"What has two arms, two legs and no ears?” The answer to that riddle, as any good ole’ boy working in the country music industry in the early ’80s would have known, was Joe Galante, the brash young New Yorker who was dispatched from RCA corporate headquarters to Music City in 1973 to become manager of administration for RCA Records Nashville. Though its small Music Square West office was then considered a hillbilly branch of New York or Los Angeles headquarters, RCA Nashville enjoyed an acclaimed legacy of talent, leadership and musical heritage that reached back to the 1920s. By the time Joe Galante moved to Music City, RCA or one of its earlier incarnations (Victor, Bluebird) had been home to artists such as Jimmie Rodgers, The Carter Family, Bill Monroe, Ernest Tubb, Kitty Wells, Chet Atkins, Porter Wagoner, Eddy Arnold, Jim Reeves, Elvis Presley, Hank Snow, Roger Miller, Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings and Dolly Parton, just to name-drop a few. When Galante arrived, RCA was being run by two country music heavyweights: artist/musician/producer Chet Atkins, and producer Jerry Bradley, son of the legendary Owen Bradley.
So what in the hell did a smart-ass, Italian, Yankee pencil pusher know about country music? Most felt he didn’t know a thing, though their criticisms were cloaked in sweet-talking, hypocrisy-drenched, good-old Southern hospitality. The riddle itself about arms, legs and ears was a pointed reminder that Galante was not a producer, or a publisher, or a musician; he had not been drawn out of the backyard well from which Nashville record labels had typically selected their management. The boy wasn’t from here. He talked funny, too quickly, too directly, and, in fact, he was downright rude. Who were his people anyway?
The riddle made the rounds of Music Row and the watering holes that served as second offices for label executives, but the person being made fun of ultimately had the last laugh. By 1982, Atkins and Bradley were gone, and fewer than 10 years after he arrived, Joe Galante was named head of RCA’s Nashville division. At 32, he became the youngest person ever named to run a major country record label. He was also the first such executive to rise through the ranks of marketing, rather than A&R, or the creative side.
“When he was named to head the label, Music Row was extremely distrustful of him,” says journalist and country music historian Robert K. Oermann. “He was the first bean-counter, non-music person to head a label here. It wasn’t easy for him.”
In September of that first year, Billboard named RCA the No. 1 country label, a position it maintained for the next decade. Over that time period, the band Alabama reached superstar status. Critically acclaimed artists like K.T. Oslin, Keith Whitley, Vince Gill, Clint Black and The Judds were signed. The tremendous gifts of these artists put some of the doubts about Galante’s musical credibility to rest. But nothing could silence the criticism of his aggressive—some would say ruthless—business practices and his no-nonsense personal style.
In 1990, Galante rose higher still, tabbed by corporate hierarchy again. This time he was summoned back to New York and named national president of RCA Records Label-US, which by then was owned by Germany’s Bertelsmann Corporation. The appointment made him the first Music Row label head to run the U.S. operations of a major label. Recognizing what he had achieved in Nashville, Bertelsmann Music Group’s (BMG’s) chairman and CEO Michael Dornemann believed Galante was just the man to repair the pop division, which was floundering infamously. As Dornemann said when announcing the appointment, “Joe Galante’s outstanding performance as head of BMG’s RCA country music unit has made him the logical choice. Under Joe’s leadership, BMG’s RCA label has become a dominant force in country music, and I believe that in his new position he will have the same impact on the larger RCA Records U.S. operation.”
In August 1990, not long after RCA had moved into its new $3 million Nashville headquarters on Music Circle North, and just three months before his planned wedding to Arista Nashville executive Phran Schwartz, Joe Galante, the Italian New York Yankee, was headed home.
Or was he? Over the next several years, Galante would discover that Thomas Wolfe was both right and wrong when he warned that you can never go home again. If he had begun his music career in Nashville as a stranger in a strange land, the truth is that over time Galante had grown to become one of the most powerful, influential and successful people in the country music industry. The proverbial Nashville outsider had ironically morphed into the ultimate insider. Strangely, it was in New York where Galante foundered. And after a brutal three-year stretch that took an enormous personal toll on both him and those around him, Galante was lured back home to Nashville to do what he had done so well before.
