Joe remembers going to the family dinners as a child where his uncle would play Portuguese folk songs on his home made guitar. His parents got him a clarinet and piano lessons but after listening to Ike and Tina Turner and Roy Orbison and Elvis on the radio in the late 1950s  he wanted to emulate the sounds he was hearing so he talked his parents into getting a guitar and started playing around with it for a while. When he heard the Beatles when they came out in 1964 playing guitars he grabbed his from the closet and started to get interested again and First time Joe saw a live Rock & Roll band was at his high school dance. He soon got together with some friends and started playing some Beatles and Byrd songs. But it was the hard rock that really got to him. Joe talks about the new bands coming over after the first British Invasion died down that he gravitated to that were coming over. “This band like the Yardbirds had guitars like I never heard before. The Stones were pushing the edge with distorted guitars. That was a big influence on me”