This rocker's earliest memory about electric guitars is getting thrown buns over forehead by the shock from touching an electric guitar while standing on soggy tundra. From the age of eight onward, Paul Spradlin was asking his parents to buy him something that could do that to him all over again. Listeners who have endured a two-hour-or-more jam band set by his group Goose Creek Symphony may wish he had actually been electrocuted as a child; then again, the group has plenty of fans who would take serious exception to the prior statement even if it could be whitewashed of all offensive morbidity.

Actually Spradlin, who wound up being credited as Paul Howard on the very first of Goose Creek Symphony's recorded dribbles, began as a saxophonist in school and also studied the steel guitar and French horn. It was with the magnificent Sears Silvertone model of electric guitar that this performer first began touring around the United States profesionally -- in 1967 forming a group with Cory Wells, later to be one of the triumvirate of upfront vocalists in the Three Dog Night band. Spradlin met Charlie Gearheart in the spring of 1968 following the former's move to Phoenix and it was this team that first initiated what would become Goose Creek Symphony. The new group was signed by Capitol in 1970 and began touring with a fervor, shedding and accumulating members as the creek flowed. Based in Nashville, Spradlin was largely quiet from music during a Goose Creek Symphony hiatus that ran from 1976 through 1990. ~ Eugene Chadbourne, Rovi