If you ask Gary Floater what keeps him going after surviving the inevitable ups and downs of four decades of the entertainment business and after influencing three generations of country artists with his honest and bleary-eyed songwriting, he'll tell you: it started out all for the money.
And just when he seemed to be in reach of the financial decadence he'd always dreamed about - at the age of 25 - his financial prospects deteriorated after a string of ill-advised televised comments and international marriages that kept Gary from returning to the country of his birth.
Maybe it was due to lingering bitterness over his embarrassing late night televised falling-out with Telly Savalas. Maybe the distance from the red dirt of his Missouri home snuffed Gary's creative spark. Whatever the reason, from 1983 to 1993, during ten years, Gary wrote only two songs, "Grandpa's Promise" and "A Whole Lot Further To Fall."
When he was penniless and stranded in the Netherlands, selling fruit to Dutch businessmen in the subway stations of Amersterdam, that's when the songwriting began again. And that's when it became all about the music.
If you told the scruffy haired young man who grew up near in Miami, Missouri that he would write hit songs one day that inspired hundreds to sing along, to tunes like "That's When the Eagle Screams" and "It's High Time This Old Cowboy Quit Getting So Goldanged High," he wouldn't have believed you.
But he did. He's been to hell and back.
For the money. For the music. And for you - the fans.
Ten years since his last major label release, a group of artists who have been moved by Gary's works have joined together in a big public thank you to a man who made country music and did it his way.
The Floater Way.
A Hero Never Learns: The Songs of Gary Floater
Now available on Hyena Family Records