Who Is This J.D. Rogers? 

J.D. Rogers was born a Hoosier in Indianapolis, Indiana in 1951. He attended Avon High School, where he majored in study hall, home room, and the principal’s office. Dress codes were not to J.D.’s liking. Why did an unaccredited high school like Avon care if he wore paisley-colored capes with knee-high suede boots? Besides, with his band, he was destined to be a rock star—or so he thought.

After barely graduating from the high school where the principal had once suggested, “It would be best for all concerned, J.D., if you just quit school,” he went to work for a few months in a factory that manufactured heating and cooling systems. It was during this brief internment that it became obvious to J.D. that he had two choices: suicide or a move to Moab, Utah. Moab was a place he’d been in love with since his first visit there in the spring of 1964, when he was in the seventh grade. Moab is the land of great arches and broken dreams, deep mysterious canyons, three legged coyotes (too many trappers), and high-grade uranium ore—a substance that miners carried in their front pockets for self-sterilization and paid for later with testicular cancer.

Moab was home to The 66 Club, The Lrae Club, The Wagon Wheel, Woody’s, and the Westerner Grill. It was the place with majestic snow-capped mountains (Mt. Tukuhnikivatz in particular), the Colorado River, Dewey Bridge, Dead Horse Point, and Behind the Rocks. It was the land of outlaws, many of whom would become J.D.’s lifelong friends (most are dead now and others close to it). He continued playing in rock bands, working in uranium mines, and feeding his unquenched addiction to the red rock country, a period he jokingly calls “a life of total debauchery”.

After sixteen years he moved to a place he refers to as “the land of curdled milk, rancid honey, and deadly drive-by shootings,”—Los Angeles, California, where he worked hard at pursuing the life of a Rock Star. There he became the only hard rocker in his circle to study organic gardening between gigs.

On the bad advice of a trusted music publisher, J.D. started writing country music. Over the years he recorded three CDs—none even made the discount bins, although they have been sighted at Goodwill Thrift Stores. It appeared that music wasn’t in the cards at that time.

But the best thing that came out of his L.A. experience was meeting his “bride”, Sioux. After they were married and spent some time in L.A., they bought an eighty-nine-year-old log cabin on forty acres in Applegate, Oregon. The place was a run-down sheep spread that they transformed into magical flower gardens, vegetable beds, and an heirloom apple orchard. It took many gopher traps (the only good gopher is on a coat collar) to make this place in paradise happen. Nowadays they slave happily at the ranch with their current beloved dogs—two rescued Border Collies, Tuesday and Utah—backed up by Chloe the calico cat and dozens of chickens.