Gloria the musical beginning… 3 chords for hours with a friend on drums. We were just learning. Hoping to move from chord to chord trying to make it smooth.

That’s what I and thousands of young teens were doing in the late 60’s.

Then we added “For Your Love” by the Yardbirds and just learning key riffs like “Sunshine of Your Love” and “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida”… we would play these over and over.

My first amp was an old hifi amplifier I found at the end of a neighborhood drive way. Then I took an old living room end table (another drive way) and nailed some wood I found on a construction sight to make a speaker cabinet. Guess where I found the speaker!

So with my custom DIY amp, and a friend with real drums, Sister Mary Vincent let us use the convents breeze way to play. What a gas… we played “Steppin’ Stone” by the Monkees for hours!

This song had 4 chords now and easy fingering on a guitar for a beginner.

There was no youtube, no “How to play like (artist of your choice)” DVD’s, no tabs,… just our ears and whatever anyone else would share with you.

If you didn’t learn how to figure things out by ear, watching others and noticing patterns that repeated in certain songs to another… well it was going to be painful to try and play with others.

So how did we get the words to the songs?

Well, if you have 4 band members you play the song and member 1 writes down line 1, member 2 writes line 2, and so on. Once line 5 comes along member 1 writes that, and etc.

Once the record finished we cut and pasted (with glue) on a new piece of paper.

This then was our lyric sheet. (We did not have access to a photo copier either!).

Primitive, but it did the job.