I think it may have been just at the beginning of 1996 that Dave Hauglund told me he had met the original lead guitarist of Alice Cooper at a family Christmas party. In northern Iowa.

Say what now?

Yes, it was true. He was engaged to someone related to Dave's dad. And had been living in Clarion, Iowa for a while now.

Dave had brought up the concept of our fledgling TV show in conversation, and he was open to doing an interview with us. His name was Glen Buxton.

So that's how Glen got Involved with Lonesome Roadie. It was serendipity and good timing.

Dave setup the Interview. It would be at Glen's house In Clarion, where he and fiancee Lorrie (Miller) lived. Apparently he was looking forward to showing us the "cold room", which nowadays might be called a man cave.

Jim and I arrived with Dave for the shoot. We met Glen and Lorrie. He was in a very good mood, and we had some great conversation. He had a few ideas about what we should shoot. Then he ushered us into the cold room upstairs.

The room got its nickname for good reason. It didn’t have any heat. What it did have was a boatload of posters, magazine articles, and other things lining the walls. There were his guitars and amps, of course. But also a small collection of items including everything from an old typewriter to a reel-to-reel videotape recorder. (You can see a good overview of the room in the just testing... show posted below. It was the first thing we taped and It is the first part of the interview shown.) Like Glen says on camera, "Welcome to the inside of my mind." Indeed...

Later he sat down with Dave for his interview. Honestly, before meeting him I wasn't even aware that there had been an original Alice Cooper Group. Fortunately Dave knew all about them and had some good questions ready. Glen was very amicable and had nothing but good things to say about his former bandmates. And it was the same for Iowa.

Glen was living in Phoenix in the late 1980s when John Stevenson, a native of Iowa and a big fan of Glen, travelled down to Arizona with Glen’s fellow Cooper guitarist Michael Bruce to find him. Eventually he convinced Glen that it would be better for him to leave the area and try a quiet life away from the big city in rural Iowa.

By the time we met him, Glen had been in Clarion for a few years already and had met Lorrie, who had recently become his bride-to-be. He really seemed to be enjoying himself there.

Before doing the interview, we had taped local band Roadhouse live on stage for the upcoming show. Since we knew Glen would be on the same episode, we had Roadhouse do a little live shout-out to Glen on stage. We played this for Glen after the interview, then had him do a shout-out back to them. We showed him some of the performance we had taped. He said he thought the band was great and that he'd like to meet up with them someday. (He did - but that's another story…*)

Before we left, Glen mentioned several time how much he had enjoyed working with us and that he'd like to do something more with Lonesome Roadie. We all thought this was a great idea, and said we would get back to him about it. (I’ll get to his other appearances with us later on in this blog.)

So that’s how it went. We edited the interview along with two songs from Roadhouse, and that became the second episode of just testing…  It aired (on cable) in May 1996. (By the way, all of the incidental (bumper) music in this episode is from the Ski Band - see the previous blog entry.) Please enjoy the show below! It’s a little rough around the edges, but for the time it’s actually a pretty kick-ass episode, we think….

*Side note: Glen and Roadhouse met at the Powerhouse Bar in Freeborn later in the year. He and lead singer/guitarist Mike Flynn hit it off immediately. Some time later, they got together and briefly formed the band Buxton-Flynn not long before Glen’s death in 1997. Unfortunately, Mike Flynn passed away in 2014.