Ryan  

It all started when Ryan was about 11 years old. His dad got him a little 3/4 scale acoustic guitar for Christmas and Ryan tried his hand at guitar playing. Little did he know that the old saying "no pain, no gain" really applied to learning the guitar. Deciding on something a little less taxing on his fingertips, he starting hammering away at a set of drums he and his dad found at an auction sale. For the next few years he kept the rhythm for his dad's guitar playing to many OLD country and western favorites.

Well that all changed in the summer of 1988. He and his parents were headed for Big Sky Montana on vacation and asked Todd if he wanted to ride along. Well on the way there (and back) they proceeded to work their way through the first couple of Van Halen cassettes. Ryan's view of music and guitar playing took on a totally new dimension. He thought "if this is out there... think of what else is out there". Well upon returning home from vacation, Ryan took his dads electric guitar and Alamo amp, cranked it to 11 and Todd started scraping up some cash for a bass. After about a year of doing nothing but practicing, they formed their first band, "Orion".

Orion was pretty short lived band mostly due to the fact that there wasn't enough honey available locally to keep the vocal chords of their singer limber enough to sing the music they were playing.

In the later part of 1989, Orion disbanded and Ryan joined up with another local band called IN2U (which later changed to Ground Zero) featuring Jim on lead vocals. Ground Zero giged quite regularly for the next several years but constantly battled with members leaving for college or changing jobs. As a matter of fact, Todd even filled in on a couple of gigs in the later years of Ground Zero.

In 1993, Ryan moved to Fargo to finish up his electrical engineering degree at North Dakota State University. He wasn't actively involved with any bands there but spent most of his spare time playing acoustic guitar and teaching himself fingerstyle playing. He also worked with a couple of local musicians there on original acoustic material.

In 1995, Ryan graduated from NDSU and returned to Dickinson. He was looking back to Jim for help in getting something going musically in the area. After a year or so of waiting, the band Jim was singing in broke up and so they snagged the bass player and guitar player (Forrest) from them and started something different. The next few years probably should be made known as "the great band name changing era".

This band went by names such as "Jimmy and the Jukebox Band" later to be called just "Jimmy's Jukebox". Also played as "Vertigo" before settling on Mr. ED.

Ryan is currently self employed at Custom Data, Inc developing web sites, producing videos and doing all sorts of cool computer related stuff. Also, two year ago he meet Kelley while on a business trip to Williston. Earlier this summer he poped the big question, she coughed and said yes!