In 1957, at age eleven, I started writing songs with my cousin Paul. I bet a lot of kids wrote songs with their cousins. Here’s the dumb luck part: Paul’s dad, my uncle Abe, was an art director for Columbia Records. By 1958 we had formed a group called The Cousins. By 1959, in front of a sold out crowd, I was bar mitzvahed.

We did write one sweet song called “Green Eyes”. and Paul wrote a disturbing song called “Igor.”

Then, in 1965, I went to Goddard College where I became best friends with David Mamet. A best friend sounds like something you outgrow, but I haven’t—neither the term nor the friend.

In my mid-twenties, my dad suggested I find a trade. We came up with plumbing and piano tuning. I took a stab at being a piano tuner. First I studied with The Great Karmi. My first paying job was tuning the piano at Carnegie Recital Hall. At the time, my dad was dating Arlo Guthrie’s mom, and he talked her into arranging the gig. I tuned the piano, and later that week my dad got a bill for $7500. Apparently I had spilled most of my drink (bourbon) into the piano.

My last job as a piano tuner was tuning Aunt Shirley’s piano. She is David Mamet’s aunt. I did not have enough money to take the train to her home in the suburbs of Chicago, so I sold my piano tuning tools. I went to her home, where she cut up her husband’s t-shirts so I could dampen some of the strings and ply my trade.

I will say this about The Great Karmi: he was full of shit. You can’t tune a piano based on his theory of finding “The Glory Vibrato”. I did keep the doctor’s bag that you get when you become an official piano tuner; and I still have copies of a card that says “SET YOUR EIGHTY EIGHTS STRAIGHT WITH JON KATZ, THE KITTEN OF THE KEYBOARDS.”