Page 167 - Been There… Done That!

Been There... Done That!
or as he said, just good enough to get by. We decided to play some in his folks’ bar but had no idea of things to come. We started with people laying money on the stage and then Gary’s mom put a glass jar on the stage that they started putting money in. We joked about and wondered whether they wanted us to play more or less. Word got around that we were doing that and other musicians started to come around.
As summer started to come to an end, Gary told me it was time to get serious as he wasn’t going back to being an electrician. I asked him what he had in mind and his response was, let’s put a band together. Well, I was still in school and didn’t know how I could do that and Gary said we could do it on weekends and I thought that would work.
We auditioned several musicians and finally hired Gary Craig, who, like me, was an Army brat and played some drums. He said that his brother Ed was coming back from Germany and that he played keyboards. Gary said he wasn’t happy with the present drummer and we were told about a local guy by the name of Scott Stryker who was also hired along with Ed. That made the band complete.
We worked in Columbia, Missouri on weekends and things were going great when all of a sudden President Kennedy was assassinated and everything stopped. I will never forget Gary being the positive thinker saying, screw this, let’s go to California and pursue the recording industry. We all agreed, I even quit school and we were “off and running” believe it or not, to Hollywood, California.
I don’t know anyone that I ever met that could have pulled that off, but Gary G did it. We were playing famous clubs and off to Vegas
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