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and never once had to pay for accommodations. I put a band together with an English bass player,
an Australian tenor saxophonist, and a drummer from New Zealand. We were playing blues, rock,
and some jazz. The hotel even began to pay me and make sure I was fed.

While I was there my debut album was released back in Sacramento and I had a couple of boxes
of CDs sent to me. They put one into the hotel juke box and someone gave it to somebody at Radio
Caroline, which was a pirate radio station. I was selling the CD at my hotel gigs.
What are the chances of something like that happening?

LL: You helped launch Sirius Satellite Radio. Would you tell us all about it and how it came
to be? Are you still involved?

ET: Similar to landing a gig on my first day
in a foreign country, helping start Sirius
Satellite was equally serendipitous. I had
moved to NYC and only knew one person
there. I had nothing going for myself
except for a job in the basement of a record
store in Manhattan in the jazz and blues
department. During my time there, a
couple of CDs I had played on with E.C. Scott had been on the shelves. A guy named Michael
Anderson that I worked with in the department had told me that he worked in radio but was
between jobs.

At some point I left that job, and I went out to play some touring dates with E.C. When I returned
there was a message from Michael who asked me to call him. As it turned out he was hired to run
the blues channel at a fledgling satellite radio station called Sirius and he thought I would be great
on the air. I started a week before 9/11 in 2001 and originally broadcast my shows to zero
subscribers. That was over 20 years ago, and I am still working in radio. We’re now well over 30
million subscribers.

I have been blessed, to say the least!