I have always loved music. Even when I was five or six and saw The Beatles on Ed Sullivan, I loved it. I liked it all Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra? Are you kidding me? Barbara Streisand's voice still makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up! I grew in the 60's but I was jus a kid, sure I loved music, but my world was all about The Midnight Special and Don Kirschner's In Concert series! I will never forget seeing Grand Funk Railroad on that show, I was amazed and in awe. I saw Linda Ronstadt, voice of an angel, with I think most members of the Eagles backing her up, I was amazed.
My love of music started in the weirdest way. I was in a catholic grammar school, and we went and saw Godspell at the Wilbur theatre in Boston. I was in the seventh grade! I was blown away. From then on I wanted to play guitar and sing. So I begged my mom and dad to buy me a guitar and I would sign up to be in the folk masses, to play on the Saturday night folk mass on Saturday night at our parish! I also begged for lessons, so I could really understand how to play. All I wanted to do was play music, I was 11. So I got good enough to play in the weekly folk masses pretty quickly. We had some nun, I forget her name, teaching us these NEW catholic folk mass tunes, I felt I was part of a revolution. Hey I didn't know about John Lennon yet.
I remember I used to save my money and go to the cut out bin at Osco's Pharmacy and buy these cassettes. I bought them because the cover looked cool, or I heard some older guys taking about bands. So I bought a little shit cassette player and started buying these tapes. The first one I bought was a band called T-Rex, because the cover was so cool and I only had $1.99. I went home and fell in love with that stuff. I mean Jeepster and Bang-A-Gong were on that cassette, pure stuff. Then I bought an cassette from Led Zeppelin II, I thought that was even cooler. i mean don't get me wrong, I still loved The Monkees and The Partridge Family but this was another level. I mean all I wanted to be from when I was 11, was to be in a rock n roll band! I found my calling. Except where I lived that was a very unusual calling. i didn't care. my mother signed me up for guitar lessons every Saturday with this gut, who was probably 18 at the time. All he wanted to teach me was classical music, you know not three chords and the truth, it was actually scales on nylon strings!
I wanted to learn how to play, Are you Ready by Grand Funk and he was teaching me classical guitar, which was hard and legitimate, but far from my dream. So I stuck with it for a few years, learned my scales, learned chord inversions, blah, blah, blah. But when I heard the White Album for the first time or Hendrix, I knew that was it for me. I had a guitar from Lechmere's, called a Crucianello, the strings were 2 inches off the neck, impossible to play! I knew I had to get an electric guitar and an amp. But how do I do that? Well by then I was 14, so I had a pretty successful paper route and I was hell bent on getting an electric guitar. I remember, I had figured out the chords to I'm Leaving On A Jet Plane. My mother asked me to play it for my grandmother over the phone! Then I realized what performance meant, I refused and ran up to my room, as my mother explained, no he's really good. Something I would have to get over I guess to reach my dream. But, wow, was I good in my room all alone, how do you translate that? It wasn't going to be easy, I wasn't a natural performer, I didn't even know I could do it. All I knew is I loved it.