The story of Joe Galante’s professional life is so grand and epic that it is as much about an entire industry as it is about him. Far more than any other single individual, he willed the modern country music industry into being. Along the way, artists were dropped, employees were sacked and competitors retreated under his withering advance. Today, as it has been for years, RCA is without a doubt the most powerful and dominant country music label in town. Not only is no one asking why, but the jokes have stopped too.
Sitting in an upholstered chair in his comfortably decorated Nashville office, the youthful Galante looks nothing like his 54 years. As he discusses his childhood in Astoria, Queens, a blue-collar borough of New York, you would never confuse where he comes from. “It was Archie Bunker territory,” he says of his childhood. “It was a very close-knit, ethnic neighborhood—everybody knew everybody and their whole family.”
Like Nashville, only very different.
His parents were first-generation American; his father spent 30 years with the postal service and his mother worked outside of the home. His grandparents were the daily adult presence in his and his two younger sisters’ lives.
Though Tony Bennett, Frank Sinatra, Big Band and Italian opera was the music of his parents’ home, Galante learned to play guitar like many other boys in the 1960s by sitting on the edge of his bed and listening to rock ’n’ roll 45s in his room. He formed a band with some friends, and they practiced in the basement, though public performances weren’t forthcoming. “We were horrible,” he admits. “It was embarrassing.”
Early on, however, he did figure out a way to make money from music. “I used to play Eve of Destruction over and over,” he says of the Barry McGuire protest anthem. “My mother hated it, so she offered me a dollar if I would break it so she would never have to hear it again. Singles weren’t even a buck back then, so I took the money and used it to buy more records.”
Galante had a head for figures. In 1971, he graduated from Fordham University with a finance and marketing degree. He turned down a job offer from the Federal Reserve Bank because it was “too analytical.” He interviewed with the fledgling computer division of RCA, a venture that would later fail miserably, but that at least got his foot in the door. However, when an offer from RCA Records came, he didn’t exactly do back flips. “The label wasn’t on any of the records I had ever bought.”
Nevertheless, in 1971 he joined RCA as a financial analyst. His duties included gathering financial information about different departments—media, sales, advertising. He sat in on their meetings, but was clueless about the system. Fortuitously, he met not only a translator, but a teacher.
“Frank Mancini was the guy in promotion—he was over every genre: rock, pop, R&B, jazz. He took the time to explain to me what was going on. After I was done with my work for the day, I would go up and sit in his office while he ran department meetings. He taught me so much; he was a real mentor to me, and became a good friend. He would take me to dinner with him and Harry Nilsson, Ringo Starr. I’m thinking, ‘Holy shit! Nilsson Schmilsson! Ringo!’ I was making $9000 a year, but there were some great perks. It was a big deal for me to get free records.”
Mancini brought Galante into the marketing department as a product manager, working with unknown artists like David Bowie and Lou Reed. Whereas the pop artists got some marketing attention, Galante says in those days that “marketing of country product was unheard of.... Mostly, they just cut a record and threw it out there. No one ever expected country music to sell big.”
In 1973, Mel Iberman, then vice president of business affairs at RCA New York, sent Galante to check out the label’s operations in Nashville, the idea being that Galante might be assigned there full-time. When he returned, Galante told Iberman that he wasn’t interested in moving to Nashville. “Iberman said to me, ‘You don’t understand. It’s not a question. You are going to Nashville.’ So I negotiated a two-year deal, with the agreement that after two years I would go back to New York.”
Galante’s title was “Manager of Nashville Administration,” the pay was $13,500 a year, and with his first wife and baby daughter he settled into a house in the Williamson County suburbs. Music Row did not exactly send the welcome wagon.
“When I first moved here, it was very tough—no one would even talk to me,” he remembers. “It was a very closed world, people who had grown up together, whose fathers had grown up together, everyone knew each other, and I didn’t know anybody. People couldn’t even pronounce my name. It was ‘Who are you? Why are you here? What do you want?’ I went to meetings and listened as much as I could. I didn’t have a feel for things at all. Jerry [Bradley] didn’t exactly want me here; he had no idea what to do with me.”
Galante didn’t help his own cause either. “Back when he arrived, he had no sense of Southern culture or manners or style,” recalls Oermann, a former librarian at the Country Music Hall of Fame who is as knowledgeable of the history of country music as anyone. “He told it like it was, which was the way it was done in New York, but not in Nashville. He was abrasive, brash, outspoken, but he was also damned good at his job. He wasn’t going to be asked to join the good ole boy club, but what he could do was earn their respect.”
