I have played guitar since the early 70s when I bought an old electric (I don’t even remember the brand).  I ended up selling that guitar and in 1974 bought an Alvarez from a friend I meet in Colorado, I still have that guitar.  I just retired it 2 weeks ago when I bought a new Seagull Maritime mini-jumbo with cutaway and electronics.  For those who aren’t familiar with Seagull, they are made in Canada and are very nice guitars for a very affordable price.
I started writing poetry/lyrics in the late 60s mainly thanks to the Beatles.  When I moved to the Northeastern US I meet a couple of guitarist and we started playing together and writing songs.  We wanted to record our compositions so I bought a Tascam Portastudio, this was in 1980 and we built a small studio in my basement.
I not only recorded our material but always had musicians from the area coming over to record demos and just to jam.  I bought a couple of synthesizers so we could add them to our songs and started playing keyboards when people would come over to jam.
Through the studio I meet some guys who were starting a Reggae band and needed a sound engineer and asked me to fill the position, which I did.  After a year of engineering I left the band to further work on my keyboard playing only to join the band a year later as their keyboard player.
With the Reggae band we played all over the Northeastern and upper Midwest of the US.  We released three albums when I was with the band one we recorded in the famous Channel One studio in Kingston Jamaica.  I wrote some of the songs for the band including the title song of the third album.  It was titled “A Sign of the Times”.
I left the band after eight years, tired of being on the road.  This was in the early 90s and I pretty much laid low for a long time after that, though I still have all my keyboards and play them on occasion.  About a year and a half ago I started playing guitar again on a regular basis and am now back writing songs again.  I have reconnected with the guys I played and recorded with in the early 80s and hope to do some recording again soon.