Doug Gillard was born in Sandusky, Ohio. His parents were from Colorado, where his father helped construct missile silos, and his mother was a teacher's aide. Gillard grew up on a farm in rural Northeast Ohio, in the town of Huron, and attended schools in Elyria, Ohio.
By age five, Gillard was writing songs, which he recorded on a reel-to-reel tape machine to be mailed by his family to his older sister who lived in Germany.
Gillard moved to Cleveland after graduating high school. In 1984, he was briefly a non-student college radio DJ at Oberlin's WOBC, after which he was a DJ for six years at Cleveland State University's WCSB, concurrent with his musical career in the late 1980s.

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