I was scheduled to graduate from high school in 1943, but I was in a course that was supposed to give us four years of high school plus a year of college in our four years. So by the end of my junior year, I would have had enough credits to graduate from high school.
When I was a teenager, I got into four track recorders, drum machines, and synthesizers, and I started producing instrumental music.
We ain't have video recorders back in high school, or at least we couldn't afford them.
I grew up in a small town outside Philadelphia and went to the local high school, where I ran track all four years.
I like making little videos and little records. I've always loved video cameras and four-track cassette recorders, still cameras, anything.
I've never been one to think it was cheating to sample this or to loop the drum part there - I've always done that. Even using four-track cassette recorders, I was always doing whatever I could to make it as good as I could.
I really had a rough time in middle school. Middle school to me was the way most people explain high school. Then in high school I had a blast. I basically did everything that you would do in high school or in college, so it really wasn't a difficult thing to pull out.
I had four or five years in school training as a soprano. I fell into pop singing because of economics. I got out of high school and had to go work, and they weren't hiring opera singers.
High school wasn't a trial by fire or some ordeal that had to be survived. It was all a big joke. You just had to provide the laugh track.
My freshman and sophomore years in high school, I spent a lot of time trying to get back on the right track. I was arrested multiple times by the time I was 16, so I had a little harder time trying to adjust like a lot of us do in high school.
I ran track in high school very competitively, and then ran it D-1 at Boston University. I ran there on an athletic scholarship and chose BU because they had both a good track program and an arts program.
My mother - neither one of my parents went to college. My mother, after her four children had grown up, went back and got her high school equivalency degree at night, at Central High School in Providence, became a teacher's aide.
I actually ran in junior high school a little bit, you know, like most kids do in track and things. Then I got out of it and just trained for football and played ball for so many years - high school, college and the NFL.
I was lucky enough to go to an all-boys prep school in upstate New York that had a film program, so we had access to 16mm Bolex cameras, Nagra sound recorders, Arriflex cameras. We even had an Oxberry animation stand!
I had a really hot girlfriend in high school and I'd get into fights over that. And by the time I got into high school, I was moved around into a lot of schools, so I was getting into fights in high school.
I played football and ran track in junior high, but by high school I was getting serious about my studies.