About Stevenson & Company

I was 10 years old when our family sat down to watch the Ed Sullivan Show, as we usually did every Sunday evening. Once Mr. Sullivan announced The Beatles and I saw the mob of screaming girls, I knew something very special was about to take place. When The Beatles began playing, I realized what I want to be when I grew up: a rock-n-roll star. It took me until I was 14 to get my first real guitar. My younger brother Bruce had gotten a set of drums when he was 11 and he and his best buddy Watson Pryor had been playing in a band called The Revolutions. They were really good for their age. After The Revolutions broke up, I petitioned Bruce and Watson to let me play with them in a new band. We grabbed our neighbors Stev Guyer and Jimi Oates and formed Hereafter. We had a fairly good following and that band morphed in to A L. Richard Band. When Jimi quit the band, we were able to pick up Mike Fowler as our lead guitarist. The band took off. We had the same booking agent as the Allman Brothers and he kept us booked at least 250 days per year for the 2 years that A L. Richard Band were together. During that time, Watson, then Bruce left the band to head off to college. 

A L. Richard picked Tim Brown as our new drummer and John Gary Nelson took over bassist duties from Don Donaldson, who had replaced Watson at bass. Soon, Steve and Mike left the band and John Gary brought in his old Caution bandmates and A L. Richard Band was no more. 

It wasn’t until 1990 that a perfect storm brought Bruce back to Rock Hill, where he, Flip Moore and Gregg Sizemore formed a garage band called The System. We made a pact not to play in public more than once a month. That band went through many changes in personnel and eventually ended up with Bruce, Gregg, Thomas Horton and me. We changed our name to King Mixer in 1996 and recorded a CD. It was a low budget CD, but there were several good songs on the album. We soon brought in Brent Guyton as a second guitar player and featured Julie Covington on a few tunes to give us even more variety. We were locally successful and had a great group of people who came to watch us play. Those were good times. But soon Gregg moved to Columbia, as did I, and King Mixer was done. 

Some 25 years later, I found myself in Blowing Rock, NC where there was not much to do in the winter. So, I built a recording studio, wrote and recorded a song for my wife for Valentine’s Day. I wanted to make it sound as good as possible, but I had recording gear, not mixing gear. That is when I got in touch with Chris Brown. I wanted the best engineer I could afford and came across Chris’ name. Chris was the lead engineer at Abbey Road Studios in London.  He was Sir George Martin’s protege and engineered the Beatle Anthology albums with Sir George. Later, Chris engineered Rod Stewart, Radio Head and a slew of other top British artists. So, I asked if he would give my song, Alright Tonight a go. He did, and I loved the result. 

I wrote and recorded the bones of a couple other songs, but those songs needed a drummer. I knew that Bruce had sold his King Mixer drum set, but he had just retired and had bought himself an electronic drum kit. We began working on So Glad to See You and Talking Down to Me. 

After writing the bones to Talking Down to Me, I reached out to Bill Szymczyk, who had produced the Eagle’s Hotel California album. He lived just around the mountain from me. I knew he had retired, but what the heck. Surprisingly, he took interest in Talking Down to Me and In My Head, a song Bruce had started writing.  The raw bones of Talking Down to Me needed something though and I couldn’t put my finger on it, so I asked Steve Stoeckel, the bassist for my favorite local band, the Spongetones to take a listen. Steve reworked the song, added a killer bass line and now it was the song I was looking for. When I took it back to Bill, he really liked the song, but told me that songs that make it now days are more modern and pop sounding. It was at that point that Bruce and I made the decision to go back to Chris Brown to engineer the rest of our songs.  

Bruce is a great drummer, so things were coming together on those songs, but Bruce’s real talent was in orchestration. So Glad to See You needed something, so I asked Bruce to add a cello part. He added a string orchestra to the piece, and it sounded fantastic.

All of this started in 2020, right smack dab in the middle of the Covid outbreak. The coverage from the news media had us convinced this thing was going to destroy mankind. Bruce wrote Morning, After Rain as a song of hope for when the pandemic was finally over. I also asked Bruce to arrange an orchestral part to Alright Tonight, which we then had Chis remix. One song led to another, until we had over 10 songs.  

Bruce and I wanted to get some of our former band members to play with us on the album, so Bruce got in touch with as many as he could, and we were able to get Watson Pryor, Mike Fowler, Thomas Horton, Julie Covington Templeton and Kenneth Sealy to join us in completing the Out of Time album. Even though Steve Stoeckel and Kenneth Sealy had never actually played in a band with us, they were both good friends and excellent musicians that we respected. We are so glad that all of these very talented people decided to join the project. This album was a lot of fun to record, and I hope that listeners will enjoy the variety of styles and quality of these performances.