# The Chevrons

URL: https://www.grahamnicholson.com/chapters/the-chevrons

Last updated: 2026-10-14T19:44:38.594Z

He picked up a guitar for the first time in a bedroom in **Litchfield**, around **1959**. Before that he played the **mandolin**.

That is where this starts — not on a stage, not in a band, in a room in a house in Litchfield with an instrument he had not played before.

He had come to Litchfield at seventeen — born in **Brooklyn** in 1940, by way of **Wantagh** and a high-school football field. He bused tables at the **Westleigh Inn**, drove a laundry truck and a dry-cleaning truck, finished high school and gave **UConn** a year. Then the music found him.

And before the mandolin there were three more. It started in high school with the **violin**, in the school orchestra, and an invitation to the **All-New England Choir**. Then the piano, which nobody taught him: his **sister** was the one taking lessons, and one afternoon he came in from football practice, sat down at it for the first time and played **"I Hear You Knocking"**, the Smiley Lewis record. She could not believe it, and she quit her lessons. The mandolin came at **UConn in 1959**, where he roomed with **Tom Bosse** and started writing songs.

The guitar arrived by accident, in the most literal sense. In **July 1959** he was in a near-fatal car crash. He had applied to the **Naval Academy**, and was turned down on a physical injury the crash had caused. While he was recovering from it, he borrowed a guitar and taught himself to play. His first guitar of his own was a **Magnavox**.

The band was the **Chevrons**.

He formed it at **Pennsylvania Military College**, where he went instead of Annapolis and graduated in **1962 with honors** — and he formed a second one there too, the **Magnums**. That settles what these photographs are: the military-academy dress in them is PMC.

The photographs from these years show them in military-academy dress: grey tunics with shoulder tabs, white trousers, black ties. Two archtop guitars, a drum kit, a piano, an upright bass. In one, a photographer has hand-coloured the print and posed three of them behind a gold bandstand painted with a treble clef. In another, six of them work a function room, one playing in sunglasses. In a third, two of them bend over a white pedal steel guitar under a marquee, a tartan bag and an amplifier at their feet. A fourth is an album page, two guitarists in matching grey shirts leaning into a shared microphone, captioned by hand: *What did you say?*

No reporter ever asked about any of it. The Hartford Courant, profiling him in 1992, reached back only as far as two rock bands and a business degree.

What the photographs establish on their own is worth saying plainly. He did not pick up a guitar to start a business. He was in a working band, in uniform, reading charts off a stand, before any of the rest of it happened.

And there is the pedal steel. It is a country instrument, sitting in a marquee sometime around 1958, and it keeps turning up in his hands or beside them for the next fifty years.

**Still to settle:** which figure he is in each of the band frames, and which of them are the Chevrons and which the Magnums. The dress portrait is him. The rest are unlabelled.