Ray was our third drummer; after Don left for college we where once again looking for a new drummer to replace him. We took the audition process seriously, looked at a multitude of candidates, and Ray got the gig. He also took Dons position as drum instructor; he was a great drummer, had a very nice singing voice and could help with the songwriting moving forward. We did a lot of practicing and started to add more vocals with this version of the group. Ray and Bob started to write more material that reflected vocal arrangements rather than purely instrumental music, Bob started singing to help with vocal harmony.

One of the interesting gigs that we had was at the yearly performance event called Tapestry and Talent. Ray was with us the first year that we played that venue; it was actually the first year of Tapestry and Talent and we were invited by my very good friend Harvey Leventhal to participate. We have some pretty cool video footage that covers that performance. We sounded great. Ray was on point and as usual Bob was wailing away to the delight of the audience. It was a fun show, and wouldn’t be the only year that we would be playing there.

We had a lot of fun and it was a very creative time musically. Ray could write songs with Bob as well as songs from scratch himself, and things worked out really well for a while, but after a time, things just sort of slowed down and started to feel a bit stagnant. Ray was also the drum instructor for the music school during the same time that we were in the group together, and Bob and I were thinking about maybe hanging it up for a while to focus on our teaching. Ray went a different direction – he decided to quit as a teacher at the music school and moved on in his music journey from there.