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Mack and the Treniers, all kinds of R&B and things leaning toward blues organ

players.

I was already a very enthusiastic piano player. I took lessons from age eight to 13,
but I never played anything like that.

I had whole books of Led Zeppelin
albums and Rush albums, Michael
Jackson albums. I would play them

on the piano. Especially he sent me a
cassette with tracks from Otis Spann

entries on the compilation called
“Chicago The Blues Today”, which
was a classic compilation. James
Cotton was on it, Otis Spann was on

it, Junior Wells was on it, and he also
sent me some of the recordings that

Otis Spann did with members of
Fleetwood Mac called “The Biggest
Thing Since Colossus”. He sent me
tracks from all that, and of course, I

dug Spann’s voice and a lot of the
other blues stuff he sent me, but

mostly the left hand of Jimmy Smith on organ and Otis Spann on the piano became
an obsession and I stopped going outside to play baseball on sunny days and I sat
there running back and forth in the cassette player to the piano to try to mimic these

bass lines. By the time I was 15, I had it pretty well down because you had to tell me
to stop practising.

In fact, my sister, when my parents were out, would scream down the stairs: “Shut

the fuck up”, because I would just not stop playing. I was playing and playing and
playing and playing and playing and playing and playing and playing. So I got really
into the left hand thing and my father likes to remember and reminisce that it was

quite obvious when I started taking piano lessons, he had tried to play some piano
but he said he couldn't get his left hand and right hand to work in concert, but he
said from the very beginning, it was clear that they were each pretty autonomous

my two hands.

I picked that up pretty well and another crash course was my first blues band when
I was 16 or 17, the best musician in the band was the bass player and his whole

family picked up and moved from Pennsylvania to North Carolina. So he was so good
that we felt that we couldn't replace him, so I just started playing all bass lines on
the organs. So by the time I was 17, I had been the bass player in a quite good, quite

busy blues band in Philadelphia. That's why ever since then, I'm pretty territorial
down there and I like to play the bass lines on organ on piano and bass sounds