I grew up listening to Big Band Music, all the great crooners like Sinatra, Martin and Crosby. Rogers and Hammerstein musicals were always spinning on my folk’s turntable as well. My older brother got into the whole folk music scene too, so Peter, Paul and Mary, along with the Kingston Trio, became part of my musical upbringing. But it wasn’t until the Beatles came along that I was truly bitten by the rock ‘n roll bug. When I saw those incredible guitars: Paul’s Hofner, George’s Gretsch, and John’s Rickenbacker (not to mention all the screaming girls) I knew I had found my calling. Three of my friends and I put together a “band” where we made cut out cardboard guitars and drums in order to lip sync "Meet the Beatles" at backyard parties and elementary school talent shows. We even perfected our Liverpool accents to impress the girls! However, it wasn’t long before I had my first “real” guitar, an awful $19 Stella guitar that made my fingers bleed, but I kept pressing on and taught myself how to play.

Like most of my friends, I spent a lot of time in various parents' living rooms or garages irritating the neighbors while we learned our chops. My first real band was in junior high school, but things got more serious when I got into high school where we competed in local talent shows and played dances throughout the area. We covered songs by bands like The Chambers Brothers, Neil Young and Crazy Horse, Deep Purple, Steppenwolf, and others.

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My musical direction took quite a different route half-way through my senior year in high school when I gave my life to Christ. Suddenly, all I wanted to do was to share my new life and spread the Gospel using rock 'n roll music, so the following year I started my first Christian band, Crossroads. There was very little contemporary Christian rock in those days that we were aware of, so we began rearranging old hymns by putting in rock guitar hooks, doing cover songs like "Jesus Is Just Alright". We played anywhere and everywhere we could, including parks, Christian coffee bars around Southern California and making our way down to the Naval Training Center in San Diego to share our faith with the sailors-in-training. The first time we played in a church, some folks walked out before we began when they spotted my electric guitar, considering it a “tool of the devil”!

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After moving to Seattle to in order to attend Bible college, I started a long-running band, Cypress, that included my wife, Marilyn, and several college mates. We played all over the Pacific Northwest and shared the bill with artists like Darrell Mansfield, Sweet Comfort Band, and Servant. As the years went by, I began to realize that the Lord was calling me in a whole new direction with a genre that didn’t even exist then, Christian heavy metal. It took over a year-and-a-half of praying and looking before the lineup for BLOODGOOD was complete in late 1984. A few months later, our very first show was opening up for Stryper in Seattle. Soon after that, Darrell Mansfield was playing our demo cassette, Metal Missionaries, at Frontline Records down in Costa Mesa. We would eventually sign a recording contract and begin tracking our first self-titled album.

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Almost forty years later with a full-length documentary, Trenches of Rock, records, videos, newspaper, magazine, radio and television interviews and countless tours, BLOODGOOD continues to perform and write music that glorifies Jesus and allows me to work and play with my best friends.