He’s seen it first hand and almost got to go down the road himself when the Fort Dodge based band The HAWKS — he was the lead singer –started taking off in the early 1980s.

“I’m almost glad we didn’t make it,” he said. “There’s a lot of cost to it. Family, wife, it’s a tough, tough road. I was seeing a lot of people in our world disappearing — Joplin, Hendrix. I was really aware of the cost of the road.”

That theme, “It’s a crazy world,” runs through many of the songs on a new album Wiewel has recently released with his friend Keith Brown called “Frank & Howdy, The Road Not Traveled.”

“This is a real rock’n’roll record,” Wiewel said, “It’s less pop than The HAWKS.”

Wiewel said the sound on the new album is a little “rougher.”

“I wanted it rougher,” he said. “I wanted the spontaneity of going into the studio. Often, you should leave it and not go and polish every little nuance out of it.”

Wiewel and Brown were bandmates in the band West Minist’r. They recorded and released four albums in the 1970s. The pair recorded at Chess studios in Chicago and also at the legendary Muscle Shoals studio in Alabama.

For a time, Brown and Wiewel produced a syndicated radio show called “The Twin Boys Radio Show” where they paired cutting edge new music with political satire.

It did not go so well.

“It was amazing how fast public radio shut down The Twin Boys show when we launched our Washington expose,” Wiewel said.

Brown went on to launch Crystal Sound Studios in Des Moines which creates original scores for film and video productions.

Wiewel had some other adventures after The HAWKS.

That included a stint with the Office of Alternative Medicine, a field he’s still an active advocate for, and a trek to Africa to help on a film project.

“We came back and my daughter got to tell people she met Dumbledore (Richard Harris),” he said. “She was thrilled beyond belief.”

He tried to shelter his own family from the rough side of the music business.

“They see the cool side,” he said. “They seemed really impressed that was dad on the record. I wanted them to grow up normally. So many of my clique that got famous lost their families.”

Wiewel said he was in the music business at just the right time, during the transition from the era when artists were exploited by record companies and the current era of digital music.

“I’ve had an interesting life,” he said. “There was a period of time when the artist finally began to get paid, had a chance to make a living.”

One of those fond memories was playing the ballroom circuit, something that really doesn’t exist anymore.

“We could make a couple of thousand in a weekend,” he said. “It was a living.”

When The HAWKS albums took off, that changed.

“Suddenly,” he said. “We were making real money.”

He compares the measly one cent the Beatles received per album per song with what The HAWKS earned.

“We got 10 times as much per song, per record than the first Beatles album sold for,” he said.

Wiewel has little use for the modern era of digital music.

“It took the heart, it took the soul and it took away any chance of making a living with your music,” he said. “That makes me sad.”

It was also a much less formal business in the past.

“You’d go with your record in your hand,” he said. “It was so informal. We knew all the DJs at all the radio stations. We would talk, they would go to the gigs.”

Brown and Wiewel wrote and recorded “The Road Not Traveled” over the course of the past 20 years. He’s amazed at how the early songs have held up.

“Some of these are more relevant today than they were then,” he said.

While the album is available on ITunes, CD Baby and Amazon, for the die hard traditionalists, there will be a version for the turntable.

“There will be a vinyl copy,” he said.

Wiewel often listens to some of his old favorites on vinyl.

“I bought a Sgt. Pepper, I bought The Beatles, I bought Pet Sounds,” he said. “I had to get that. The way it sounded then.”