Put a bunch of rock 'n roll musicians around a table and inevitably they start one-upping each other with wild stories about life on the road -- the good gigs, the dumpy clubs where their sound systems caught fire, crazy women who hid in their vans, crazier husbands who came after them, chiseling club owners....the list goes on.
Having hung around musicians for much of the past 30 years, I thought I'd heard most of those tales until a newspaper colleague enthralled me one afternoon by recounting the summer of 1966 when he'd played in an "imposter" band all across West Texas, Colorado, Wyoming and even Montana, where Red Man-chewing cowboys tried to give the foursome unwanted hair cuts with sheep shears.
Maybe it speaks volumes about my naivete, but I'd never imagined that any band would have the nerve to try and pass themselves off as another, real-live group that actually had a record on the radio. What guts. What craziness. What idiots to try and pull that off!
The longer I thought about that story, the more it begged to be told in some form -- and so you have "The Romeo Boys."

The first story of mine published, "Song For A Summer Night," I wrote on a dare -- a dare with myself. Surprisingly, it also was about a musician. In the summer of 1979, I was spending quite a few evenings each week warming a bar stool and listening to a terrific country-rock band, Fall River Road, that was extremely popular in the Colorado Springs region. They did a cover of "Orange Blossom Special" that can still make me smile, just from memory.
At that time, a local university literary anthology was advertising for stories and poems from Western writers. It wanted "voices of the West" or something just as pretentious. What the hell, I told myself? I'd write a story and see if I had any juice for fiction. Hang around a band long enough and, even from a distance, you become aware of the personal trials afflicting them. In Fall River Road's case, it was the question of whether to take the big leap and try for Nashville glory or to just stay put and enjoy small-town fame. And that idea, of a successful singer coming home to play a reunion show with his small-town friends, became my story.
Which the anthology editor gobbled up and called brilliant. That was nice to hear, but the story wasn't brilliant, of course. You can still find it in Writers Forum 6, University of Colorado-Colorado Springs. While my tale has all the overwrought weaknesses of a beginning writer, you should know that volume also contains several early poems by Yusef Komunyakaa, who later received the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.
Yes I'm standing in reflected glory. Damn straight.

I started writing fiction while in college, had some small success getting a couple of stories published, and then went into newspaper reporting full-time in 1979. During my journalism career, like many reporters, I had a novel or two underway in desk drawers and typewriter cases. In my boxes of manuscripts is something like a police procedural as well as a partially written comic novel.
In 1993, I met Lily Susser, a Holocaust survivor, and spent one lunch a week, for most of a year, helping her remember her time in the camps so that she could write her memoirs for the National Holocaust Museum, which she did.
It actually wasn't until I heard the story from my friend of the summer he spent in an "imposter band" that my desire to write and publish that particular story caught fire. It was the most original story I'd ever heard and so I began work on it in 2004.

I am a U.S. Government-issued Air Force brat and proud of it.
My father was a World War II B-24 gunner who is officially credited by the U.S. Army Air Force with shooting down two Jap fighter planes over New Guinea. Unofficially, my dad would tell you he didn't. Oh, he knocked pieces off a Jap "Tony" fighter on one mission, but the bastard didn't flame up or even smoke. He just dove away from my dad's bomber and that was almost as good as knocking him down.
When Korea broke out in 1950, Ray Roper volunteered to go back into service and he became a blue-suited officer. He stayed in uniform long enough to win a trip to Vietnam in 1972 to turn off the lights on the U.S. air war there. I freely admit having a military dad warped my view of the world. I thought civilian kids just had a raw deal.
How that plays into "The Romeo Boys" is I loosely -- very loosely -- based my main character on my older brother. My family was stationed in Ankara, Turkey, in the summer of 1966 when my brother had to return to Colorado to get enrolled in college or risk being drafted into the Army and sent to Vietnam. The draft eventually caught up with him in 1970, but that is a different story.
There is one striking memory from that time that left its trail all the way to "The Romeo Boys."
We had no television in Turkey, a blessing I later appreciated, so my family went to the American library at least once a week. One particular day, 11-year-old me was descending the stairs with my brother when a young man, possibly 15 at most, came in the door and started up the stairs. He froze us. He looked like a Beatle. The kid's hair was shaggy and long. He had on bright-colored pants and a turtleneck and Beatle boots. He was so incredibly "mod" that two airmen in front of us -- still greasing their hair -- began jeering and taunting him for "looking like a girl." I remember the kid just steeled himself and went past us, leaving us wide-eyed. We'd just seen the future and didn't realize it.
But perhaps I did because, man, I thought he was cool.