In junior high school I took up the trumpet. I don’t exactly know why except that I really liked Al Hirt, Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, and Herb Alpert. Art classes, including those focused on music and dance, were offered at the high school over the summer. So Mom, wanting to get us up and out of the house and feel good about it, signed the three boys up every year for something artsy. So for three years I learned more trumpet and also learned music theory and even took jazz dance. Brother Brad took drums and music theory as well. One summer I even volunteered to be in the local Drum and Bugle Corp as a bugler. I didn’t know the first thing about the one-valve horn, but I had an opportunity to march in several parades in uniform, and marvel about how cool the drummers were. One year, my parents bought Brad a drum set. It was a Japanese-made US Mercury set, with laminated brown wood shells, ride cymbal, and a high hat. The set included a 22″ bass drum, snare, a mounted tom-tom, and a floor tom. I would watch and listen to him play it in his room and marvel at how cool it was. He would play along with his 45 rpm records. Brad could do everything! He could play sports a lot better than me, he got the good-looking girls, he was confident around everybody. But maybe this is something I could do too. So he showed me a few things and allowed me to play them, which I did often. Around the same time I saw my first rock concert. The Lovin’ Spoonful were playing at the Music Circus in Lambertville. In 1967 I went with my new friend Johnny Kurtz and his younger sister and friends. I think the tickets were $4.00. The girls loved them, particularly when they played their current hit, Summer in the City. This looked like this could be a way to get the attention of girls — to play music. Johnny and I talked about playing in a rock band someday. At school we met Dave Conard who had a cool haircut and liked to sing and I mentioned my other friend Mark Ward who could play keyboards. At that point, things moved fast. Johnny got guitar lessons and eventually got himself a bass guitar and a Supra amplifier. Mark got a Farfisa-style electronic organ and Fender Champ amplifier. Dave bought a microphone from Lafayette Electronics. Our first practice was at Mark’s house. I brought Brad’s drum set, and I think we learned how to play Louis, Louis. During this first practice, Mark mentioned that we should get a guitar player and we didn’t know any. He said there was a kid he knew from church named Carl Sturken, who was really good. Carl had his own Fender Mustang guitar and Princeton Reverb amp, but he was two years younger than us, and lived and went to private school in Princeton. The next week we tried him out, which was a revelation because he was much better than all of us. As the Split Ends, our earliest tunes were Wild Thing, Just Like Me, and House of the Rising Sun. At the eighth grade Spring dance, Dave mentioned to the rock band on the stage that we’d like to play a song. To our immediate surprise and dread, they said “yes.” We played Just Like Me. I imagined many of my classmates saw all of us in a different light that night. Our first paying gig was to play for a pool party at the O’Donnell’s house across the street from mine. We played four songs twice, and Dad paid us twenty dollars. As of 2014, two out of the five of us are still in the music business.