My first attraction to play music was borne the minute I held my brother David’s beautiful marble-coloured Bellini guitar.
My parents encouraged me to play an instrument preferably piano but I insisted on guitar as my choice of instrument. They bought me a rose-coloured entry-level Bellini guitar and for an hour every week I went to guitar lessons with Mike Barker, a local guitar tutor. He would teach me rudiments of music theory and learn to play simple songs like “Little Brown Jug” and “Rambling Boy” but I was more interested in playing Beatles, Stones, etc.
I would spend a lot of my pre-teen years standing in front of a mirror, miming to tunes and with my guitar in my hand slowly began to work out the chording of what was playing.
Obviously my next goal was to somehow amplify the guitar. In those days every home had a radiogram in their house; a large piece of furniture consisting of a radio, a turntable and large speakers at the bottom. I soon figured out that by cutting the plug off a small microphone (the ones that came with portable cassette recorders) and connecting the wires to the turntable stylus, the microphone would be amplified and once placed in the sound hole of the guitar, volume became an option.
At the age of 13, I remember distinctly, while watching the bass player of the band that played at my Barmitzvah party, that I wanted to play the bass guitar.
