What’s the best advice you ever received?

The best advice I ever received? When I was in high school I was accepted to the Eastman School of Music and one requirement that they said I had to learn was to learn the piano because I had no knowledge of the piano whatsoever. So I found the best guy in my hometown that I could think of to teach me the piano. He was this very distinguished looking, grey-haired man. He played piano in the local pit band and he was the director, a very distinguished guy and a wonderful musician. I used to go and sit in the front row of the theater just to watch him. So I called him up, his name was Don Gray, and I said Mr. Gray, I’d like to study piano with you and he said okay and gives me a time.

I show up for the lesson and the first thing he says to me is, “why do you want to learn to play the piano?”

I said, ‘because I got accepted to the Eastman School of Music and I have to learn to play the piano.’

He said, ‘what do you want to do that for?’

I said, ‘what do you mean?’

He said, ‘what do you want to go to music school for?’

I said, ‘because that’s what I do, that’s what I’d like to do.’

He said, ‘don’t do that, that’s the worst thing you can do with your life…there’s no life in this music, you’ll just end up being a bum’ – and that was my whole lesson.

He didn’t talk about the piano he just talked about how bad the music business was. And that’s the best advice I ever got because he got me so mad that I knew I had to make it in music. I always think about that story, here was this sixteen year old kid with stars in his eyes who wants to do something and somebody tries to talk you out of it and it turned out to be good advice because it made me think about what this music meant to commit myself to it. So it was reverse psychology.