Sixty years ago, on a Sunday night, the Beatles invaded America, and I watched in glorious black and white as they captivated every teenager in the country. The next morning, I told my mother that there would be no more haircuts and that I needed an electric guitar and amplifier. At this point, I had been playing guitar for two years on an old Gibson D 45 and was ready to take the leap into electrified instruments. I took extra vitamins and found a few special exercises to generate hair growth. It was a painstaking process.
Halfway through my school year, my family moved to Plano, Texas, and I was befriended by my good pal, Jarry Davis. He and I both had that special itch to play rock music. He knew a drummer and a sort of bass player, and I took on the lead guitar duties, playing a Japanese electric with six pickups and twenty knobs that did nothing. We called our band The Dolphins, later changing it to The Orphans, which sounded a bit tougher and fit us because of our long hair and general surely attitude; we were not the Monkees.
My rock n’ roll journey started on that February night and lasted until 2019, when my band, The American Classics Band, retired our setlist. Not a bad run of it.
Notes From The Cactus Patch 