August 26, 2025

Wow, this feels like another lifetime ago. I’m talking about today’s posted photo. That’s me jamming out on my Dad’s Fender Strat during a short set with my first band, Sax Appeal. It was me, three teen boys, and our teacher, Mark, who usually covered bass and vocals. This particular photo was taken at the Canyon Club in Agoura Hills, around 2012. That was definitely the height of my guitar playing years, as I had started playing in October of 2008. We did a few, somewhat jazzy renditions of songs like “Bloody Well Right” by Supertramp and Reel Big Fish’s version of “Take on Me,” but to my delight, I did manage to persuade the band to crank out a couple of Rush songs, with it being 2012 and all, the year I like to call “Year of Rush,” since they were pretty much all I listened to.The thing was, we had a sax player in our group (hence our band name), so the only Rush song I initially thought of that had some semblance of a sax section was “Dreamline,” off their album Roll the Bones. It was kind of an experimental operation, but we managed to pull off a pretty good cover.