I mentioned a few years back that as a teenager, I used to write songs, and with my friend Tommy Williams, a real musician, we recorded them on a 4-track tape recorder owned by a friend, the late Richard Hegeman (who was our engineer, as it were–we recorded them in the basement of his house). I wrote the songs, but Tommy arranged them, and played everything except the rhythm acoustic guitar, which was my instrument. Without Tommy’s arrangements, which were sometimes quite brilliant, there would have been nothing. We jokingly called ourselves the “Holy Rockin’ Band,” after the Holy Roman Empire we had studied in high school, since we were neither “holy,” nor “rockin’,” nor a “band.” Tommy and I traded lead and backing vocal duties, and Tommy played everything else: all other eletric and acoustic guitars, electric keyboards and synthesizers, bass guitar, and drums (yes, he was that good).

The main influences, as will be apparent, were mid-60s Beatles and sometimes Bob Dylan, Donovan etc.. One of my sons recently digitized them, and so I will share some here over the next few weeks. Perhaps some folks will get a kick out of them.

Here’s the very first song we ever recorded, “Feel All Right.” The recording quality on this one and the mix are not great, but you will get the sense of it:

This one, “Who Am I?,” is pretty recognizably Beatlesque-circa-1965 in style:

I’ll post a couple more next week.