There's a difference between playing music and learning to play with people.
The Peacemakers taught me the first. The Robert Lumpkin Uprising taught me the second.
From Junior High to High School — A New Band, A New Level
By the time I entered high school, music had already become the organizing principle of my life. The Peacemakers — my junior high band — had given me my first taste of playing together, of finding a groove with other people in a room.
But the Robert Lumpkin Uprising was something different.
On bass, my brother Ed Stilles — who had grown up in the same household, hearing the same records, absorbing the same instincts. On drums and vocals, Robert Lumpkin, himself — the kind of presence that anchors a band and pushes everyone around him to rise. And on guitar, me.
That's us in the photo. Three kids on a set of railroad tracks, somewhere in New Jersey, sometime around 1968. We didn't know what we were building. We just knew we had to play.
Opening for Buzzy Linhart
Toward the end of the decade, something shifted. The Robert Lumpkin Uprising had grown — tighter, more confident, more alive on stage. Enough to earn an opening slot for Buzzy Linhart.
If you don't know Buzzy Linhart, you should. He cowrote Bette Midler’s 1973 hit « Friends » and he played vibes on the Jimi Hendrix song from the Cry of Love album « Drifting ». A singular figure in the New York scene — musician, performer, connector of people. He had a gift for recognizing something real in another player, and he took a liking to me.
What followed was one of the most formative chapters of my musical education.
The Village, The Duo, and the West Coast
Buzzy and I began playing as a duo around the Village scene in New York City. Those rooms were unlike anything I had experienced — intimate, demanding, full of people who had heard everything and could tell immediately whether you meant it.
We played alongside Phoebe Snow and many others whose names are woven into the fabric of American music. Every night was a lesson. Every conversation backstage was an education.
Then Buzzy took me to California in ’79.
Back to where it had started for me on that Christmas in Santa Ana.
The West Coast scene in that era had its own gravitational pull — looser, sun-bleached, psychedelic in the truest sense of the word. We played it. We lived it. I absorbed everything I could.
And then came time to head back East.
The Last Gig Before the Album
That West Coast run was the last gig I did before returning to finish what would become my debut solo album — a record I had begun recording at the end of the 1960s and would not complete until 1980.
That album is Bhang. Originally released on my own label, Telewbar Records, it was reissued in 2024 by RidingEasy Records, a California label — finding a new audience, five decades later, among listeners who understood exactly what it had been reaching for.
The Robert Lumpkin Uprising planted the seeds. The Village sharpened the instincts. California opened the door.
Bhang walked through it.
This is the second in a series tracing 60 years of music — from Montclair, New Jersey to ZenMelodies. Christmas 2027 marks the 60th anniversary of that first guitar.