I've been playing the guitar since I was 5 five years old. I received a white Stella acoustic from a neighbor who was moving and didn't want it anymore. I strummed and twanged it until the neck broke off in a bedroom brawl with my brother. I imagine everyone was glad to see it go. My maternal grandmother played guitar in a gospel trio. She had a guitar at home that she would let me play when I visited on vacations. It was made by a local man in Bernie, Missouri. The frets were slightly misplaced so it would not play in tune.
My family moved to Hawaii in 1963. This was a transitional period in pop music heralded by surf bands and British Invasion groups. Everyone wanted to play guitar and I was no exception. I begged my father for a guitar. He had played some as a teen. One day, it happened. He returned from an Air Force mission to Japan with an ARS spanish style acoustic. The guitar was very much like a classical with a slotted peghead but sported steel rather than nylon strings. I played this guitar for two years until we relocated to base housing on Hickam Air Force Base.
On the other end of the apartment building we moved into was a fourteen year old guitarist. He had an Guyatone electric guitar and an amplifier. He was already fairly proficient at playing Animals songs. He had friends with a bass guitar and drums who would set up on the patio and practice playing surf music, British pop and emerging American pop like The McCoys and Paul Revere and the Raiders. Up until then I had been picking out one melodies from surf tunes. He taught me to play some chords and my first song, the ubiquitous House of the Rising Sun. I received my first electric guitar, a single pickup Kawai from my parents for Christmas. It was accompanied by a Kent tube amplifier with an 8 inch speaker. It was small but mighty enough to start a daily litany from my parents that would become a familiar phrase throughout my life. "Turn it down!", they would say, adding a "Dammit" for good measure after the third or fourth request.
My family returned to the mainland in 1967. The popular music scene was shifting again to a mixed bag of bubblegum, folk and psychedelic blues and rock. I sought out other wannabes near my new domocile in off base housing in Wrightstown, New Jersey outside of McGuire Air Force Base. A new band was formed to butcher the Top 40 list every day after school. Cream and Hendrix were added to the songlists. The 50's rock and country & western to which my parents listened were starting to influence my understanding of how music was constructed. I discovered somewhat accidentally the pentatonic scale. When I realized the 1-4-5 chord progression could be played anywhere on the neck, a new day dawned.
