I was born Edwin Emmett Brown in San Diego in 1950, grew up in San Diego, California, and still live in San Diego... it's a wonderful town. Never did use "Eddie," though. I've always been "Emmett" - except for my blues name!

I'd had accordion lessons (thanks, mom) at about the age of ten that didn't quite take, but as a teenager in the mid-sixties I starting playing guitar. I borrowed a Gibson LG-O from my cousin (who owned it, but didn't play) to puzzle out my first chords.

My early enthusiasm, though, was for the electric bass. The first real bass guitar I ever played belonged to a friend of my brother - it was a Sears Danelectro, the single-cutaway one with the "dolphin head" that I often see now called the "NRBQ" bass. Once I picked that bad boy up, I was hooked. Soon, I had bought a cheapy St. George bass and joined my first band, all players who attended my high school. The rhythm guitarist (yes, it was William Scott Arthur Kidd, aka Scott) had the equivalent to my bass in a horrible Rodeo six string, but the lead player (Craig Horn) had a Gibson ES-345 in cherry red. Wow! We beat to death songs like "Pipeline," "Wipeout!" and "Walk, Don't Run" - standard surf fare. At that time, none of us ever DREAMED we could sing... or would ever have to!

GEAR NOTES: That ES-345 was a wonderful instrument. How did it come to be in our presence? Well, where I had been given accordion lessons, Craig had been required by his folks to take guitar lessons, and they were bamboozled into the purchase of this incredible guitar for their budding young student. Holy crap! At the time, we didn't even have the stereo cable required to be able to use both pickups. I remember it had one of those goofy "sideways" Gibson vibrolas installed - what a Rube Goldberg deal that was! A few years later (I believe it was when he went into the service) he allowed me to have "custody" of that guitar for a year or so. Sweet, sweet axe. I still see that guitar in my dreams... I've been a Gibson fanatic all my life, I guess, and that's gotta be one of the reasons. Wonderful guitar.

Probably within a year I obtained my first "professional" instrument, a Gibson EB-2. Why an EB-2, instead of the ever-popular Fender P-Bass? Well, gosh, even though I got a sunburst one, the body style matched that beautiful cherry red ES-345 (Scott got a sunburst Epiphone Casino that matched, too). These things seemed important back then. That band may not have played anyplace but our garages, but it certainly impacted my musical influences and preferences for a long time, and the friendships outlasted the band more than a hundred fold. Plus, my FAVORITE bass players were now Chas Chandler with the Animals and Paul Samwell-Smith with the Yardbirds, both of whom used EB-2's (yeah, but I dug Chris Hillman of the Byrds, and of course, Paul McCartney, too). That EB-2 made me feel like I was like the only kid on the block who actually had a REAL bass guitar and prefered it, instead of just faking the bass parts on a guitar because somebody was already covering all the other guitar parts.

My brother John lucked out, in that, by the time he was ready for the muse, my folks had gotten swept up in the spinet organ craze of the sixties, and therefore he got organ lessons (not accordion!) and became a keyboard player. Once he got his Vox Continental (the two-keyboard model, very spiffy!), we played through all the pre-requisite high school garage band experiences... Sometimes we were in bands together, and sometimes in seperate bands, until we settled into our own four-plus-one-piece, which consisted of two neighborhood sets of brothers (John and I, and James and Charles Peeks, lead vocal and drums respectively) and an "outsider" on guitar (Larry Huntley - he had a spiffy Fender Jaguar and a Bandmaster, and his dad had a station wagon and drove us to all the gigs). As I recall, we played mostly at the enlisted men's clubs (government-run bars) on the local military bases, thrashing away at the Top 40 tunes of the time. In San Diego, one of the great all-time, all-NAVY, all-MARINE towns, there were dozens of those clubs on the many Navy and Marine bases around the county. We were allowed to work in these bars as teenagers because military bases are all FEDERAL property, and the state and local laws concerning the employment of minors in bars did not apply. It was positively an education... I can't wait for the movie: "I was a Teenage Lounge Lizard!"

