much from that point onward.
Yeah, you were talking about going to college at Michigan State and you also graduated the Musician’s Institute, right? Yeah. A few years later. Let’s see… actually, ten years later I started at MI. I started col- lege in ’73 and I started Musician’s Institute in ’83 and I graduated from MI in ’84. What a great school that was. It’s right down on Hol- lywood Boulevard, it was. It still is but it’s in a different building right down off Hollywood Boulevard on McGavin Place now, but back in the day it was on Hollywood Boulevard and it was actually the upstairs of the Hollywood Wax Museum which at one point had been the Screen Actors Guild headquarters. It was some sort of actor’s training union headquar- ters back in the 40’s and the 50’s.
Wow. Interesting building. Still had some of the plaques on the wall from you know, Bing Crosby or whoever it was. I do remember there was one that was Bing Crosby’s there. I always thought that was pretty cool. But yeah, I went to school and moved out to California. Didn’t know a soul but one cousin that lived out in Orange County. Moved out there and started playing and stayed out there for five years. Met somebody, came back here and got married and been playing around here since then.
Well, jumping back in time, I was read- ing that your parents actually had a nightclub, right? And you used to go there and play? Well, they had like an in-town bar called The Office that was right in town by where the big courthouse is. You know, Hamilton is the county seat of Butler County and the big courthouse is like right across the street. And then they had a half interest in a place, strangely enough, called the Halfway Inn
which was out on the highway in between Hamilton and Middle Town and it doesn’t sound like much, but back in those days Hamilton was a big manufacturing center. We had Champion Paper and Beckett Paper and over in Fairfield we had a GM assembly or a stamping plant and of course, Middle Town had the steel plant, so there was a lot of stuff going on so there was a lot of stuff going on in this area back in the 50’s and the 60s’. It was thriving. I mean, come the 70’s all that industry kind of faded away. But at one time, it was jumpin’ and man the clubs were jumpin’. And especially the ones that were, like, in between Hamilton and Middle Town, because that’s where everybody lived or worked and yeah, it was happening.
Oh yeah, yeah. Saw some great players there. Are you famil- iar with a fellow named Troy Seals?
Yes. Yeah. Great player, writer. Used to play the Halfway quite often, in fact, I learned to drive a stan- dard shift when I was 12 years old on Troy Seal’s 1950 GMC Panel truck which my dad had won from him in a card game out at the Halfway.
Oh boy. Now dad, later, you know, soon after that, felt bad about it and gave it back to Troy or Troy bought it back from him. I mean, I don’t know what the actual arrangement was but Troy got his truck back.
Well, another artist that I read that you’d been influenced bye was Lonnie Mack. I can kinda tell. Well, Lonnie was a big influence on anybody and everybody that wanted to play electric rock and roll guitar. Whether they know it or not. He truly was that. Clapton said as much a few years back, he said that Lonnie Mack was the guy that really brought guitar to the
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