How It All Began

At 17, I was a very private kind of teenager in Charleston WV, but decided in the eleventh grade that I wanted to be singer. I would close the door to my room and sing along with records. I learned to chord the guitar. My mother encouraged me, and got me interviews with a few local promoters. 

Neither of us knew anything about the entertainment business. The promoters seemed to be slick con men, not really the kind of people I cared to be around. Somehow I ended up sitting in with Chuck Birch and the Veveltones, with Miss Bonnie B, Chuck's wife. They played the Moose Club, Elk's Club, Son's of Italy Hall and that sort of venue. 

I would get to sing a few songs but I never got paid. I was happy just to get the experience. I entered the yearly HS talent show. Anyone could enter and most sang or did comedy, or other odd things. I surprised a lot of people because I had always been so quiet, and nobody even knew I had been singing with the Velvetones for months. Without warning, there I was on stage. I think I did pretty good. The students seemed to enjoy it. 

I started a group with two girls to back me up. It didn't work. Then I got with a some musicians from school and we started a band. Didn't work, and we started another band, got a few jobs here and there for next to nothing pay. During this early period I appeared on local TV twice, once accompanied by a regular on the show who played guitar, and another time with the Spyders, one of the bands I had started. 

I even went to Canton Ohio on a Greyhound bus, where my brother Don lived. I thought I was going to get to sing with a band. But when I got there, they ran a mike thru a small amp and gave it to me. I didn't know what was going on or why I wasn't going to use the PA system. I thought I was going to sing for the show, but I didn't. The sound was terrible. You couldn't hear the small amp above the guitars. I don't know why they even bothered, because they had no intention of really auditioning me. 

They were humoring me by letting me sit in for one song before the gig. I went to see an agent there and he told me to learn Frank Sinatra songs if I wanted a job, but I liked Rock and Roll. Before I left to come back to Charleston, I auditioned for a local TV show. I was accepted. They had pros and amateurs on. 

Dionne Warwick was going to be on the same day I was. John Kennedy was assassinated the day of the show and it was cancelled. That was the end of that. I came back to Charleston and got a job in a defense plant making tanks and armored personnel carriers for the guys in Vietnam.

When you were first hired someone would give you a bucket of screws and bolts and say deburr these but take your time, no hurry. Another guy come by in a few minutes and yell at you for working too slow. It was a game to keep you in line. They gave you a rag and an open barrel of toxic solvent and no gloves to clean the pressing machines. When you finished your hands were raw. But you couldn't complain because you would get fired. Back then there were few work place safety rules, or else they were ignored. I worked on hundreds of tank sand carriers, inside, outside, over, under, sideways, down. I can't tell you how many times I sliced my hands open on the razor sharp sides that were angled for welding. Whole tanks being transported across the length of the factory above us on conveyors had fallen before and smashed some poor souls flatter than pancakes. 

We made those tanks by hand. There were no robots like the ones in automobile factories now. The sides of the tank metal armor, as much as a half inch thick and they weighed hundreds of pounds. I can't even guess how much , but it was impossible for one person to lift one off the floor. Whole pilots ( pile-its) of them stacked 2 feet high were placed on the floor in the "grinder" work areas. We had to lift one end up using only our bodies and backs, often one person did it with no help from another, and get under it while pushing up to a vertical position in order to give a quick flip onto a work and get out of the way as it fell. It was definitely a workout. I would go home exhausted and dirtier than you can imagine, covered with black oxidized armor metal dust. In the plant there was constant fire from welding torches, and sparks from metal being ground and polished. It was like an organized hell. Black dust would cake in your ears and your hair weighed several pounds more by the end of the day. We had masks like surgeons wore and goggles but they were so hot we couldn't see or breathe with them on, so we didn't wear the masks sometimes. It kept the goggles from steaming up so bad. 

With or without the mask you breathed the metal dust and coughed it up the next day. Now and then your arms or legs would simply give out and you had to try to flip the piece too soon, or drop it and hope you could get out of the way before it bounced up and back at you, to graze and your shins or ankles, ripping 6 to 8 inches of skin off under your jeans in the process, or worse. You had to be quick or you could lose a limb or your life. There is nothing like it today, except maybe a coal miners job, and they don't do the heavy lifting . 

That factory would be shut down immediately, and people would be filing claims right and left about back injuries and more. It was dangerous. People died. Those tanks and personnel carriers saved the lives of hundreds, maybe thousands of soldiers. The workers who died should have been honored by the President or received some kind of medal but they didn't. It was also loud and toxic in the plant. 

I never forgot my music and I would sing at the top of my lungs in harmony to the noise of the machines while I worked. It was a regular band with the deep bass thumping, clanging of metal being bent and shaped under tremendous power, and the whirring of drills and grinders punching and polishing metal. They might have seen my lips moving but I don't think anyone else could hear me sing.

One day I asked for a Friday off to audition for a band, but the super said no. I went to Morgantown anyway and auditioned for a soul band but a guy who sang like James Brown got the gig instead. I lost my factory job. I never regretted it but my parents were pretty angry. I tried to get a job on the radio as a DJ. Nobody wanted to hire a young man who was not married or in school. They felt it was a waste of time because he would be drafted and all the training would be for nothing. I enrolled in West Virginia State College. 

One Friday night in the summer of 1966 I was cruising in Kanawha City with with friend and we saw Norris, my future friend and bass player, walking the long boulevard home. At the moment he played a fantastic sax in another band. He had graduated the year after me. I didn't really know him but my friend did, so we picked him up. Norris remembered me from the HS talent show and invited me to a rehearsal of a band he was in. They were making good money in Charleston but they had to travel too much from Ohio and Morgantown for the gigs, so they decided to break up Some of them wanted to go to West Virginia University and start another band there. 

My other brother, Jerry, was a student at the university and had an apartment in Morgantown which he was about to vacate. Since Norris and his band mates were about to go to WVU, and some of them needed an apartment which I could easily get, they convinced me to enroll also. Their band, the Glass Menagerie, was working until the singer left. I was there and available so it was a natural. I joined up and that band lasted another year. We went on a little tour in the Midwest in the spring of 1967, and returned to Morgantown when the band broke up. That's when we reformed as the Mind Garage. 

I have never recounted this story before, never analyzed it, but looking at it, I can see the progression and how hard it was. When it's happening you just shrug it off and keep going. It's called Life. The doors do not open easily for newcomers. Don't worry about the odds against you. Make your recordings and Cds. It will be history. You don't have a second chance so take all the chances you can, while you can. The world may never recognize you in your lifetime, but one day collectors are sure to find your work and call it a treasure, and it will all have been worth it. You knew it all along. 

Never lose sight of your goal. Never let go of your dream or you will die inside long before your body gives up the soul. You have to have a goal or a dream, but even then it's still luck, timing, the right combination of musicians, and circumstances beyond your control that give you the break. But you have to be ready when it comes. It may take a year, or 5, or 10, or even the rest of your life. But you have to keep trying so you are there at the right time and place. I had already been trying to get a break with no success for 5 years before Norris and I ended up in the same band. It was another 3 years after that before we finally "made it" by getting a contract with RCA. 

I was 25 years old then and I had been trying since I was 17, for a third of my life. The rest is history.