I’ve played in rock bands since erev my bar mitzvah, through the heart of the British invasion, starting with the Dynamic Five, later the self-monickered Benson and the Hedges. With our prepubescent voices and faces, festooned in white collared shirts and scarlet velveteen vests, we cranked out a cacophanous crop of then current tunes with a lineup of three guitars, drums, and accordion, ala Gary Lewis and the Playboys. Our first gig was the drummer’s sister’s Sweet Sixteen, at the now defunct New York New York restaurant in Lefrak City, Queens, New York (now a curry joint catering to its predominantly South Asian populace. We played on entry level but American-made Fender and Gretsch guitars and drums, our Lafayette microphones jointly patched with the instruments into our Deluxe Reverb amplifiers. Considering that the Beatles, despite their cool looking Vox amps and Rickenbacker guitars, had little more to brag about in terms of sound reinforcement at their Shea Stadium concert, we were practically state of the art.

In a portent of rock pyrotechnics to come, during the denouement of the Animals’ “We Gotta Get Out of This Place,” I accidently touched my E-string’s uncoiled tuning peg end to the ungrounded microphone, and watched in horror as the string first flamed, then turned molten, and finally melted off the guitar’s neck. Unprepared and bereft of a replacement, I played the balance of the show on five strings, with the positive result that I was forced to learn, literally under fire, alternative chord and fingering positions.

As the vocal-powered midsixties pop sounds gave way to heavier, guitar driven Vietnam era rock, psychedelia, Brit interp American blues and southern rock, I switched to electric bass, which has been my instrument of choice ever since. The allure of this rhythm/melody bridging instrument was partly that bass players always seemed quirky, whether cooly distant, like the Stones’ Bill Wyman, or up front and personable like Paul McCartney, or out there and in the pocket like Chick Churchill of Ten Years After, and partly that I played the notes that girls didn’t always hear, but felt in the depths of their core (read loins).

I performed in a series of rock, country, and country rock groups through high school, college and law school, playing with a motley crew of miscreantal musicians, including not one but two blind country singers, a keyboardist who couldn’t smell, an array of tone deaf and rhythmically impaired instrument owners, and a stroke victimized, pedal-steel guitar player who had no short term memory and could only remember and play songs more than twenty years old. Cover tunes were my mien. Although I couldn’t sing well, I learned and memorized lyrics and chords, passing them on the singers and other players in the pre-Lyrics.com era. I served a three year stint in an original band, fronted by a singer-songwriter couple who remain fast friends. With Mike’s prodigious output of songs, it was time consuming, stressful work to not just clone, but create and mold the rhythmic patterns into concurrent, complimentary lines and phrases within the framework of the song’s vocal and instrumental melodies.

I played with neurotics, psychotics, and a singer guitarist whose crooning Irish voice, scruffy long hair, and hippy cool belied the fact that he never, ever cleaned his toilet; much to the dismay of the women whose overnight amorous affections he managed to exploit. Interestingly enough, it was jamming with a Messianic Jewish drummer/dentist that led to an epiphany of playing, changing my style, and at last earning respect amongst the musical cognocenti.

In spurts separated by ten years, I played with a particularly psycho guitarist, with whom I have shared a unique combination of mutual loathing and musical compatibility, not unlike a couple who detest each other, but nevertheless engage in intensely passionate sex. In this latest incarnation, however, I met Jay Stein, guitarist and Mike Pendola, drummer, both originally natives of Bayside, New York, where I had life-guarded for them when they were musically wet behind the ears. In a move that precipitated the demise of that incarnation of the Native Soul band, we three hooked up with their childhood friend and Bayside native Sean Farrell, who was living in upper Westchester and playing in a upstate modern rock band called “Bunkmunkie,” which was fronted by two singers, including the lovely, lively and talented 24 year old Elizabeth Browne of Newburgh, New York.

Sean brought Elizabeth to a studio in Manhattan, where, in the space of a few hours, she blew us away with her renditions of Led Zeppelin’s “Ramble On,” Blondie’s “Maria,” and the Pretenders’ “Mystery Achievement.” She and Sean were willing to continue the musical experiment, and we began rehearsing weekly in Manhattan at the luxurious Euphoria Studios, Elizabeth logging upwards of 150 miles round trip for each session. Sean and Elizabeth shook us out of the classic purgatory in which we had condemned ourselves, bringing us musically into the late twentieth and even the twenty first centuries. We learned, and embraced talented younger artists, such as the Foo Fighters, Incubus, and Jet, while Elizabeth gobbled up and adopted as her own, numbers from our own archives by the Stones, Steely Dan, Hendrix, the Who, the Beatles, and her favorite, Led Zeppelin. She was equally adept at chick songs as with testosterone driven tunes. Mike left the band over “artistic differences”, eventually replaced by the sardonic and immensely talented drummer, George Rose. The addition of vocalist Rob Mackoul this fall has grafted another set of cojones and pipes onto our powerful front line.