Chicago

 Chicago is an amazing city. It has a little bit of everything, and for a kid from a small town in Connecticut, that was quite a change. All of a sudden I was catapulted into the "real" world, no longer in the sheltered safety of the little town I had grown up in, but "out there", in a world where you had to be strong to survive. What I did like about Chicago was that it was a huge city, but in many ways, it had a small town feel to it, and I found it to be a very friendly place. All of a sudden I was in an environment where everything was new, and none of the familiar "comfort zones" applied anymore. Instead of being a "big fish in a small pond" I felt like a minnow, trying to survive in a vast ocean. I was questioning everything I thought I knew about myself..."do I really have what it takes to survive in the real  world...am I good enough as a musician to 'make it' in the big city"...and sometimes...."how did I get here, and who am I kidding"...after all, I taught myself music for the most part, and I still questioned whether I actually knew what I was doing. I was very surprised to find that once I actually started to perform in Chicago, word of this "new organ player" in this well known band spread quickly, and many very well known musicians came to the places we performed at...and some actually tried to recruit me for their bands. Of course, I refused....I felt it would be a betrayal to the man who had taken a chance on me and given me the job which had brought me there in the first place, but for the first time in my life I actually knew that I knew what I was doing musically, and that geography didn't have a thing to do with it, and that the future was wide open for me.....and it felt incredible to really know that...and my confidence grew tremendously, and as any performing musician will tell you, the level of confidence and authority that a musician displays and performs with, has a great deal to do with how he sounds, and how he is perceived...and I knew I was on my way...because the more audiences respond to that confidence, the more confident one becomes, and the process just feeds on itself and grows.