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CHAPTER 2

My First Music Lessons

When I was about seven years old, I started telling my parents that I wanted to take guitar lessons. It seemed to me that they kind of ignored my wishes, but now I understand that they probably didn’t just have the money for a guitar, let alone guitar lessons. When I turned fifteen years old, my father brought home a used guitar for me, and I was tickled pink! It was in real good shape, and I loved it! He only payed twenty dollars for it at the time, and that was in 1965! After I got it, I started picking up chord books so I could learn a few chords and entertain myself. In a short while, I was playing the guitar with a buddy named Joe. We’d get together with some cousins and play and sing any song that we could get our hands on. I have a cousin named Ellen who did a lot of typing for me at that time, and she would type out The Beatles songs with the chords above the words so I could play the songs.

When my mother and father saw that I was really interested, they set me up with lessons at a music store ten blocks from home. That made things easy on my parents. I’d just take the guitar, throw it over my shoulder, and walk to the lesson! The place was called Liberty Music Center, I guess because it was on Liberty Street. A guy named Tony owned it. He was a fantastic piano player. I started taking lessons from a great guitar player named Charlie, who happened to be going to my high school. He was a senior and I was a sophomore. So it was convenient when I had a question about a lesson during the week, I could just ask him in school. I started with a couple of beginner’s books, but they quickly got boring.

Realizing my potential, Charlie got me a Berkeley College of Music book on guitar. This school publishes some of the best music instruction books available. Charlie was very good with what they call “chord melody.” I’d like to explain what this is. When you play chord melody on a guitar, you play a chord with a melody line happening on the fifth or sixth string so that you get the sound of the background chord and the melody at the same time. It’s a tricky thing to learn at first because your left hand is all over the guitar neck, but it is a nice sound when you play it the right way.

At this time, there was a guy named Mike who took drum lessons at Liberty Music Center who was trying to put a band together. Charlie told him about me and set me up for an audition. Mike’s family owned a small hometown pub called The Hilltop Inn in a town called Crosswicks, about ten miles from where I live. I was sixteen at the time, and for the audition, I had to get a ride from my parents. They dropped me off one Sunday, and I sat in with Mike and a couple of other guys. All went well as far as I could tell.

Unbeknownst to me, Mike wasn’t happy with my guitar playing, but Charlie told him to be patient because I had a lot of potential. We became a band called “White Satin Limited,” taking our name from a liquor bottle in Mike’s family bar. We also had a sax and trumpet player. The sax player was my cousin, Skip, and the trumpet player was a local Crosswicks guy named Oren, whose sister I wound up dating.

We played private parties and weddings for a few years. Then I had to go into the Navy. I was about to be drafted, so I opted to join the Navy Reserves. By the way, Mike and I became very good friends and still are. We were each other’s best man. The band broke up not long after I left, and the guys went their own ways.