In a momentous decision, I decided to leave my hometown of Chico (in northern California) and my local musical success to find my future as a recording engineer in Hollywood. So I transferred from Chico State to Cal State Northridge where my audio recording specialty fell into the Broadcasting School’s jurisdiction. This change quickly resulted in an amazing series of connections.
 
Within my first two (junior year) semesters there, I became the student instructor of the high-end music recording laboratory, where my students recorded all University musical events on campus and off. I also became acquainted with four outstanding men who became my mentors: Bill Lazarus, a recording engineer for BB King, Beach Boys and Buffalo Springfield, and later the head of audio at Universal Studios; C. Wayne Taylor, former RCA engineer and head of the University’s audio services; Sidney Salkow, my film professor (I was his student aid) who was concurrently directing “Ironsides” with Raymond Burr at Universal Studios; and Dale Manquen, who was my Acoustics professor, and former lead engineer at Ampex in their professional recording machine division as the inventor of the MM1000. He was also chief design engineer for the 3M M79 2”/ 24 track machine, and served as President of the Audio Engineering Society (AES) for the U.S.. Mr. Manquen and Wayne Taylor were my sponsors into the AES, an elite professional association.
 
A new Southern California drummer friend, Marty, had been talking with my (first) wife, Kathy, and one day when we found each other waiting for the same elevator, he said, ” I didn’t know you wanted to be a recording engineer! My uncle Arnie owns some of the top recording studios here.”
 
The following day I got a phone call from Uncle Arnie who started the conversation with, “Marty said you want to be a recording engineer.” And over the course of this momentous 15-minute phone conversation, he offered me my dream job, and then completely talked me out of my life’s ambition to be involved in the professional audio world!
 
Arnie continued, ”You can start here at my Santa Monica studios tomorrow morning, but I understand you’re a newlywed...?” to which I said yes.  Then Arnie explained, ”Well I really wouldn’t feel right unless I told you my life story. I’m 34 and I’ve been married 4 times, and it’s all because of this crazy business.” He also told me what to expect over the coming months with unreasonable record producers, diva artists, and the hard and very demanding life in the studio. The clincher was his forecast of what my new wife would do. The first night of the first week, he said, when you are held over by a producer, your wife will call and nicely ask when you are coming home, and you will say, ”I don’t know dear, as soon as we’re done here I suppose.” Then, after the producer keeps you overnight and into the next day, and until the project is done, she’ll ultimately be calling almost hourly, her voice getting progressively louder and more and more angry, until she’s yelling at the top of her lungs for you to ”get your ass home if you want to see me here in the future!” Arnie finished, ”That’s almost always, exactly the way it goes, every time.”
 
After that call, which confirmed what I’d also been hearing around the water coolers of the other studios where I’d been spending time (downtown at Sunset & Vine, Hollywood), I decided to change course, away from the hazards of that fast Hollywood lifestyle, valuing my new bride and our marriage above whatever powerful lifelong dreams I’d always had for becoming a recording engineer.
 
Shortly afterwards, I got a sales job with the stereo-video chain retailer Cal-Stereo, which was, ironically, a few blocks from Arnie’s Santa Monica studio. I’m not really a sales-type, I thought, but was soon surprised with some early success. Over the next 5 years I became a store manager, subsequently being called upon to help manage the simultaneous opening of 5 new stores in the remote Northern California Bay Area. I was the only person in the company who’d come from these (very foreign) Northern California territories and therefore was one of the point-men for this expansion.
 
After some amazing years with Cal (and after it went surprisingly bankrupt), I opened my first stereo-video store, improving on the Cal-Stereo template, and only 2 blocks from Cal’s highest performing store (out of 27), a San Jose location. I was off and running into a future that included the ownership of 13 varied and interesting businesses, providing a wonderful lifelong journey (with my new wife) to the present production of our music TV series, “Plugged In and Turned On In Paradise.”

I’d started playing Music for Money when I was 12, and continued into my 20’s, in my little Northern California college town of Chico. Over those early years, I’d experienced some of my life’s most fabulous times and also learned a “fair-dinkum” bit about future roads, both taken and those avoided!
 
My dad was musical.  While he was working for his architectural degree at U.C. Berkeley in the 1940’s, Dad earned his pocket money playing trumpet in a big swing band. He transmitted his love of music to all four of the kids in our family; and while we deeply love our tone-deaf mother, she was somewhat less responsible for our common musical interests.
 
When I was eight (and the oldest), my folks bought a piano and I started taking piano lessons just down the street. Then in 1965 at age 12, I bought an acoustic guitar and, with the first tunes of the Beatles playing on our transistor radios, my neighborhood friends Conrad, Artie and I formed a garage band, The Pollywogs. Simultaneously, I followed my father’s musical lead and started playing trumpet in the Junior High school band.
 
So between these three competing instruments – piano, guitar and trumpet – it quickly became pretty clear that I would find my future playing electric guitar in a rock band. (I was really thinking of girls at the time. Shortly after we started practicing, The Pollywogs played a birthday party for Artie’s older sister, Melody, and we were gob-smacked with the idea of becoming rock stars!)
 
Over the next three years, and the rising popularity of The Jackson Five and The Osmonds, we polished our craft, becoming a proficient novelty act, and a party band for the fraternities and sororities at Chico State. We were these little kids who could actually sing and play some good music. We were four young musicians whose parents had to split the task of driving us to and from our steady weekend gigs, for which we earned an average of $50-$100 a night playing... This was 1965-1968!
 
At 17, and a few years into this musical joyride, I looked up into a beautiful fall Chico sky and recognized that this will probably be a time in my life that will be hard to beat. I’ve always remembered that moment, and after these many years, it proved to be prescient.

After winning a few of the local musical battles, our new little band, Soul Generation, qualified to enter the 1968 California State Cal-Expo Battle of the Bands. After three weeks of back-to-back appearances, we won fourth out of over one hundred entries.

Immediately after returning home, two of us were chosen by a few much older college-aged musicians to form a new rock band which we called Sara Jean. This band took off very quickly, and within a week of our first practice, we were playing regularly and earning a good musician’s living. We played all over Northern California, from the many small town "teen centers," to high school dances, and after-game events. Our bread and butter, however, were the fairly continuous sorority and fraternity “keggers,” or outdoor, beer-bash events that boosted Chico State College into the record books as Playboy’s “Party School U.S.A.” Sara Jean was partly responsible for that designation, playing 2-3 times a week for these events. I often reflect, that was the golden age of live music and our 6 piece band was charging up to $650 a night in 1968-1971, a number that’s hard to match even for semi-pro musicians today. We often camped along a roadside turnout after these little Sierra Mountain town gigs and one night, when our bass player’s girlfriend was heard changing vans (her sleeping arrangements) in the middle of the night, Sara Jean suffered a mortal wound, and this fabulous era ended a few weeks later. (The “lady of the night” later married her new favorite band-mate, the lead singer. But wait, time tells the tale, and she’s now back with the bass player and they’ve been together for decades now!)
 
Entering my first year of college at Chico State, my younger friend Melissa asked if I’d like to team up with her fine piano playing and we formed what would ultimately become Panamiga, a large horn and keyboard-based band à la Chicago, Tower of Power, Cold Blood, etc. With 9 members, including Dave our traveling soundman and electronics wizard, we were again playing continuously every weekend and one of the most popular bands in our Northern California region. This band was to be the fountainhead of many of my lifelong friendships and relationships to this day.