“The music business was so different back then,” says Bill Carter, a lawyer and artist manager whose résumé includes work with the Rolling Stones and Lonestar and who has known Galante for more than 20 years. “Every afternoon, the music biz guys would gather at Maude’s. Every rumor started at Maude’s. If you weren’t there, you were talked about. Everybody talked about Joe Galante. ‘Who is this guy from New York? He’ll never make it in country music.’ “
Truth was, Galante was unfamiliar with much of the music and the artists on his roster. The music he was familiar with, he didn’t like much. But one day he found himself introduced to Waylon Jennings. Not much later, at an RCA event, he saw Dolly Parton and Ronnie Milsap perform. He was blown away. “Those three artists were responsible for bringing me into country music. They were not like anyone or anything I had heard, each one was so unique. That is when I started to appreciate, to love and learn about country music.”
As Bradley went about running the label, he soon came to understand Galante’s strengths, even if he was a bit confounded by him. Galante recalls taking a trip to New York with Bradley in the early ’70s to meet with a group of RCA executives, many of whom Galante knew. The upshot of the meetings was that Galante convinced the corporate brass to give the Nashville office more money so it could it could market its own product. “It was like a light bulb went off over Jerry’s head,” Galante says with a grin. “He realized that I could get us money, so my role became to get us as much money as I could for Nashville from New York.”
Not everyone in Nashville was won over. Galante still vividly remembers a painful run-in with Chet Atkins who, while minimally involved with RCA’s daily operations, maintained an office on the third floor of the building and produced several of the label’s veteran artists. One of those was pianist Floyd Cramer.
The dispute centered around Cramer’s desire to have silver piano keys that would pop out from his new album cover; Galante, looking at Cramer’s sales stats in comparison with the art costs, nixed the request without consulting anyone else at the label. He got a call to come to Chet’s office. “I went in and he was sitting at his desk. I didn’t even get to sit down. He pointed his finger at me and said, ‘You’re from the North, you’re Eye-Tal-Yun, and nobody likes you. So watch yourself, boy.’ I was so hurt. I went in to see Jerry. He had already heard from Chet and was sitting at his desk with his head in his hands.
“You begin to learn, over the course of time, relationships: who knows who, who is related to who, who was married to who, why things are the way they are. Jerry taught me so much. You put the two of us in a room, and you couldn’t find two more different people. But it worked. We began building a great partnership. He was doing what he loved, finding and making music, and I was figuring out what I was good at and what I loved. I was always asking questions, trying to find a way to do more, make it better.”
When his two-year sentence in Nashville was almost over, Galante got a call from New York telling him he could come back. But by then, somewhat to his own surprise, he was hooked on the music and beginning to think of Nashville as home. “I was having a good time. Money wasn’t a big thing to me. I had a house and a car and both had air- conditioning. I never had any of that in New York.” Nashville was slowly pulling him in.
Joe Galante will tell you that he never laid out a plan to climb the corporate ranks, but there’s no denying his fierce sense of competition. With a few years at the label under his belt, he began reading everything he could get his hands on about business leaders, military leaders, what made them tick, what made them leaders, what made them successful.
One day, as they walked by RCA headquarters on Sixth Avenue in New York City, Bradley told Galante that he was leaving the company. And so, in 1982, Galante was named Bradley’s replacement. Almost immediately, he began imprinting his style—aggressive, focused, driven, relentless—on the label. RCA Nashville was his team, and everyone else was on the other side.
“We were young, we were ambitious, we were full of piss and vinegar. CBS in particular was the enemy. We went after them, and we never, ever let up. Sun Tzu said, ‘Once your enemy is down, don’t let him back up.’ I took that to heart.”
Not that he didn’t ruffle a few feathers. When he took over, he started by cleaning house, eventually purging several veteran and beloved artists from the roster, including Hank Snow, Jerry Reed, Charley Pride and eventually even Waylon Jennings. “You can like all the music you want, but if they are not selling records, they are not adding value to the company. The bottom line was my responsibility to the company. In sports, in entertainment, in anything, a career has a life span. People in the industry were mad at me, they said I was cutting the heart out of country music. I didn’t dislike Charley Pride, I didn’t dislike Waylon. It was nothing personal. It was just time.”
