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My
introduction to guitar was Christmas 1967, I got an electric
guitar along with an electric train a basketball and some clothes.
I can remember being very excited because the guitar was the
only thing I had on my Christmas list that I actually got. My
excitement was short lived, because 2 weeks after Christmas my
2 year old sister Jewell sat on the neck, when the guitar was
lying on the bed, and broke the head stock off. I cried so hard
that mom went to the store got some glue and tried to glue the
head back on. Obviously that didn't hold under the tension off
the guitar strings. Unfortunately Santa didn't have enough money
to replace the guitar. But in the years to come I would play
all my friends guitars as much as I could. I can remember some
of them telling me to leave and go home and they wouldn't let
me take their guitar, so I would stay and play until they kicked
me out. In 1970 we lived in Salina, Kansas and I got the opportunity
to play in the school band I chose to play the trumpet. I also
played guitar in music class and that was pretty fulfilling even
though I couldn't take the guitar home, I got to play guitar
everyday for 40 minutes. I played trumpet for about 5 months
in the school band and I was pretty good, I sat 1st seat. Dad
was in Vietnam and Mom ran into some financial difficulty and
couldn't afford to continue to pay for rental and I had to give
up the trumpet, that hurt a lot. Didn't think much about playing
music after that. When dad came home from Vietnam he brought
me an electric guitar. I finally had my own guitar again, finally.
I was determined to not let anything happen to this guitar. This
is where my deep love for the guitar really started to develop.
Lets jump
forward a few years to high school. I thought I was a pretty
good guitar player being self taught and learning some of the
songs off the radio, until I went to Martin Luther King High
in Phila. in 1975. King is where I started seeing some the funk
bands in school, watching them made me realize that my skills
were way down. At that point I started spending time every other
day practicing. I couldn't practice guitar everyday because I
was an athlete and played football, basketball and baseball.
I had practice for these sports every weekday, as a matter of
fact I was a better athlete than guitar player, I went to college
on a full football scholarship, but that's another story. Back
to King High. There were phenomenal players at King, some of
the members of Pieces of a Dream, Kurt Dowd, Greg Thomas, Boneapart,
Henry Horne, Tracy, Dale Harris and host of other great local
players. I was surprised when a Greg Thomas and Tracey asked
me to be in a new band they were forming called Retribution.
I thought their skills were far beyond mine. The best part of
playing with Retribution was that they added a second guitar
player, Henry Horne, and Henry helped me a lot with some basic
knowledge on playing in a band situation. I still keep in touch
with all the members of Retribution today 27 years later.
Since then
I have played in a few local bands: Phire, Session, Old News
Band, Urban Qudra Band, The Awesome band with Doug Grisby on
bass (band leader for Teena Maria) Freddie Holiday on drums (drummer
for Boys II Men), Eugene Verdell Jr. on keyboards and Constance
Powell (backing vocalist for Phyllis Hyman). I also played guitar
behind Major Harris (Love won't let me wait), and Galaxy-5 (We
like to Party) out of Phila.
Exit45
realization came when I was playing with Session, a R&B dance
band in the mid 80's. Session was a seven piece band with bass,
drums, guitar, keyboards, sax and 2 vocalists. The musicians
were feeling very constrained playing the R&B of that day,
and we wanted stretch out into some more progressive material.
So we stayed with Session but we started to rehearse some smooth
jazz and some jazz fusion. We started to input 1 or 2 of the
jazz songs per set on the Session gigs. To our surprise the audience
absolutely loved the heavier music. We got louder applause from
the jazz material than we did from the R&B. We decided to
do some gigs without the vocals and just do smooth jazz and jazz
fusion. Clarence came up with the name, as we were driving down
I76 south in Phila. the Broad street exit off I76 was Exit45.
That's were the name came from.
After
about a year of Session and Exit45 I was getting tired of gig'n
and wanted to do more writing and studio work. I left the bands
and started to develop a recording studio and do a lot of writing
with Gene Verdell. Unfortunately both bands dispersed because
I was the band leader, booking agent musical director and driving
force behind both of them.
Over
the next several years I slowly expanded the studio, developed
my writing skills, and worked with a lot of people. I believe
that I am restless spirit because after I got good at writing
and had a very nice room to work in, I wanted to do the gig'n
thing again. I called Clarence Johns (drums), Tyrone Burroughs
(bass), Donald West (sax) and Rob Lucas (keyboards) together
for a meeting to resurrect Exit45. Donald West was not available
but everyone else was. That was 1998. We have gone thru some
personnel changes since then, but it looks like the dust has
settled and the band members also.
I
recently started a guitar collection. I am slowly building, adding
some cheap guitars here and there, and adding some nice guitars
also. Right now my collection is 12 guitars which you can see
on my guitars page. I plan to add a Sadowsky Nylon string soon,
and some more after that. After meeting some of the bass players
here in the area and hearing great bass tones, they inspired
me to really sit down and work on my guitar tone. I believe that
I have developed some very nice tones for our first CD release.
I tried to move around with the guitar textures on a lot of the
songs to keep things fresh. The only problem with that is that
you don't develop a recognizable sound. Not being a world renowned
guitarist I believe that it is more important to develop the
different emotional colors of guitar for a song than for me to
be recognized for a tone. I have been told that my playing style
is my own, which makes me feel good.
My
favorite guitarist are Carlos Rios, Steve Lukather, Lee Ritenour,
Larry Carlton, Steve Morse, Drak, Al Dimeola, John Scofield,
Chuck Loeb, John Abercrombie and Eddie Van Halen. I guess you
can see that my tastes are pretty diverse. I hope the diversity
shows in both my writing and playing style!!!!!!
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