Play that lamp shade ...

Way back in 1965 I played my first rock-n-roll song with my first group of "musicians". It was preformed in a friend's basement and we had to use jury-rigged equipment in order to do it. The other guitar player and I had microphones duck taped to our flat-top guitars, and the drummer had no cymbals, so he removed the light bulb and glass cover from a pull down ceiling lamp with a round shaped metal top to use as the cymbal.  The song we did was the Beatles version of "Money" since we had head it a lot on the radio and none of us had ever heard the real Motown versions written by Barrett Strong. After a lot of "practice" we eventually played the high point of our little group's career at a private high school party.

By '67 I had moved on to work with several other groups and even had opportunities to play some rather large venues with several regional rock bands before 1970 when I left the music business. I still have a lot of memories that go along what that time in my life, some good, some bad, and some that still make me laugh out loud like the time I mumbled the entire first verse of "Proud Mary". We were preforming on the stage of a large high school auditorium with over a thousand people in the audience listening. I had a mind block and couldn't remember the words. The funny part is that no one seemed to notice including the band! I guess that was a good example of the fact that most people hear what they expect to hear.

One of the other "first songs" that I remember playing was with a band that was actually getting paid for gigs in '66. It was a tune by the Rolling Stones named "Off The Hook".  Here's an early video featuring their performance of the song.

This video was recorded at the Santa Monica Civic Center:

(Click here to view it directly on You Tube)