It was the summer of 1985. Two years earlier I had finished my time at Palos Verdes High—or, more accurately, drifted out of it. I didn’t graduate with the rest of my class. By then, I was already 18, which meant I could sign my own absence notes. And I did. School didn’t hold my attention. What mattered to me were music, surfing, and girls.

Back then, there weren’t any Asian rock or pop singers to look up to. Music felt like a passion, not a possible career. Surfing filled my days, weed filled the empty spaces, and my best friend Paul Thomas filled the soundtrack. Paul already had a reputation in school as a talented musician—piano in the jazz band, guitar on the side—and he had the record collection to back it up. We’d get stoned, spin vinyl, and try to outdo each other in sharing music.

Paul’s musical life had started even earlier. At twelve, on a family trip to Hawaii, he had met Jake Feldman, son of jazz great Victor Feldman—the pianist and percussionist who played with Miles Davis and actually wrote “Seven Steps to Heaven.” Paul and Jake stayed close after that trip, and by senior year they had formed a prog-rock band called Interval. I tagged along to rehearsals, slowly finding my place in that world. Interval ran through a revolving door of singers and drummers, but the nucleus—Paul, Jake, and eventually our friend Curt Anderson—was steady.

I wasn’t in the band, but I was always around. I listened to rehearsal tapes with Paul, gave opinions, wrote the occasional lyric, and dreamed of something bigger. Graduation came and went—I wasn’t invited—but the music was calling.

Paul’s father, William, was a smart, practical man. He knew Paul would never be talked out of music, so he enrolled him in the Dick Grove School of Music, a respected program in the San Fernando Valley where working musicians like Victor Feldman, Lee Ritenour, and Larry Carlton taught. It was Paul who nudged me toward my own path.

“Wouldn’t it be great if we were both in music?” he asked one night.

“Yeah, but what would I do? I don’t play much—just some percussion, a little keys. My fantasy would be to write lyrics, maybe engineer in the studio. Like a Brian Eno figure,” I told him.

“Then that’s it,” Paul said without hesitation. “That’s what you should do. Dick Grove has an engineering course. Check it out.”

That was the spark. I thought about it, looked into it, and finally brought it up to my dad, Warren, who was splitting time between the States and Japan with his copyright law firm. “I’ll think about it, Bob,” he said. “We’ll talk when I get back.”

And that’s where the story really began.