I continued lessons at around 10 and studied for about a year before stopping. By that time I had found other outlets for my music in the public school system performing in chorus, band and orchestra. At the age of 13, I entered my first band. Rehearsals were at my parent’s house with me playing the family organ. This did not last long as I did not own a portable keyboard. My dad bought me my first keyboard the next year: a red Farfisa Combo Compact organ with a Haynes Bass King amplifier. I joined another group and played my first paying gig with the whole band earning the total sum of $40.

Throughout school I played in various commercial and original bands. One band worth mentioning was fashioned after Frank Zappa. We called ourselves Northpolio. I seem to remember us playing a Muscular Dystrophy telethon at one point. Yeah, it was Northpolio for Muscular Dystrophy! After my first year in college, I left to join a touring group doing the hotel bar band circuit up and down the East Coast and Midwest United States. Through a family contact I met an executive for Capital Records and gave him a demo tape I had recorded in my basement. He was impressed, so I started another group with some of the old Northpolio guys named Juniper Elbow. The group performed locally while being groomed by the executive for signing with one of the majors. Unfortunately, the second gas embargo of the 1970’s ushered in a significant increased cost in vinyl (the main component for manufacturing LP’s) and budgets for the record companies’ projects started drying up.

I received an offer to join an existing funk group, Creation, along with bass player T.M Stevens . T.M and I being the new members gravitated towards each other becoming friends. I think we both brought a very driving and electric sound to the group at the time. T.M. was playing this pounding electric rock style of funk and I was really getting into the Arp Odyssey synthesizer. That group ended up recording “Bread ‘n Butter Man” in the Mercury studios in Manhattan. We played extensively in the NY metropolitan area but eventually I think our style conflicted with the core members.

T.M. and I answered an ad placed in the Village Voice for an audition in Brooklyn. It was for the regrouping of Sir Lord Baltimore. They ended up taking me and I stayed with the group for about three months before leaving.

I took a break from music for a while. Then one day I received a call from a trumpeter I knew back when doing the hotel bar circuit. He was a member of Zakariah and they were looking for a new keyboardist. For the next two and a half years we traveled throughout most of the U.S. performing until finally disbanding the group with four of the members including myself deciding to go in the studio to record some new material.

With the interest we started receiving from the record companies it became obvious that we had a future in music production. So, we purchased a house and bought a customized API studio board from Arlo Guthrie and purchased a 16 track Ampeg tape machine from a studio in Boston opening up Flying "Z" Studios. We did a lot of recording for various acts, including Little Buster & the Soul Brothers at the time and started doing production work for Brunswick Records.

After some time, I felt a need to play in public and started working with several acts that eventually led me into Manhattan where I auditioned with a singer to work at Chelsea Place. The club was listed in Playboy at the time as one of the 100 best nightclubs in the world. I worked there for about two months with the singer and, at the request of the manager, ended up staying for the next 4 years playing both in the upstairs jazz room and downstairs "boogie" room with a myriad of musicians and entertainers.

Since then, I've continued playing out, recorded music for TV, and even scored a musical. It's been a fun run, so far, and I'm just looking to do some more interesting things going forward.