I always had an interest in music since I was little and listened to all the modern hits from artists like The Beatles, The Monkees, the Beach Boys and Roger Miller along with classical composers like Prokofiev and Bach.
When I was about seven or eight years old, my parents bought a Lowrey organ and I took organ lessons for about a year. During that time, I would wait until about one hour prior to my weekly lesson to start working on it. It goes to say that I did not excel in my musical endeavors at the time.
When I moved to California, I started working on my music and experimenting with the organ a little more. I would improvise late into the evening until I was falling asleep at the keyboard.
A friend of mine named Richard Everett started playing keyboards about the same time I did and we spurred each other on in a friendly competitive way. I would learn a run, so he would learn a run and now we knew two runs, and so on and so on. Iron sharpens iron. I was self-taught in my musical pursuits until I went to Junior College. The college I attended had a good music department at the time and I preceded to take beginning, intermediate and advanced piano along with studying Harmony, Counterpoint and 20th Century techniques. That education helped me to understand more of what I was already doing and broadened my understanding of performance and composition.
When I was a freshman in high school, a friend of mine and myself were invited over to Doug Tomooka’s house where he and some other guys were jamming and playing actual songs. I was smitten and had to be a part of a real musical group.
I didn’t even have a portable organ to use, but I ended up getting together with Doug on bass, Mike Skeeters on guitar and vocals and Roger “Animal” Silva on drums and forming the band “Wolfgang”.
I borrowed a Farfisa organ for our first gig at a local junior high school and we made $35.00 with which we bought microphone stands for the band. I was now a “professional musician”.
We realized that we needed a real lead singer, so we enlisted the talents of Ernie Rodriguez and changed our name to “Dark Cloud”
Dark Cloud
Doug Tomooka -Bass, Roger Siva -Drums, Scott Radosevich -Organ, Mike Skeeters -Guitar, Ernie Rodriues -Vocals