TBT this one is for Kathy...

It is about time that I begin to tell my music story. I was, like so many others, always around music growing up. My dad was a pianist and organist for the Catholic church. His dad, my Grandfather was part of the formation of the Seabees in World War II and helped start the VFW bands on his return. He also was an artist and painted for the St Louis Sign company the makers of the first billboards and I still have a number of his paintings. His Father, it was always told to me, was a member and co-writer with John Philip Sousa.

I remember taking piano lesions at 3 and rehearsal was just part of my daily activities. Like breakfast and potty. I had a baby sitter who lived next door named Kathy Boose. Kathy being cool enough to babysit me allowed me to stay up and watch TV on the weekends. We use to jump around on the furniture whenever someone fun would be on “In Concert,” the show she watched every Friday. People like the Monkeys and Partridge Family. I remember one night Alice Cooper was on. I was 7. I thought he was crazy but his guitar players where the coolest people I had ever seen.

I started that year asking for a guitar for Christmas. I didn’t get it. I then asked for my 8^th Birthday, and that Christmas still was deigned. My 9^th birthday came with only asking for one thing. I should give my parents a break and say I was always sent away for the summers. Either the East Coast or West Coast, to stay with relatives. My birthday is in July so I never had close family or friends only distant family and strangers to celebrate with. A guitar in retrospect would have been difficult to provide.

I have no way of remembering this but I am willing to bet I wasn’t the nicest of children when Christmas rolled around that next year. I had been asking for a guitar for 3 years. A third of my life at that time. Never getting one. So imagine my surprise when that year, under the tree, there was no escaping the shape. 

A guitar.

Now you might think I was excited about it. But it was a plastic guitar with plastic strings. My brother who didn’t even want a guitar got an eclectic guitar and a 5 watt amp. We both got a 32 page Mel Bay How to Play Guitar book and I got a song book with 12 Christmas songs in it.

By 5:00 that afternoon I had gone through every page in the Mel Bay book and had learned every song and was having my first sing-a-long at my Grandmas house. I am really am glad that was before video camera.

I know I was a little snot about the electric thing but by spring I had connived the electric from my brother and had somehow wired speakers all over one of the walls in my room and powered them all with that little amp. I remember my dad also yelling at me not to remove the speaker from the TV. I always had to make sure to have it back in by the time he got home. I mostly did.

I would play to the radio for hours and hours. Most kids at that time where outside or in sports. I was by the radio every chance I got, playing.

I do have one other cool memory from that time. I had stayed the night at my Grandmas one weekend that spring and had watched the movie Kissing Cousins with Elvis. My dad came to pick me up and he asked me what I had been playing downstairs in their basement. I told him it was the title song from the movie. He asked me to play it for him. Which I did. He was amazed and I remember him asking “You learned that song by watching the movie only once?” I said yes, and would he like to hear any others? He asked “What others?”

I said the other songs in the movie.

I had learned them all.

Fifty years later I still remember the look on my dads face as I busted into the soundtrack of the movie I had heard the previous night.

As a side note. 15 years ago I was able to run spotlight at the San Diego County Fair for Alice Cooper. It was about third 3rd song when I realized that watching this band was what started me in the music business. I was now part of the show and couldn't jump around,,, Till Later.,