I first began playing guitar when I was 16, and I used to slow down the turntable to 16 2/3 rpm so I could pick out the notes on Deep River Blues. Other early influences were Mississippi John Hurt and Ralph Stanley. But then I heard Bonnie Raitt and James Taylor – a different kind of blues – and that opened up all those wonderful jazzy chords and Motown rhythms for me.
I spent about ten years playing in the DC area, and then went to Los Angeles, where I studied guitar at the Guitar Institute of Technology. When I left LA I went on the road with a rock guitarist, and ended up on Staten Island, where we played some originals and a lot of Pat Benatar and ZZ Top in local pubs. My partner and I traded off on guitar, bass, and keyboards, sometimes with a live drummer, and sometimes with a Roland drum machine.
I became fascinated with the idea that you could teach machines to do things, and began studying computers. I went on to spend many years in the software industry, and in 2009, finally picked up my guitar again for the first time in years.