I began piano lessons at age 7 and shortly there after the teacher removed me as his student telling my mom and dad something to the effect that I would never learn to play. I remember the meeting, it was like a doctor consulting the family of a dying patient.      "Count", he was always telling me "count" but I always had my own version (adaptation) of everything he tried to teach me and seldom played anything right, at least in his eyes. He would tap his foot and hit the page with his pen on every note teaching me to "count". I got it. I just heard it differently. I was always showing him the things I learned and figured out on my own.Nothing to do with what was on the page. Like at Christmas time, I showed him some version of "Little Drummer Boy"  I learned (made up) with low rumbling base notes. I loved rumbling bass notes on the piano. None of the songs I was learning had low rumbling bass notes. I had to take things into my own hands.     My practice habits were frustrating for my parents as well. It was like a daily 1/2 hour prison sentence to the piano in which I pretty much goofed off and experimented with sound including strange voices singing strange lyrics. Very annoying for sure. My dad thought he would help me understand what was happening by taping me in practice. He had an old Akai reel-to-reel sound on sound deck. I listened to the recording and liked it. What I remember most about that session was when my 4 year younger brother came walking through the room crying. Cool sound effects.     I was heart broken when I was kicked out of lessons. The organist at our church then gave me private lessons for a little while. I do not remember what happened there except that I progressed some and learned to play a few things I liked. Most importantly, I learned to play (mostly by ear), "I'd Like to Teach The World To Sing". My 3rd grade teacher discovered my hidden talent and for reasons I do not remember, one day rolled a piano into the classroom and I played my song for the class and then she asked me to play again so that everyone could sing along. And they did!     I still can't count. Even after seven years of high school and middle school band class playing trumpet, I can barely read and cannot count rests or any kind of a dotted note. In college, after taking up piano by volunteering to play for our church's worship group, I took lessons. I would struggle through the reading and the coordinating of my hands to the page until I could memorize what I was playing. The teacher would listen in to our practice through headphones as we all sat at a bank of electric pianos. We did not know who she would be listening in on switching between players at will. I learned to look at the page as if I were reading the notes and just play what I remembered. She would say kind things about our playing into our headphones, at least in to mine. She was compassionate but I still couldn't count.     My parents bought me an unmarked bass guitar when I was around 13 years old with an OLD Gibson Tweed Amp. (man do I wish I had that amp, I sold it for 15 dollars in High School). I learned to play along with Foreigner and Kiss records and pretend to play along with Rush records. My sister had an old toy acoustic guitar with three strings. I learned my first bar chords. Actually it had 5 strings but they sounded so bad I put masking tape on the two high strings to stop them from playing. Eventually I modified it to a 3 string.     Ever being the innovator, I got the idea to mic the guitar with an old plastic Panasonic tape deck microphone taped to a drum stick, taped to a shelf and play into my JC Penney's stereo through the tape deck. One day I stuck the microphone into the guitar because the tape would not stick to the shelf. I turned the input volume on the tape deck all the way up and discovered distortion. Power chords!     My first song on the three stringed toy acoustic with panasonic plastic mic distortion on JC Penney's stereo?  Smoke On The Water.  What else?

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