When I was like 3 or 4, my grandmother used to sing an old classic to me, "The
Tennessee Waltz." I still love that song. But back then, she would sing it to me and it
would always make me cry. I don't know, maybe it was something in my Grandmother's
voice, conveying the emotion of the song to me. Or maybe I pick up on the sadness of the
scenario depicted in the song. Maybe you know the story. The first person takes his/her
lover to the dance. There, they run into and old friend. The first person introduces his/her
lover to the old friend and the friend has a dance with the lover. While they are dancing,
they fall in love with each other, leaving the first person to sing this sad song.

My grandmother would sing it to me; I would start to cry, so she would stop. But I would
insist that she continue. "But it makes you cry," she would say. Still I would insist on
more, only to cry again.

I guess that was my first lesson in the awesome power of music. I'll never forget it. But
I'm also occasionally reminded, by encounters with less fortunate souls, that there are
plenty of people walking the planet who seem to be missing that ... "connection". I mean
that ability, not just to hear music or to keep the beat, but to feel its emotion and power. I
can't imagine life without that. And I count myself among the very fortunate to be able to
have that experience.

When I was about 10 years old, I started playing the trumpet. My Dad had played the
trumpet when he was a kid, and so of course, I thought that's what I wanted to do too. I
wasn't too bad at it. But I never made it passed 2nd chair in the school band. My music
teacher told my folks and me that I had a "natural lip." Maybe I did and maybe I didn't.
But what I didn't have was the self-discipline required to sit for an hour at a time,
practicing scales. I would start out doing that, and usually managed to keep it up for
about half an hour or so. Then I would lose my will power and start playing, by ear,
something I had heard on the radio. I would play each note, figure out what note it was by
the fingering, and then write it on a score sheet. I'd keep that up until I had the whole
song scored. Man, my music teacher was not too happy about that. But at least he didn't
thump me on the head with that big ruby ring of his - something I had seen him do more
than once during band practice sessions at school.

Then one night, while on my way home from a Boy Scout meeting, I changed my life.
My fellow Scout and best friend, Terry and I were walking along a freshly graded dirt
road. We were pushing our bicycles along, lighting and throwing those little "lady finger"
firecrackers out into the dark of the moonless night - watching the magnificent light show
they provided and getting off on the sound of the explosions, as boys will do. It was in
Thornton Colorado, a suburb of Denver, where exploding fireworks were illegal. The
road grader had left mounds of dirt and rock lining the shoulders of the road. As we
walked along, thoroughly engrossed in our illegal activity, we suddenly noticed car lights
approaching from a distance. We simultaneously jumped to the only logical conclusion. It
had to be the cops and they had to be coming for us! We both took off running, pushing
our bicycles. Terry headed toward one side of the road and I toward the other. Not seeing
the dirt ridge in the dark and in a panic to get away, I ran as fast as I could along side my
bicycle, holding on to the handlebars. When the front wheel connected with the dirt ridge,
the whole front end of the bicycle flew straight up in the air. The handle bar caught me
just between my chin and bottom lip. The force drove one of my upper teeth clean
through my bottom lip. I still have a small scare there. The Doc stitched it up and I was
ok after a few days. But, needless to say, my trumpet playing came to a proverbial
screeching halt. Oh, I would have been able to play again as soon as the lip healed
completely. Who knows, it might have been an improvement! But that's not the way life
works, is it?

A couple of days later, my Dad brought home a little plastic strung Ukulele and taught
me the five chords to an old flapper song from the Roaring Twenties, "Five Foot Two."
Well, of course, I fell in love with the Ukulele. Then Dad brought home a baritone
Ukulele, which is essentially a small four-string guitar. This was the point of no return.

It didn't take long to get hopelessly hooked on the baritone Ukulele. Dad taught me a
couple more songs (I never did know for sure where he was learning that stuff). And then
I began to experiment and learn a few chords by myself. And, unfortunately, my interest
in the trumpet kind of faded away. I wish I had continued to play the trumpet as well. It
would now be just one more instrument in my arsenal.

After a couple years of playing the Ukulele, I figured it was time for a guitar. My first
guitar was some department store piece of *#%! It came in a cardboard box and cost all
of $15. Please understand, I was not ungrateful then and I'm still not. Like so many of us,
it was all my folks could afford at the time. But man did I pay the price for learning my
first 6 string guitar chords on that thing! It was of course, an acoustic instrument with real
steal strings. Wow! But it would fret-out so badly that I unwittingly developed a unique
fingering technique. It involved pulling and pushing the strings in various directions,
depending on the chord being played, so as to compensate for the de-tuning effect that the
"instrument" produced. I suppose I was lucky that all the out-of-tune strings for any given
chord (I only knew chords played up at the nut end of the neck) were always flat. I could
stretch the individual strings as required to pull them into tune. I say I had to pay for
learning this technique because I had to unlearn all of those bad habits once I got a decent
playing instrument in my hands.

I did get a decent instrument before too long. Oh it was no Less Paul or Stratocaster. But
it was electric and it played in tune. Too cool! I worked hard at unlearning my bad
fretting habits and soon my cousin, Dave who played snare drum in the school band, got
himself a drum kit and we started our first "garage band." Shortly after that, my younger
brother, Mark joined us as the bass player. We rocked. At least we thought we did. It was
great! We were even told that if we practiced really hard for 6 weeks, we would be taken
to a recording studio to record some of the songs we had learned. Naturally, we believed
it, and we worked our butts off practicing all the songs we knew and learning new ones.
On the appointed day, we packed up our equipment and headed for the studio located in
the big city. Looking back, it's surprising that there actually was a recording studio right
where we were told to find it. But, of course, the person who had made the promise was
nowhere to be found. And the folks at the studio had no idea who we were or what we
were talking about. Yeah, it was kind of a harsh lesson. But it didn't really hurt us. And
we were a better band for it. We knew those songs forward, backward and inside out. I
guess that was the plan. Who knows?

Over the years, I've been in so many of those "garage bands," I've lost track. Like a
million others, I've played in bars, barns, from the back of truck beds in shopping center
parking lots, after hours clubs, strip joints, proms, parties, battles of the bands,
campaigns, on the radio, on TV, in churches, in studios, stoned, sober, happy, sad, inside,
outside, in tune and out of tune. Oh and of course, on the Internet. I've had the pleasure of
jamming and partying with some of the biggest names in the industry. I've seen parts of
the business from the inside. Some of it's cool and some of it not so cool.

These days, I mostly like to make demo recordings of the songs I write. Songwriting is
about the most enjoyable and rewarding thing I know. I also believe that the ability to
make music is a gift. While it starts as raw talent and most of us have to work our tails off
to even reach a point where we feel like we can share it with others, (which must surely
be one of it's primary purposes) I think we owe it to ourselves and the Universe to do just
that. Buy hey, it's also important to HAVE FUN!