Bob Crain

Bob Crain has been making music since, oh, about the age of three when he got a Beany and Cecil guitar with a music-box type crank on the side that played, as far as he can remember "Pop Goes the Weasel". His next musical fantasy was fulfilled as a tenor sax player in the Cocopah Elementary School Concert and Marching bands, in which he and a sizable cadre of schoolchildren were lead and frequently threatened by a Cuban-American bandleader with delusions of being a composer (must have been hell for the man). Next up in the musical career of Bob was a fateful purchase of a J.C. Penney's Penncrest classical guitar by his dad, Carl Crain. Bob's hands were still too small to get to grips on the wide-necked beauty, but his dad's excellent attempts at mastering the guitar served as endless inspiration for Bob toward the possibility of playing music that he might actually enjoy. Eventually one of his dad's songbooks containing such golden hits as "Never On A Sunday", "The Magnificent Seven", and "What's New, Pussycat" enabled Bob to pick out hearty tunes at his leisure. Thus emboldened, he was able to join his now teenaged friends in periodic jam sessions at Derrick Bostrom's guest house in his back yard in Paradise Valley. But as Jack Knetzger was already the king of the guitar in that particular group of music pals, he was reminded by his friend Jeff Skirvin (who was a trombonist in the aforementioned school band) that if he could get ahold of a sax, Mel Collins-styled frenzy would be sure to follow. Indeed, the finding and purchase of a silver colored C melody saxophone (selected as much for it's low cost of $125 in 1977 dollars as for its sound) added a fitfully lasting axe to Bob's musical arnenal.More to come!-Bob Crain, 01 December 2006, Falls Church, VA