I learned my initial chops from Dennis (Bones) Hunter. We grew up in the same neighborhood in Atlanta.

Bones was a baseball player and it looked like he might make it to pro ball until one evening he stopped to jump off a car and somehow got both knees crushed when another car crashed in to the one he was working on, pinning him between the two.

I think we were in our late teens at this point and spent a good deal of time hanging out with a very nice family of drunks who liked to play country music on their guitars and have sing alongs while drinking PBR and smoking pot and generally getting what we called "tore up".

While Bones recouperated from the auto accident on crutches he also went through most of the 60's and 70's pop music catalog learning every song on every album note for note.

I had owned a couple of guitars but didn't know how to play anything. I would pick one up ocassionally but like most teenagers I was too busy with the insane business of being a teen in the mid and late seventies to care much about anything else.

My first concert was at the Georgia Tech colliseum where I saw Deep Purple, and West, Bruce, & Lang.
My mother stood in line for the tickets in the hot sun one day after she got off work at Sears Roebuck on Ponce De Leon Ave. She rode the bus to get the tickets and then caught another bus home.
For over thirty years now, she has reminded me of that fact at least a couple of times per year.
The night of the show, the crowd had begun to climb the fence surrounding the colliseum after enough time had passed in line so that they had grown agitated from the long lines to get in to the show.

After a couple hundred people climbed up on the fence it promptly fell down and the crowd rushed in, overtaking the security guards at the doors and causing great chaos.
I will never forget Leslie West belting out Mississippi Queen....or live "Smoke On The Water" either.
All in all, a great first concert.

One day I was riding through the old neighborhood with a friend, probobly stoned or looking to get stoned, when I heard Bob Dylan's "Tangled Up In Blue" on the radio.
Something about that song drew me in. I was always drawn to lyrics and around this same period I was attending concerts regularly, hanging out at a pool hall, and was newly divorced from my first wife at the ripe age of 18.

It was around this time Bones got religion. Not the typical kind of religion, Bones got Blues religion.
All the rock stars of the era were turning on the world to the heros of their blues rooted music. The Beatles, The Stones, Clapton, Zeplin, The Allman Brothers, and Hendrix, all seemed to know a secret that they were willing to share.
It was in the music itself, and they paid verbal homeage to their blues roots in endless interviews and media bites which we hungrily sought out.

Bones found this religion and was convinced he must immediately move to Memphis and become a Bluesman. I was not convinced.
I had learned to pluck a few notes by now on an ancient Sivertone hollow body that I had converted to left handed. It would not stay in tune. I was reading Author Rimbaud, and the beat poets, getting high, and writing horrible poetry. I was also dealing weed to friends to pay my rent and going out to bars in the Old Underground Atlanta, where people danced and drank till late night, sometimes to bands sometimes to the pulsing records played through the giant PA systems.
Eventually someone would give this type club a name. They would call them disco's, but not yet. I wouldn't hear that word for a couple more years.

When Bones returned from Memphis a year or two later he brought back a book by Chuck Berry and Maggie, a girl he met in Memphis. Maggie played guitar and had a great soulful voice and the house they moved into became a sort of south side Atlanta version of Big Pink, or to put it another way, a hangout.

Musicians and friends of all sorts came and went and I was there often, smoking pot, drinking booze, or learning a new chord, or riff. The first song I could play all the way through was a blues song called "You Got Me Runnin" by Jimmy Reed.
It was a one four five loop so there wasn't much to remember. At that point my fingers would not cooperate very well and Bones was constantly disgusted because when he tried to play melody licks (which he knew by the hundreds) I would stop playing. He would shake his head and say stuff like "don't stop godammittt" and other things like "tap your foot when you play and count, godammittt". He also gave me homework, drew out blues charts, scales and riffs and made me take them home to study.

The years since have been pretty much the same story, I don't smoke pot or use drugs. They just make me sleepy, and only ocassionally have a beer, I'm learning more music, in and out of bands, working, recording, raising kids, moving, a lot of moving, writing, reading, beaches, vacations, never enough of the last two.

All of which brings me to the present, marketing a CD I made out of sheer boredom and waiting on the next vacation, the next beach, the next riff,  and admiring all the guitars I don't have and can't afford, but maybe one day. :)

Steve Edge
July 2007