GEAR NOTES: Perhaps a key to my inclination to rewire, modify, and tamper with guitar wiring can be traced back to this early time, when we couldn't afford all the different guitars, but wanted to copy the sounds of the Top 40 tunes we were playing to sound as much "just like the record" as possible. I must have dreamed of one guitar that could sound like a bunch of different guitars, and that desire must have remained in my subconscious, all these years... Even now, when I actually HAVE a lot of different and spiffy guitars, I'm still constantly re-working them to broaden their tone palettes. It's a compulsion!

The summer I graduated from high school (1968), Larry, the guitar player, went on summer vacation with his family and we picked up a gig for which we decided John would cover the bass parts on keyboard (like The Doors did) and I would play guitar. We decided Top 40 was dead, man, and we were gettin' into underground stuff, the San Francisco scene, and the blues... I had managed to buy an old Les Paul Goldtop (my first electric guitar - a Les Paul!) which actually didn't play too well but I was determined to use. For the gig, I also borrowed a friends's (yes, the old rhythm guitarist from my first band) Epiphone Casino (which I totally fell in love with) as a backup. Here's a pic from the gig, with me playing the Goldtop. Yes, that's a '62 P-bass behind me... it belonged to the "absent" guitar player! As a bassist, I'd come to use it as often as the EB-2, which was, as you all know, notoriously muddy, and I finally realized the P-Bass just sounded better on stage.

GEAR NOTES: I now think that my first Les Paul was actually a 1953 model, the transition year where Gibson had decided to use a stop-tailpiece/bridge combo instead of Les Paul's goofy trapeze-tailpiece with the strings-under-bridge combo, but before they went with the stop tailpiece and tune-o-matic setup. I'm pretty sure of this, because it had the wrap-around combo stop-tailpiece/bridge - with no tune-o-matic in sight - and P-90s. Unfortunately, on this axe it was as if they neglected to change the neck-set angle to compensate for the added height of the stop tailpiece assembly, rather than the trapeze that Les Paul had designed. The neck was straight, but the action was unpleasantly high. Being a dumb kid and not knowing about neck resets - not that I could have afforded one! - I went after the BOTTOM of stop-tailpiece/bridge bar with a bench grinder, and then wound a paperclip around the top of the mounting post as a spacer to get the strings about an eighth of an inch lower - but it was still a bear to play, considering I had strung it with a strange setup I had read about somewhere - flat-wound low E, A, and D, and plain rock and roll high E, B, and G - don't ask me WHERE that idea came from! The next year, when I decided to "quit" playing in bands, I sold that guitar for (gulp!) $125...

Anyway, as I recall, for all our new musical ideas and ideals, we only played the one gig as a three-plus-one piece, and perhaps another, before James quit to concentrate on college and I just quit playing the electric guitar. I think over the next year or so I did some acoustic stuff with my ol' pal Scott, while John and Charles joined forces with a new high school chum (Lonnie Napier) on guitar, and played as a three piece, calling themslves "Dragon." When that guitar player moved to LA a year or so later, I went back to playing rock and roll with them again, in a band we called "Trilogy." Pretty much my musical history from there on out is documented on the Tacoma home pages.

GEAR NOTES: Now that I was playing electric again, in 1969 I bought an old and rather beat-looking ES-335... for $200! It was a sunburst "dot" model, with a factory-installed Bigsby. What a fabulous GUITAR! The finish was totally spider-webbed, and it had one of the thinnest necks I've ever played. I played it as it was for a couple of years, then took the pickup covers and Bigsby off (it had the stop tailpiece mounts on it all the time, covered by a little "custom made" plate) and played it that way for a couple of years. As I recall, once upon a time we worked at some serial number dating scheme and came up with 1959 - but I obviously can't confirm that now. And, in this picture, you can see that it does NOT have the "long" pickguard of those early models. OK, so it must have been a '61. It couldn't have been any newer, because Gibson switched to block inlays in '62, and the finish was just too thrashed. [Sigh] I only sorta knew what I had... I let this guitar get away from me in the mid-seventies for a huge "profit" at what seemed like a fair price, but I have had nothing but regret for that decision ever since. I really do MISS that one!

