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MS: Yeah, so a beautiful town.

BiTS: Now, how did you get into music? What attracted you to music in the first place?

MS: Well, I had older siblings. I was the youngest of three, and of course, back in the 60s, the
Mecca of music, my brother was spinning Carlos Santana albums and Jimi Hendrix and
Steppenwolf, and I was kind of introduced through that type of music, and I guess you would say
from the rock vein. It was a while before I discovered blues, but little did I know, all the music
that I really, really loved that was rock based was also stuff that was really close to blues, so I

gravitated toward that.
BiTS: Ain’t that the truth. When you left school, did you have any plans to be a professional
musician at all?

MS: No, I never thought like that. I just knew I loved music and so, you know, I would look at the
Sears and Roebuck catalogue for weeks in and weeks out when I was a kid, drooling over their
guitars and it took me years, and
finally, when I got in grade school,
junior high, I mowed enough
yards to go down to a pawn shop
and put some money down on a,
I believe it was a small three
quarter size Kay bass. I actually
started out playing bass. Yeah, I
was sort of infatuated with all the
bass players back in the day. Mel
Schacher of Grand Funk and
Geezer Butler from Black Sabbath
and I listened to bass lines a lot.
But it didn't take me long, though,
that only lasted about a year, and
then I mowed some more yards
and bought a guitar (laughs).

BiTS: Was that around the time
when you moved to Texas? How
did you come to move to Texas?

MS: Yeah, my move to Texas
happened much later. So I finally
got those guitars and played
through late high school and early college, and then I kind of put it down. I was raising a family
and I also injured my two fingers severely. I stuck them in a serpentine belt, and one got sort of
amputated.

BiTS: Whoa!

MS: Yeah, one got amputated at the end and the other was sort of nearly ripped off, and after
multiple surgeries, got them basically repaired. One’s a little shorter, it's your fretting hand.

BiTS: And did you go back to the guitar to try and rehabilitate? It must have been very painful.

MS: Yeah, that's actually what I did. I went back. I'm like, I wonder if I could even play. So I got
a little acoustic and started playing at church or trying to play at church. I couldn't play very well,