul searching as well.
In 2007, A musical journalist named Matt Prokack from Los Angeles discovered me and conducted an interview. Matt was looking for a clean LP for reissue and we found an Ode to Quetzalcoatl and Harbinger set in good shape. Matt sent these Lps to Guerssen and they offered me a contract. What a surprise and a great feeling to be on a label. I was validated and discovered. I took my music more seriously.
I did my first overseas tour in Denmark in 2018. More recently, I toured London, Lisbon, Germany and Belgium in May of 2023 and now have an upcoming concert in Lleida, Spain on March 16th at the MUD Festival.
I have more than enough songs to do another LP; the future is full.
I will always write music and document history as I have traveled the USA and now Europe.
- David Bixby
Dave Bixby 