In the seventies, I went into a ten-year severe GAS stage (interupted by two years with Uncle Sam). My pal Scott and I were MONSTERS - for every guitar I bought or traded for, he had bargained for two. Classics, clunkers, collector's pieces, junkers, and everything in between. It was insane! I'll bet I've had almost everybody's dream guitar pass through my hands or across my workbench (whether he owned it, or I did) at one time or another in that ten year span.

A list of the guitars that I went through (meaning, that I personally once owned and played, but no longer have) in the years between 1970 and 1980 would include the following, and more:

Gibson (non-reverse) Firebird III and FireBird XII, two ES-175's, a J-160E, and an early 70's Les Paul GoldTop w/P90s; four Fender Strats (one a mid-sixties model), two Telecasters (one a mid-sixties model and one I put together out of genuine Fender parts); two Gretsch Tenneseans; two Rickenbacker 360 12-strings, and two 4001 basses; a Mosrite doubleneck (6 and 12); Guild D-35 and F-310-12-string (acoustics), and Starfire electric 12-string; an Epiphone Olympic and a Caballero (acoustic); an MSA ten-string pedal steel; a Martin 0-15... and a genuine Hofner "Beatle" bass.

Scott went through an equally - if not more! - impressive list of guitars, including a Super 400, a couple of Les Pauls, and lots of acoustics (his preference, I liked electrics). These lists leave out the many Harmony, Kay, Danelectro and even Vox guitars we bought or traded that crossed my workbench as I taught myself repair, action adjustment, custom wiring, and refinishing along the way.

During this period, I also worked at a retail musical instrument store (San Diego's largest, at that time) with both the Fender and Gibson franchises, so I handled countless new instruments on their way to eager owners, as well as doing hundreds of setups (especially on them nasty three-bolt Strats!) and many repairs...

Of the guitars that came and later went, a lot of them "went" as an indirect result of a divorce in 1981, which pretty much brought a close to my '70's GAS syndrome (until lately, that is!). Still, there were just a few more I went through in the eighties worth mentioning:

A Gibson SG Standard, another ES-175 I rebuilt from a badly damaged basket case (no hardware, broken off and missing headstock); one of those way-carved walnut-maple laminate Flying-V's (V2) with the funny "V" shaped pickups; Peavey T-20 and Foundation basses, their MIDIBase bass guitar/MIDI controller, and their little T-15 guitar...

Not on these lists is the Les Paul Custom I aquired in the mid-seventies, which I still have.
It came, and never went!

In the eighties, I did a turn at another pro-music store doing mostly pro-P.A., paging and background music systems installations, but they also had a small musical instrument inventory, and it was there that I got into MIDI and home-recording. I picked up a gig in a country band, they played all the time, in nice bars and bad; great chemestry (I thought!), and I had lots of fun until they decided the wanted to make the band better by replacing the drummer, who was the nicest guy... and I quit them myself, within a year.

In the late eighties I found myself working part-time in a little mom & pop-style music store, no big-name franchises, but, man, did I have occassion to use my setup skills on a whole bunch of lower-quality axes (Kramer, BC Rich and the like). Making them cheapies play better was WAY more of a challenge than setting up them three-bolt Strats... and I beat on 'em ALL until they played great!

I was also working the odd-weekend casual with a trio (early ninties), when I got married again and started looking for a little more job security - and some health benefits. One of my bandmates said he thought he could get me into something at the school district where he worked. He came through with a job, eventually I quit the trio, and I have been at the district for over fifteen years now, looking forward to retirement in another five (or ten)!

Almost all the axes I now own have been obtained since 1990. As you can see, I have a great affinity for American made guitars, especially Gibsons. The prejudice against imports, born of my youth, still haunts me a little even today... Well, yes, my MIK Epiphones are nice axes, and once I DID bid (eBay) $1000 on a new MIJ Gretsch...!

No, I'm not giving you the FINGER!

This was taken at the rehearsal for our annual jam session summer 2001
(Any resemblence in this photo between myself and Jerry Garcia is ... tragic!)