The Andantes had gone through a few changes and when it was down to Don and Daryl Gutheil, Don Young and I joined forces and shortened the name to simply Andante. Our agent and good friend at the time was Don Edwards, an Illinois transplant. With his connections in the midwest USA we extended the band's traveling range to North and South Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Montana, Idaho, Washington and Kansas. Up until this time most of the gigs I had been doing were one-nighters. We branched out into the club/bar scene with this band. Among the highlights were warming up in concert for John Denver at a small college in Racine, Wisconsin and having Jos� Feliciano sit in after a concert he had performed in Moscow, Idaho. He played bass and we did some R&B tunes. Both were real nice gentlemen.
During this tenure Don Edwards had been in contact with the Bruce Allen Agency in Vancouver. One agent/affiliate came out to hear us in Regina and there we struck up a friendship with Shelly Seigel who would later found Mushroom Records. We made it up to Vancouver after some NW US dates and Shelly took us to record a demo in a small studio owned by Tom Northcott. Unfortunately, nothing ever came of it. Another agency we worked with at the time was Actron out of Saskatoon. It was run by David Tkachuk, now a Senator in the Canadian Government!!
It was on one of our Northern US tours that we passed through Billings, Montana and spent some time with Chan Romero. I played him a dub of my song 29 One-Nighters. He liked it and proceeded to publish it with his "Warrior Tunes" thus my becoming a writer affiliate with the performing rights agency BMI. By osmosis I became an affiliate with BMI Canada which in turn became Procan and is now called Socan.
