My Journey in Music: Part I - The Early Days

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.