A hero never learns.
If you ask Gary Floater what keeps him going after surviving the inevitable ups and downs of four decades of the entertainment business and after influencing three generations of country artists with his honest and bleary-eyed songwriting, he'll tell you: it started out all for the money.
And just when he seemed to be in reach of the financial decadence he'd always dreamed about - at the age of 25 - his financial prospects deteriorated after a string of ill-advised televised comments and international marriages that kept Gary from returning to the country of his birth.
Maybe it was due to lingering bitterness over his embarrassing late night televised falling-out with Telly Savalas. Maybe the distance from the red dirt of his Missouri home snuffed Gary's creative spark. Whatever the reason, from 1983 to 1993, during ten years, Gary wrote only two songs, "Grandpa's Promise" and "A Whole Lot Further To Fall."