Most pop stars who emerged in the 1960's will tell you that they got their inspiration by seeing Elvis Presley perform on TV in the '50's. But Walter Parazaider, born in Chicago on March 14, 1945, had a slightly different experience. "I started playing when I was nine years old because I saw Benny Goodman on The Ed Sullivan Show," he says. "I was a clarinetist to start with." Parazaider came by his interest in music naturally. His father was a musician who had turned from full-time to part-time work when he started a family. "I can't think of a time growing up when there wasn't music in the house," Parazaider says, "whether it was my dad practicing by himself or playing in a band that was rehearsing at the house, or my mother listening to records, and that's from my earliest recollection." As a result, when he began to take an interest in playing music himself, "the support that I had from my mother and father over the years was phenomenal." Parazaider studied and practiced the clarinet for the next several years, and by his teens had displayed so much proficiency that he became the protégé of Jerome Stowell, who was the E-flat clarinetist in the Chicago symphony.

But even for a classical music prodigy, the late '50's were a time when other forms of music exerted an influence. "I picked up the saxophone along the way," Parazaider recalls, "and discovered that you could make a buck and get some girls playing a saxophone in a rock 'n roll band. So, I enjoyed a schizoid musical existence, so to speak, from about the age of 13 on, playing in anything from an octet playing all the standard big band tunes, any rock 'n' roll from Tequila to any of the Ventures stuff that they'd use a saxophone on, and did that along with pursuing the classical career, because my idea at that time was to take my teachers place in the Chicago symphony."

Pursuant to that goal, Parazaider enrolled at Chicago's DePaul University, where his teacher, Hobie Grimes, taught, all the while still playing "Many gigs and smoke-filled rooms and dance halls, and also some orchestra balls." It was at DePaul that he met another young Chicago musician, Jimmy Guercio, who years later would become Chicago's producer. "We started playing in different rock 'n' roll bands in the area," Parazaider recalls, "played a lot of the beer bashes at Northwestern University and the surrounding colleges in the area, and we became quite friendly." Meanwhile, Parazaider was maintaining his "schizoid" musical existence at DePaul, though with increasing difficulty. He recalls, "After about a year and a half of realizing I didn't want to study trigonometry and how to teach health class in school, and also realizing with the help of some of my professors that, because I wasn't a patient person, I wasn't cut out to be a teacher. I changed my major. I prepared for about a year and a half and played a degree recital for the principal members of the Chicago symphony and an audience. I passed with flying colors and received a playing degree in orchestral clarinet. In the meantime, I had taken all my masters credits in English Lit."

But while doing all that academia work, Parazaider had also gotten a non-classical musical idea he thought had promise: a rock 'n' roll band with horns. In the trendy world of pop music, horns took a back seat in the mid-'60's, when bands, imitating the four-piece rhythm section of the Beatles, stayed with the limits of guitars-bass-drums. Even the Saxophone, so much a part of '50's rock 'n' roll, was heard less often. Only in R&B, which maintained something of the big band tradition, did people such as James Brown and others continue to use horn sections regularly.

In the summer of l966, the Beatles turned around and brought horns back. Their Revolver album featured songs such as "Got To Get You Into My Life," which included two trumpets and two tenor saxophones.