Many of the text and photos seen in this honorary historical section were obtained from Pete Mayforth's and Mark Paris' photo albums which they were nice enough to supply. Thanks Pete and Mark!

However, there also existed, scattered throughout the land, a few discontent musicians who had a pang located deep inside themselves, a yearning to become more than themselves, to join together with others of their kind to create their own special brand of music; where the sum of the individuals' efforts and talents blended and gelled, led and followed, and inspired and developed, until the whole becomes much greater than the sum of it's parts.

In northern Delaware, in the summer of 1974 A.D., such a consciousness began to grow. At first, it was just a gentle flow within many individuals in many different directions. The flow waxed and waned, grew and subsided, and changed directions many times, until it gradually began to have substance and form, and after many, many, trials and tribulations slowly began to assume size and shape, although it never remained constant. Thus the flow became an entity, and the entity began to have some small degree of influence on the history of the sun's third planet, and the entity began to need its own special identity.

This collection of ideas, ideals, and personalities was peculiar in its own special way, just as everything is peculiar in some manner, and it tried to identify with its peculiarness. It was a large organism, compared to ints own special subclass, yet it fed on the tiniest of thoughts and technicalities, as small as the plankton in the sea. There were few of it's kind in existence, and the number would probably grow smaller as time progressed. It lived in one medium, and yet took an essential portion of it's lumbering life from another.

Thus, in a somewhat symbolic way, this substance and shape borrowed the name of the largest living earth mammal, one who spent it's life apart from most other mammals, and whose continued existence was somewhat in doubt in the evolution of species at the particular time in the earth's life.

Thus, WHALE began...

The first traces of the group appeared in the summer of 1974 and, memberwise, it became stable in October of '74 with the following members:

Keith Irwin	Derek Forsberg Derek, I need a photo!

I won't list the various talents (or lack of) of the members of the group, because no one outside the group will ever read this; unless of course we become famous, and then everyone will know already.

All of us were going to the University of Delaware at this time, except for Derek (Derek was still a high school senior and was giving us quite a collective scare about which college he might attend), and the early consensus of the direction of WHALE was to become rich and famous as soon as possible, and to try to stay in school and have a great time while failing to do so; which is a good example of the dream versus reality struggle we were all having at the time.

Although the possibility of doing original material was open to us, with several creative geniuses in our midst, we decided to follow the standard route and play popular music until we became "well established", as they say.

We started out rather humbly, as I suppose most everyone does, practicing in Bob's basement. [We practiced at Mike's for a while in the very early stages and moved to Kenny's basement in December '74]. We began using a Kustom 300 PA system and about 8 microphones and assorted paraphenalia from "Crossroads" which we must eventually pay for ($100) and some microphones, paraphenalia, and 2 V.O.T. cabinets from "Persimmon Hill" which we sort of hope we never have to pay for, and other personally owned equipment, which we already paid for.

Jim, Mark, Ken, and Derek (in order of most done), did most of the early arranging, with everyone else throwing in bits and pieces. We are indebted to Jay Synder for arranging several "Tower of Power" songs, and to Dale Dallatrida for an arrangement and a couple of original songs we intend to perform.

From here on, I will attempt to maintain an accurate finacial account, along with a running commentary of what goes on. A "*" will indicate pieces of trivia." -