In the early ’80s, as the Urban Cowboy craze was at once mainstreaming and sucking the life out of country music, the time was right for something new, and RCA found it first. Though the exact details of Alabama’s signing are somewhat in dispute—some credit Jerry Bradley, some Tony Brown—Galante recalls RCA promotion department secretary Sheila Shipley first bringing the band to the attention of the label. What is inarguable is that the plan that would take the country-rock quartet from Ft. Payne, Ala., to an astoundingly successful 20-plus-year career consumed everyone at the label. Alabama was the first country music vocal group who played their own instruments, they brought a youthful audience to country music, they were filling arenas like rock bands and they were selling merchandise like one too. They were the first group to be named CMA Entertainer of the year, first in 1982, then again in ’83 and ’84. It was a dazzling feat for the band and for the label’s staff.
Marketing was key, says Galante. “We used a pop model to market Alabama, we did it like it had never been done in country music. We did a total, brutal, all-out blitz, from city to city, booking them into rock clubs and inviting radio, broadcast and media, not just country, but pop and rock. There was no video to speak of back then, so we had to bring them right to the people who would put them in print, on the radio, in the store.”
The success of the all-out marketing plan for Alabama became the model for other acts. “I could see how it could be done,” Galante explains. “We figured out the charts, we figured out the game and we worked harder than anybody else.”
Galante’s management tactics back then—and those of his longtime, right-hand man Randy Goodman—could be extreme, uncompromising and unforgiving, and staff that couldn’t cut the mustard was unceremoniously and unapologetically given the boot. Says Goodman, “It was nothing back then for me to work 12-hour days. Joe lived and breathed RCA, and he wanted the same of his staff. If you couldn’t cut it, you didn’t belong there.”
That was particularly true in the case of the publicity department. “One of Joe’s only weaknesses was that he didn’t get media. He didn’t understand or trust the press and he either kept his distance, or tried to manipulate and intimidate,” Oermann recalls. “And if things didn’t work out, then in the end, the publicists took the bullet.”
The short-lived tenures of media directors at RCA in the ’80s were legendary. (I should know; I only lasted at RCA from 1981 to 1982.) In one decade, nearly 10 media heads moved in and out of the department. One publicist, Pam Lewis, knew her days at the label were numbered when she returned from a trip to discover that while she was gone her office had been moved into the record closet. Yet when Lewis, who later went on to become Garth Brooks’ manager, tried to garner support for a possible law suit from previously ousted staffers, she found no recruits. No one, no matter how far removed from their days at the label, wanted to cross Galante.
Part of Galante’s frustration with the media was because he couldn’t control it the way he manipulated the other elements of the master plan. But he was also stung by the assumption—in the press and on the streets—that he was not a music man.
“I lived with all of that for 10 years after I took over the label,” he says, “that I was simply not a music guy. That I was all about the business, and not about the creative. That I was all marketing, and not music. It used to bother me, it was frustrating. I was mad about it at the time, but not anymore. I’ll say this, you can’t market your way out of bad music.”
Oermann agrees. “I was one of those who was furious when he was dropping some of those legends from the label. But then to my great surprise he signed The Judds, Clint Black, Keith Whitley, K.T. Oslin.” Bill Carter agrees. “Joe professionalized what was notoriously a very loose environment; it was more fun back then, but no one was making any real money. He brought a business model to Nashville’s music industry.” Galante, Carter adds, “has an understanding of artists. You make your music, then you give it to Joe, and your music is in the best hands in the business. I had an act on RCA that was dropped, so I took it to another major label in town. The head of the label said to me, ‘If Joe can’t do it, how do you expect me to?’ ”
That may have been the thinking of the Bertelsmann Music Group when Galante was summoned back to New York in 1990. “Michael Dornemann [chairman and CEO] called me [and said], ‘You have to come to New York.’ I asked why and he told me he wanted me to be president of the label. So I went to see him, and I had a list of reasons not to, and he had a list of reasons I should. He told me I had three hours to make up my mind.”
Galante decided to accept. “I flew home to get some clothes, and on the plane it occurred to me that I have really screwed up. I had made a life-changing decision without having all the facts. I was walking down the ramp from the plane feeling like I had made the worst mistake. But standing at the end of the ramp was Phran, holding a bottle of champagne. I felt like it would all be OK.”
