Early Years
Giammarese was born in northwest Chicago, Illinois. His study of guitar began in 1960 and continued at Catholic grammar school St. Thomas of Canterbury and high school at Lane Tech in Chicago, . His first musical influences were The Ventures’ Don Williams and Bob Bogle, and the Chantays, who started the craze of surfer rock, with their unique guitar riffs. Influenced by a high school teacher, Giammarese’s musical interests expanded from surfer rock to jazz and early rhythm and blues. His first guitar was a used Harmony open top guitar, a gift from his father in 1960. At home, Giammarese took in the big band sounds favored by his parents. His next musical influence was James Burton, who played guitar for Ricky Nelson’s band every week on The Ozzie and Harriet Show. Future legend and neighborhood guitarist Harvey Mandel was Giammarese’s next instructor, from whom Carl took lessons while part of his first band, The Centuries. By this point, he was using a solid-body Gibson SG guitar to play dates.
Read more about this topic: Carl Giammarese
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or years:
“Franklin said once in one of his inspired flights of malignity—
Early to bed and early to rise
Make a man healthy and wealth and wise.
As if it were any object to a boy to be healthy and wealthy and wise on such terms.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“Twenty or thirty years ago, in the army, we had a lot of obscure adventures, and years later we tell them at parties, and suddenly we realize that those two very difficult years of our lives have become lumped together into a few episodes that have lodged in our memory in a standardized form, and are always told in a standardized way, in the same words. But in fact that lump of memories has nothing whatsoever to do with our experience of those two years in the army and what it has made of us.”
—Václav Havel (b. 1936)