From Deseret News archives:
He makes the music
Ron Simpson receives the 2006 Pearl Lifetime Achievement Award
Simpson has spent his career making musical connections in just that way as a musician, songwriter, producer, promoter and teacher. At the 2006 Pearl Awards, he was honored for those accomplishments with the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Faith Centered Music Association.
His foray into the music world began when Simpson was growing up in Southern California in the late 1950s. "It was a heady place to be. I got to see people involved in the emerging world of rock 'n' roll music at a close range."
Simpson started out playing the trumpet, then later switched to fretted instruments. In high school, he was a singing partner and bandmate with Joan Baez.
He later shared a guitar-teaching studio with Jerry Garcia, who had just started the Warlock band that would evolve into the Grateful Dead. "I had the mornings, and he had the afternoons."
That was at Dana Morgan's music store in Palo Alto, "and it was a magnet for early rock-and-roll folks."
So, "when I arrived in Utah with all this background, I knew exactly what I wanted to do. At a very young age, I understood the models of the music business what was publishing, what was selling. And I had invented in my mind a series of companies to do that."
Simpson started out in Salt Lake City in a home office in 1968. By 1969, he had moved to a suite in the McIntyre Building on Main Street. "Then I moved into a suite in the home of Ken Sansom. He had been a big name in local circles at that time, and it felt to me like the torch was being passed to a new generation."
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