I started playing guitar as a teenager, without benefit of lessons or a tuner. It sounded like it. But with a little help from my friends I got better and played with a couple of bands in and around Philadelphia, PA, in the late 1960s.

I went on to other things.

In 1988, after a long time without an instrument, one of my students--Mike Fairbanks--talked me into starting a rock band "just for fun." He brought in a friend (Drew Thompson) and I knew a drummer and then we got a bassman and Whitedog was born. We played bars in northern Alabama and Mississippi, and had the rare pleasure of hanging out at Muscle Shoals Sound in Sheffield, Alabama. Soon our original drummer was replaced by Mitch Rigel, who had just come off the Reunion Tour with Lynryrd Skynryrd. One thing led to another and soon we got larger than life and the usual things broke us up. I wrote Living in the Rock n Roll Mystery about it. And left town.

More recently my pals Nick Trujillo and Bob Krizek talked me into joining The Ethnogs, which, you may recall, was a huge fictional success back in the 1960s and through the late 1980s. We play academic conferences, which shows how the mighty have fallen . . .