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JENNIFER TOFFEL, JIM MCCRARY, WILLIAM WRIGHT AND UNKNOWN
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We did about a year and a half opening for Fleetwood Mac. But our favorite traveling partners were people like the Marshall Tucker Band, Charlie Daniels as well as other Southern Rock mainstays of that era. We all spoke the same language and had a gentlemanly respect for each other. |
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| After "long strange trip" with my friend Sanford, I took some time off to collect myself after the grueling schedule that we had maintained for so long. I started getting into co-writing with other people like Kenny Loggins, Larry Carlton and eventually Gregg Allman. |
 | During that time I also did a number of commercials as a vocalist and had quite a few songs placed in motion pictures. But even though the money was good I still longed for the creative challenge of the music I was closest to. | A friend of mine had this great musician/songwriter hang that was actually his own recording studio in a large commercial space in Hollywood. I started coming over a few nights a week and playing and writing songs with some of the other people that came through. |
 | Got to meet and play with a lot of great musicians like Ivan Neville and Hutch Hutchinson and great songwriters like Michael Smotherman. It charged me up again to be around guys like that and around that time is when I started writing the kinds of songs that I always wanted to sing.. | Don Henley heard a few of the things and called me up one day and asked me what I was doing with this stuff. I said, not a lot. Got any ideas? And of course he did have good idea. He took me over and introduced me to Irving Azoff and Irving gave me some dough to put together a band and a showcase |
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| It was great, here was one of the best opportunities for me in a while and so we put together John Townsend and Friends and did this spectacular showcase for several hundred folks at S.I.R. in Hollywood and no one that heard it could understand why I didn’t get signed to MCA until several days after the showcase. | I read in one of the trades where Irving had just left MCA to start his own label, Giant Records. End of story. The one great thing that happened is that I got to meet Henley. He’s a straight shooter in my book. He gave me a real shot and he is a prince among men.. |
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One autumn evening in 1991, I picked up a local paper and noticed that The Gregg Allman Band was playing just a few miles from where I was living at the time. So I got dressed and drove over to the Country Club in Reseda and arrived just in time to see the band getting out of a limo going into the club. |
| It was great seeing Gregg and hearing all that incredible music after being held captive by alien jingle writer bondage for so long. After the show, Gregg invited me up to his home above San Francisco to do some writing. I only realized when I arrived at his house that the whole band was staying there and rehearsing for a tour. |
 | We got in a little writing, I got to know the guys in the band better and after a couple of days Gregg came to me and said, “oh by the way, you’re in the band”. It was the greatest shot in the arm I’d had in a long time. So I stayed up one night and learned a lot of great Allman Brothers songs and for the next year and a half, got to play them with the real guys. | What a total blast that was. I owe Gregg a lot for lighting a fire under me and for making me get off my butt and get back in it all the way. And after another nice run, The Allman Brothers got back together and the band went home. |
| Then I got a call from my friend Danny Toler who, along with his brother Frankie, were the guitar player and drummer in Gregg’s solo band. Danny wanted me to come down to Sarasota and see if we could put together a band. | So, with no hesitation I set out for Florida. The Townsend/Toler Band did some recording right off the bat to see if we could find something that worked for us. The recording turned out great but we had a hard time selling it. So we hit the road and played pretty much every decent club up and down the length of the east coast, and some that were not so decent. |
 | We were able to make a little dough but with no visible avenue of advancement, another winged idea slowly fluttered back to earth. I really enjoyed that band. Great players and great music. Danny and I wrote a few things that will surface in the near future. |
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