Born in Los Angeles, California, Gans started out as a musician in 1970, playing guitar and writing songs and performing both as a soloist and as a member of various bands around the San Francisco Bay Area.

I got a million-dollar education from interviewing Leo Fender, Randy Newman, Fleetwood Mac, Steve Goodman, T Bone Burnett, Warren Zevon, Ted Templeman, and people like that.

While promoting his first book on the Grateful Dead, Playing in the Band, Gans found himself in the studios of KFOG radio in San Francisco.

In the mid-1990s, with the death of Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead's subsequent extended hiatus, Gans decided to set journalism on the back-burner and focus on music again.

In 1997, he released a duet album of himself playing with Berkeley singer-songwriter Eric Rawlins, Home By Morning, backing it up by performing around the Bay Area.

This was followed the next year by a topical single, "Monica Lewinsky," that got a lot of airplay and publicity and enabled Gans to expand his touring base.

The band featured a variety of special guest from the Grateful Dead family of musicians including Mark Karan, Jason Crosby, Henry Kaiser, James Nash and Sunshine Becker.