I was just a kid, a neighborhood kid, living a “ kids life” in a typical 1960’s suburban development between Poughkeepsie and Hyde Park, NY.
I did a lot of “boy/kid” stuff – riding bikes, playing “army”, playing with electric trains and race cars, not to mention baseball. George Carlin once said, “somewhere in the world through the process of elimination, it has to be true that there exists the worst doctor, and someone has an appointment to see him . . . tomorrow!” Well the same was true for kid baseball players. After the process of elimination, you could find the worst baseball player, and someone has to get stuck with him on their team and that worse baseball player was me.
And there you have my childhood in a nutshell from the time I became “aware” up through my first 10 years. It was pretty typical and relatively uneventful yet I look back on it with great fondness.
But there was this one thing that was always present during those years. Whenever it came about, I had to stop and take notice. It was music playing on the stereo, or on TV or on my sister Dianna’s little fold-out record player. It was never just “in the background” it always made me stop whatever else I was doing or thinking and really listen. Why did this affect me so? It might be a polka record my parents were listening to. I was also affected by the theme for the Huntley/Brinkley News Hour (Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, 3rd movement).
Of course I didn’t know who Beethoven was or even hardly what a symphony orchestra was all about, but this music bowled me over! It did something to me that I couldn’t explain but I somehow knew it was important to me. It gave me a sense of wonder and excitement that I somehow knew would be a huge part of who I was and what I would become.
And then IT happened! I was 8 years old and it was 1964. My older sister Dianna brought home “Meet the Beatles,” and put it on her stereo for the first time. She was probably annoyed that I was hanging around in her room, but I couldn’t leave. First, I heard “I Want to Hold Your Hand” followed by “ “I Saw Her Standing There.” What were those sounds? What type of instruments made them? How did they get their voices to sound like that? These were all the thoughts going through my clueless, immature, 8-year-old brain.
As the weeks and months went on, Dianna brought more records home. I remember the first time I heard The Animals “House of the Rising Sun.” It was frightening but beautiful at the same time. It starts on that A minor chord and then that low-guttural voice of Eric Burdon comes in for the first verse. Half way through that verse, he takes it up an octave to an unworldly scream! As a kid in my past, I couldn’t have intellectually expressed what I have just described now as an adult today. I didn’t know anything about music or octaves, or vocal ranges, or song forms. I just knew it all sounded amazing and I couldn’t get enough of those new “45s” that came out every week.
My cousin Paul, who lived in our neighborhood was the first person I knew to get ahold of an electric guitar and amplifier. He invited me and some of my friends (and future bandmates) over to watch him plug the guitar into the amp, turn the amp on, turn it up full and strum across the strings. His strumming “technique” was some kind of voodoo-like rhythmic mishmash of distorted noise. He had no idea what he was doing, but it sounded fantastic! I just had to get ahold of such an instrument “someday.”
In the meantime I had received my first guitar sometime in 1965. It was a classical-style guitar strung with nylon strings and it came with an instructional record.
The first part of this record gave you each string to individually tune up to. There were no “magical” electronic tuners in “those days.” So I probably went through that tuning section of the record more than 100 times before I even got it anywhere near tuned correctly. The first chords the record taught you were G, C and D. I squinted at the diagram and tried to form the G.
Well they had to be KIDDING! My fingers couldn’t possibly go into those contortions that were called for! When I strummed it, it sounded HORRIBLE! It sounded like a railroad spike being driven into a coconut. I developed a system of “practice” where I could try the chord a few times, then stand up, lift the guitar above my head and slam it down on my bed!
It must have worked because in some period of time that is kind of a blur to me as to how long it took, I could play a somewhat legible G, C, and D chord. I still had to get through more “guitar-slamming” before I could finally sorta play the chords to the one song on the record . . . I think it was “Red River Valley” or something. Certainly not one of the “cool songs” that I was longing to play.
During this time of “learning the hard way” there were two other “cats” in the neighborhood, Gary and Nelson, who had both procured electric guitars and amps. I was still hacking away at my classical “tree trunk”, but all three of us had the good fortune to cross paths with a very talented guitar instructor that our collective parents had somehow located (His name was Richard Trecino, and I am forever in his debt for the music that he instilled in me!). Richard came to our neighborhood and gave us each an hour guitar lesson at $3.50 per kid. It was the best move any of us wannabe rockers could have made at the time.
He taught the three of us some of those all-elusive “cool songs.” “Daydream” by the Lovin’ Spoonful; “Good Lovin’” by the Young Rascals, and “Walk, Don’t Run” by the Ventures. Things were getting really exciting now!
It was inevitable that Gary, Nelson, and me would play together and form the beginnings of a band that would go on for the next 15 years or so to come (give or take various personnel changes and additions). After all, we were in walking or biking distance from each other, so practicing our guitars together was an easy situation to set up.
We finally found a kid in our school (Lenny) who had a “Champagne” Ludwig Drum Set. The three of us neighborhood kids had to be driven over to his house in Poughkeepsie to practice for the first time. So there we were . . . Lenny, our newly found drummer, Gary and Nelson each playing electric Fender guitars and me strumming like mad on my classical tree trunk. The first song we ever played together was “Walk, Don’t Run” and it was one of those shining moments in my life! I will never forget the first few measures of playing that Ventures tune as long as I may live! For the first time (at least to us) we sounded like a real honest-to-goodness Rock Band!
Within a week I somehow convinced my parents to buy me an electric guitar and amp so I could finally get “heard.” At our second practice as a foursome, we decided to name ourselves, “The Reverbs.” My cousin Paul (who was always buying cool stuff) had just bought a reel to reel tape recorder and became our “recording engineer.” He was about 8 years our senior, so it just would have looked funny for him to be playing in the band with us little kids. That tape still exists and I managed to digitize a sample:
One day, the four of us were having a band meeting (big deal, right?). It was somehow decided we needed a new name. I guess “The Reverbs” sounded too much like all we played was surf music and we were already branching out into “groovier” stuff like “Hanky Panky”, “Snoopy vs The Red Baron” and of course “The Monkees Theme” (You might well ask “What? No Beatles?” – We did have an instrumental version of “This Boy”…Other than that, their stuff was too challenging to play or sing at the time!). Anyway, we each wrote down some names and put them into a hat. While we were writing things down, a name just flew into my head – “The Stockade”. I really don’t know where it came from or how I got the idea. The next step was to draw the names out of the hat and vote on them (why we even bothered with the hat, I’ll never know!).
When “The Stockade” was revealed, it was unanimous that it was as cool sounding as cool could be (or maybe the word at the time was “boss!”). And so, with our new name, “The Stockade”, we began a new phase for this “kid” band. As mentioned before, the band as well as its name (we dropped “The” eventually) would last for the next 15 years or so, unbeknownst to us kids at the time.
Again, though there were more personnel changes to come, it can be said that on that day (sometime) in 1966 a rock band called “Stockade” came into being. This “little band” of ours would shape my career choice and my life in general for evermore.
(To Be Continued…)