Galante and Phran Schwartz first became acquainted with each other professionally when she was an executive at Arista Records Nashville. When Galante’s second marriage ended in 1984, he and Phran began dating in 1986 and married months after he accepted the top RCA job. As it turned out, New York wasn’t so great for either of them. “Phran had an identity of her own in Nashville and a really good career,” he explains. “But because of who she was married to, she couldn’t get hired in the music business in New York. After two years, she got a job at BMG Kids, but is was very tough for her.”
Tougher still for Galante was his own professional environment, which he described as being like “the Titanic. It was way past rearranging the deck chairs. We were going down.”
As head of the label’s U.S. operations, Galante really found himself focused on the pop division of the label, which was losing enormous amounts of money. Given his nature, Galante responded the best way he knew how: aggressively. More than 80 percent of the staff changed, and of the 100 acts he inherited, he kept only three. It was, he says, a wrenching experience. “I couldn’t have done it without Phran, and Randy [Goodman] and Ron Howie [director of sales], who came with me.”
He cites the signing of Dave Matthews and Wu-Tang Clan, the development of Bruce Hornsby, the growth of the label’s jazz division, Novus, and the entry into the lucrative movie soundtrack arena as successes. On the other hand, the signing of fading rock stars ZZ Top to a multimillion dollar deal was widely regarded as a horrendous mistake.
It didn’t take long for the critics to begin lobbing bombs in Galante’s direction. A sharply worded story on the Bertelsmann company as a whole ran in The New York Times in 1992, with a sidebar titled “Disappointments at RCA.” The expectations from the parent company increased. “It was doomed to fail,” he remembers. “We almost stopped the red ink, but it was impossible.”
Meanwhile, the thriving, competitive entity he had built in Nashville was floundering. Nashville artists and managers were calling and coming to see him in New York, pleading for his help, but he tried to keep his focus on the big picture. Just over three years into the job, Galante went to a corporate meeting in Germany and was humiliated as Bertelsmann executives tore the company apart. “I felt so betrayed,” he says. “I felt the 10-year plan was working but it was not going to work in the five years they wanted. I had two years left on my contract but I told them, ‘You have lost faith in me, and I have lost faith in you. Let me go.’ ”
Bertelsmann didn’t want to let Galante go. Instead, they asked him to go back to Nashville. After talking it over with his wife and closest executives, he agreed. In 1994, Galante returned as chairman of RLG/Nashville, with the RCA and BNA labels under the RCA Record Label Group (RLG) umbrella.
When Galante had taken off for New York, he had been replaced in his Nashville post by several executives whose milieu was more music than business. During those three years, the label slipped from its perennial No. 1 ranking. Galante himself was worried whether he would be able to right the ship; a skeptical peanut gallery was asking whether he could regain dominance as well.
“There was a perception when I came back that we had failed in New York, and that everything was different from how I left it. It was. My system had fallen apart. People didn’t understand goals, they didn’t know what their vision was. I knew people were saying that we wouldn’t be able to do it again, that it was an all new playing field.”
The competition was fierce. “Arista was really hot, it was very competitive,” Galante says. “We were getting it thrown in our faces by our own artists. ‘Look what Arista is doing.’ I said, ‘Who the hell do you think did it first?’ We wrote the damned book that everyone else was reading. It pissed me off when I heard that.”
So Galante gathered his staff, telling them that the turnaround wouldn’t happen in a year. But he vowed to be No. 1 again. “We got the right people back, and the system back in place. I went back on the road, took meeting after meeting, calmed everyone down, got them to focus, to believe that we could do it.”
One person he ultimately had to do without was his trusted advisor and executive, Randy Goodman. About a year after they returned from New York, Goodman began receiving feelers from the Disney company in Los Angeles. “New York was a great learning experience, but coming back to Nashville we were faced again with trying to turn something around,” he explains, sitting in his office at Lyric Street, the Disney-owned label he opened in Nashville in February 1996. “I was torn about leaving Joe. You know, he is Sicilian, he is committed, he is loyal, you don’t let anyone in the family down.”
Goodman was replaced by label veteran Butch Waugh and the team’s foundation was in place. The rebuilding process continued with additions like Martina McBride, Kenny Chesney and Lonestar. Not every shot was a score; Mindy McCready, who burst onto the scene with a mega-hit single “Ten Thousand Angels” that propelled her debut album of the same name to platinum status, crashed and burned in a spectacular and very public show of personal and professional self-destruction. Stan Moress, a longtime associate of Galante’s (as K.T. Oslin’s manager) and McCready’s former manager, says, “With Mindy, it all started out great, but then it began to fall apart, like a runaway train. It was incredibly frustrating for everyone; he stayed with it longer than anyone, but in the end, a passion for an artist and their music has to be balanced with accountability and responsibility.”
