Happy Birthday to The Tooners' Rocktasia CD which is twenty years old. On a sad note, Rocktasia had four songs which were written or co-written by songwriters other than Neal Warner and Greg Piper of The Tooners and unfortunately, those folks have not had an easy past twenty years. Cindy Mady who co-wrote Backstabber with Greg Piper has disappeared so I really don't know whatever happened to her but the next writer with a song on the CD is Don Coorough who wrote They Died Young and his story is not a happy one.
THEY DIED YOUNG
Sometime in the late nineteen-nineties Don decided to chuck it all and went "off the grid". He became homeless and found his way to Arizona. In Arizona he became a poet which is what he claimed to be when I first met him back in the Sixties. He had asked me to write some music to his poems hoping to turn them into songs. Unfortunately he held to the philosophy that poetry didn't have to rhyme while I contended that song lyrics did have to rhyme so I never managed to put his poems to music. Don eventually started writing rhymes and joined the pre-Tooners band, Womanizer, as the bass player before Greg Piper joined the band. In his band before Womanizer Don had written the song They Died Young and he, on guitar and Greg on bass, recorded a demo of the song. When The Tooners rerecorded They Died Young for the Rocktasia CD we kept his original arrangement intact as much as possible.
After Don quit Womanizer, then eventually his girl friend, his job, the state of California, his friends, steady employment and a roof over his head, he enrolled in a program the state of Arizona started that offered a free dorm room and college tuition to homeless people and Don began poetry classes. It was there that he met Jared Lee Loughner, the mass murder and potential assassin of U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords and was interviewed about Loughner by Christiane Amanpour.
Don has since published a poetry blog called Shoreline Driftwood,
(http://shorelinedriftwood.blogspot.com/) and a book of poetry (available here). But his whereabouts as of now are still unknown.
(http://shorelinedriftwood.blogspot.com/) and a book of poetry (available here). But his whereabouts as of now are still unknown.
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