Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, is the stated starting point of the band that would become The Six: in the mid-1960s, Billy Dunne and Graham Dunne began there as the blues-rock group the Dunne Brothers. The city’s importance in the account is chiefly that of an origin, set against the band’s later separation and its members’ very different lives.

Setting and Early Beginnings

The oral history places the Dunne Brothers in Pittsburgh in the mid-1960s, but does not describe particular streets, venues, or neighborhoods. Its account of the brothers’ musical beginnings instead centers on family history and an instrument: after their father, William Dunne Sr., left in 1954, their mother raised them, and he left behind an old Silvertone guitar. Billy recalled that he and Graham fought over who got to play it and taught themselves. The account gives the brothers’ ages when their father left as seven and five, respectively, but does not specify where they were living at that time.

The Band Takes Shape

The Dunne Brothers grew from the two brothers into a five-man band. Billy recalled bringing in drummer Warren Rhodes, then inviting bassist Pete Loving, a schoolmate who had played in a high-school band. Pete vouched for Chuck Williams, whose rhythm-guitar playing proved better than Billy’s. With the lineup complete, Billy could take the role of front man he wanted. These recollections establish the group’s early membership and development, though they do not locate each recruitment or rehearsal in Pittsburgh.

An early wedding booking shows the band beginning to find an audience: Billy estimated he was nineteen, and expected the event to expose the group to around a hundred people. The song that secured the job was his slow, folkier composition “Nevermore,” which he later remembered with embarrassment. The oral history does not identify the wedding’s location, so it cannot establish that the performance took place in Pittsburgh.

Origin and Retrospective Memory

Pittsburgh remains the place named for the band’s beginnings, while the later history is marked by dispersal. The members had not played or been seen together since their show at Chicago Stadium. In retrospective interviews, their accounts sometimes differed, and the book presents the history as a collective record rather than a single, uncontested version. The city therefore anchors a shared starting point without resolving every uncertainty about what happened there or how each member remembers the group’s early years.