In March, 1999, RCA Records, BNA Records, BMG Publishing and BMG’s Arista Records moved into the historic Sisters of the Poor convent on the outer edge of Music Row; the award-winning restoration was meticulous and the building is considered a showcase, serving not only as offices for the separate entities but also as an ideal setting for company showcases, parties and celebrations.
On July 1, 2000, the Arista Nashville label was folded into RCA Label Group RLG/Nashville, a three-ring circus under ringmaster Galante. Under one tent now were some of the biggest stars in country music—Kenny Chesney, Alabama, Brooks & Dunn, Alan Jackson, Martina McBride, Lonestar and Brad Paisley—as well as a handful of mid-level artists, not to mention new and developing acts spread among three labels. With strength in numbers, the RCA Label Group racked up when it came to chart position, sales and awards. In industry paper R&R’s 2001 year-end awards, Arista was the No. 1 label (also named No. 1 by Billboard), BNA was No. 5 and RCA No. 7; the most-played records of the year were also RLG’s and their artists were the most honored at the 2001 CMA Awards. The company rolled on in 2002, with a clean sweep of major trophies from the Academy of Country Music that spring, and another in the fall at the CMA Awards, where Alan Jackson was named Entertainer and Male Vocalist, Martina McBride Female Vocalist, and Brooks & Dunn Duo of the Year.
In an interview in the first quarter of 2002, speaking of his goals for the three labels under his care, Galante said that he felt by the end of 2002, Arista could be the No. 1 label, RCA No. 2 and BNA No. 4. He missed by one—BNA came in fifth in year-end trade polls.
RLG was looking forward to another good night at the CMA Awards this year with 20 of 56 possible CMA Award nominations. (The show itself was being held after this issue’s deadline.) The three labels have again gobbled up the charts like a Pac-Man, thanks to new releases from Alan Jackson, Brooks & Dunn, Lonestar, Brad Paisley, Sara Evans and Martina McBride.
Music Row today is nearly unrecognizable from the Music Row of 30 years ago when Galante first came to town. Many of the charming older bungalows with front porch swings that served as publishing houses, management firms and booking agencies, as well as the small, squat office buildings that housed the country divisions of major labels, have been replaced by slick, contemporary buildings with unwelcoming entrances staffed by uniformed security. Beneath the gleaming facade, the loosey-goosey, high-living industry that was run by good ole boys on a handshake over a drink is as much a thing of the past as vinyl and four-track tape. Joe Galante is not responsible for that seismic shift, but few got a handle on it sooner, or took the measure of it more advantageously, than he did.
“Joe has an extraordinary balance of vision, passion, drive and common sense,” says manager Stan Moress. “Go back to the basics, cover the bases, and you have a better chance of succeeding than anyone. He is tough to work for, but he challenges people, he forces them up the ladder. He loves music, but he is at home and comfortable in a business atmosphere, and that has been key to his success. Because the business is so complicated today, his way works. The business has caught up to him.”
The man who came to Nashville 30 years ago knowing no one now seemingly knows everyone. The shunned outsider has become the ultimate insider. He serves on the boards of the CMA, the Nashville Chamber of Commerce, Leadership Music, the T.J. Martell Foundation in both New York and Nashville, and the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center. He is inarguably the most powerful man in the country music industry. But in the second half of his life in Nashville, he has made a life outside of the office and outside of Music Row.
“There was a time I chose work over life; I balance the two now,” he says. “I have a responsibility to my staff and my artists, but I have a full life outside of that.... At the end of the day, Phran and I come together and enjoy those things that brought us together in the first place.”
Galante says he is not ready to retire yet, saying he is “having too much fun, but I promise you I won’t be Clive Davis either.” He and Phran try to get away to their place in San Diego every few months, where they eventually plan to retire, but there’s no mistaking what he calls home.
“When I left New York, it was the first time in my life I had ever walked away from anything. But it was the right thing to do. I learned a lot about myself through that experience. My roots are in New York, my family is there, but my friends are here, my life is here.”
