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My Mom was a single parent raising two boys with a secretary salary and there wasn't enough money to buy a real guitar. So, I bought my own guitar using money I made cleaning my Uncle Bob’s liquor bar on Sunday mornings. I was only 13 years old when I heard about a used guitar for $15.00 on the radio want ads. It was the first guitar I had ever seen up close that wasn't a toy. It was love at first sight. It looked beautiful. I still have it today and it really is a piece of junk but in the eyes of a 13 year old it was beautiful beyond words. The strings were about half an inch away from the frets most good guitars are 1/8 inch or less. So holding those strings down was really painful. Later I learned how to adjust the bridge lower so it would be a little easier. I would start practicing from the moment I got home from school until suppertime and then for a couple hours after that. I had a very successful band for 20 years playing mostly nightclubs, country clubs and show lounges five and six nights a week. When the band broke up in the 80’s I decided to continue playing as a solo entertainer. Being accustomed to having a great musical background behind my vocals, I knew I needed to have that same full background when I played on my own. This was happening prior to Karaoke in any form. I created my own musical backup tapes playing all of the instruments into a 4-track tape recorder and bouncing tracks to get more than four tracks of instrumentation. In the early days, I didn’t have a drum set so I became very creative building drum sounds with what would have been considered bizarre. Did you know that a very thick Chicago Phone Book makes a great Bass Drum when you hit it with a mallet and place a microphone pointing at the edge of the book? Tom toms or something like them can be duplicated with balloons of different sizes. I was never able to come close to the sizzle of real cymbals but I opted for other sounds like a sheet of paper played with a stiff brush, cardboard boxes, pipes and wind chimes to name a few. I did have my guitars; bass; piano; harmonicas and trumpet all to add to the tape back up. Once I completed a catalog of cover songs and original tunes, I hit the stage once again armed with a cassette player, PA system, guitar and microphone. I continued performing into the early 90s. More and more nightclubs were beginning to lose money due to the new drunk driving laws and were forced to eliminate live entertainment. Soon, I found myself out of work and trying to make a living with computers. Today, I still make lots of music in my expanded recording studio but choose to keep my performances pretty much locked within the studio walls except for an rare concert or two. I have also started producing other singer’s songwriters and bands and enjoy working with these new talents. I find it sad however that they will probably never get to enjoy the thrills of performing live and getting paid the huge sums of money that my band commanded. |