GONN - Life Away From The Band

Life Away From The Band

Craig Moore has remained active in music throughout his life and has been involved in numerous bands over the years and up to the present, although he has not been a full-time member of a rock band since 1987. He also produced LP's for blues legend Luther Allison Gonna Be A Live One In Here Tonight (1979), and southern rockers The Dave Chastain Band Rockin' Roulette (1980), among others. Former Ilmo Smokehouse bandmates Slink Rand & Dennis Tieken, and GONN songwriting partner Rex Garrett all made guest appearances on his 1989 solo LP AGONNAGAIN. He met his wife Marina while touring Volgograd, Russia (formerly Stalingrad) after the 2001 GONN European tour. He is the owner of a collectible records/pop culture shop called Younger than Yesterday and lives in Peoria, Illinois. His most recent solo album is Still Tomorrow Yesterday, which came out in 2004 and features guest performances by friends Jim McCarty and Chris Dreja from the Yardbirds, and Eddie Phillips of The Creation. Through October into mid-November 2008 he toured on bass and vocals as special guest on THE FUZZTONES GONN PRIMITIVE TOUR of Europe with Fuzztones Rudi Protrudi, Mike Czekaj and Lana Loveland, and UK guitarist Bob Hughes from the Yorkshire group Flight 13'. A live album of their set, which they performed all over Germany, Italy, France, Holland, Belgium and Norway, awaits an undetermined release date. YouTube videos of the recent tour abound.

Gerry Gabel is the head of the music department at Texas Christian University and has authored and produced several orchestral compositions. He was also in Ilmo Smokehouse with Craig Moore in the early 1970s, and scored and conducted a string quartet for a track on Moore's 2004 album. Most recently he has been involved in producing concert performances in a musical exchange program with similar music departments at universities in Ukraine. Several of Gabel's orchestral compositions will be performed in 2009/2010 in Ukraine, and he has been commissioned to write a special piece for one of these 2010 performances.

Rex Garrett and Dave Johnson performed with several bands throughout the 1970s and early 1980s. Each has children that now play in rock bands, among them Dana Johnson whose first band Urban Discipline is featured on a bonus cut on Gonn with the Wind performing a Craig Moore song. Rex & wife Dee Dee's son Ryan has recorded and toured on bass with various rock groups, and Garrett's oldest son Brent produced the GONN Iowa Hall of Fame Induction promotional DVD and the live-in-Cleveland videos you can see on their Myspace page.

Larry LaMaster retired from an insurance company in the '90s and now lives with wife Gayle near Kansas City, Missouri. Dave Johnson is with JCPenney; Rex Garrett works on the Santa Fe Railroad like his father before him and still lives in Fort Madison, Iowa; Gary Stepp is a foreman at a factory, and has been elected to the city council in Keokuk, where he still lives with wife June. Brent Colvin is married and working in construction in northeastern Iowa.

While other members came and went before the end of GONN in 1969, it is only the first two line-ups that the band actually recognizes as the 'real' GONN: