As a young kid I remember my dad buying a model. If I’m not mistaken it was the lunar lan- der from Apollo 11 and he put the thing together I’m sure, but I do remember that was my first ex- posure to model making and that’s something that to this day I still do. I specifically got into building cars and truck models and that was my bag, it’s a hobby that I still do and love all these years later. Other than music, everything the boys were into in the 70s that’s what I did, and I had a lot of fun doing that stuff.


School band, 1976.


What kind of music did you listen to grow- ing up? Well I grew up in the church. My mom was the pianist, organist, singer and the choir director for a number of years. So automatically, my early music was music from the church. Like anyone else you hear pop music and you hear what’s on the radio. I was exposed to the old hymns and gospel. At home it was much the same. On top of that my older sisters, being a few years older than me, listened to early to mid-1970s rock and roll and I would listen to their albums. Around 10 years old or so is when my ears perked up to what was popular music, but I was still in the church and listening to Christian music. I had an early appreciation for what music was from my mom and just being exposed to that. She was and still is a great piano player and singer and I still get a kick out of listening to her sing and play.


What hobbies or activities did you do as achild or teenager? The standard kid stuff in the 70s; bike riding, skateboards, sports of all kinds. I tried all the sports; baseball football etc. I wasn’t the best athlete but I damn sure put my best into it, be- cause it was the cool thing to do and it was fun. I had fun playing sports and met a lot of people that are still good friends to this day from a combo of growing up in Smyrna and playing on sports teams in the city that I wouldn’t have known without playing sports. Then I was into art. I did a lot of drawing and sketching and doo- dling not really painting just mostly pencil stuff.


When did you discover your passion for making music? I was probably around 12. I wanted to play some- thing and once I had started listening to rock n roll, like I said my sisters’ albums and listening to FM radio in Atlanta and pop music my ears perked up and I started hearing it as something fun. I thought I kind of wanted to play drums. The first private school I went to started up a band when I was, I think, in 6th grade so I signed up for the snare drum. I had some lessons from the band teacher. It didn’t last long I think it folded after that first year but that gave me my taste of it, and I knew that’s what I wanted to do. I didn’t care about that snare drum after that, I wanted a drum set. So, I started listening to music through the focal point of listening to the drums on all the songs that I was hearing. At that point, in my church one of the guys in the choir was a lawyer, and one his clients owned a music store, long since closed, and that was the place to go for instruments. He arranged for me to be able to get a used set of drums for free. Which is prac- tically unheard of. That was the start of it. When I got my first little 4-piece set of drums and my parents bought a couple symbols for me and some stands and I was off to the races. That was 1977 I was 12 years old. That same man started a band in our church to teach the teenagers instru- ments in his basement he had a rehearsal space with all the instruments and that’s what he did. He started a little youth band and I was the drummer. Before I got my set of drums, I played those in his basement and that’s when I really fell in love with it and knew that’s what I wanted to do that was my early discovery and my passion for it.


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