My grandfather Frank Haley gave me my first guitar for Christmas in 1957. It was a plastic toy Emenee guitar with a musicbox hand crank and pictures of cowboys on it. I haven't been quite the same since...and neither have my parents, or anyone else within earshot, for that matter. I took to the toy, eschewing the hand crank, and within weeks was figuring out how to make sounds on the nylon strings to copy what I was hearing on the phonograph at home, so my Mom & Dad went out and got me a Mel Bay chord book. One thing led to another, and it wasn't long before everyone decided it was time to get me a real acoustic guitar.
Through the rest of the 60's and into the 70's, I kept busy with several bands, with names as diverse as The Yet To Come (too right!), The Acid Test, The Gordian Knot and The Family Band. In late '72 I was invited to join a super hot bar band called Trails to replace an outgoing guitarist. About a year later we quit our day jobs and moved to Vermont, living in a big house on top of a mountain and gigging our way around New England for a year. To this day, we still get back together once in awhile in Connecticut, our home state, for reunion gigs, getting all our old friends together and howling at the moon.
In '79 I moved to Silicon Valley, California, where I lived for nearly 20 years. I put together a couple of bands while I was there, including an awesome Beatles tribute band called 20 Years Ago Today and a great classic rock band called The Silversides (the industry nickname for the WW II era GMC buses that kept America moving through the war, as well as a tribute to our changing hair color). I also picked up some truly bizarre temporary gigs through the union, including playing in a Mexican wedding band and in «shudder» an Elvis impersonator's backup band. (Hey, it was cheesy but it had a big ol' sound, with 3 girl backup singers and a full horn section)
In '97 I moved to Ohio and have been fortunate enough to hook up with several great bands since I've been here, 28 Daze being the most recent.
It was a perfect time to be a guitar player. By the time surfer music got going, I'd learned enough to be able to copy what I was hearing on the radio, and once the Beatles and the rest of the British Invasion hit the airwaves, well...fuhgeddaboutit. Against my parents' initial reservations, I talked them into letting me get an electric guitar (a 2-pickup Harmony solid body in cherry sunburst), and it wasn't long before I was playing with my junior high school buds in a series of garage bands, some better than others, playing everything that was hitting the radio in those awesome mid-60's times of musical and social revolution. Some of those bands were decent enough for us to get gigs at school functions and other hangouts and parties, and it was a fun time to be a band guy--I was such a shy dork my social life would have been nil otherwise, but this was my entreé into the wonderful world of dances and parties.....and chicks!
