Guitar Lessons

Guitar playing has been making more regular appearances in my life recently. Time was I played for hours every day, not because I was trying to master the instrument, but because playing the guitar is about a billion times more awesome than not playing the guitar. Simple fact.

But over the last few years, my guitars and all the stuff that went with them got shoved further and further back in various closets. At one point, I even sold my amp, the very amp with which I once stood in front of a room full of people and played a series of several of the more recognizable segments from the music of “Star Wars.” Have you ever heard The Force Theme through heavy distortion, chorus, and just a subtle, dare I say, sublime hint of wah pedal? Yeaaaah.

Probably my most rock star moment.

But aside from pulling the old girl out of the closet every now and then to blow through a few verses of “Daddy Farted,” there wasn’t a whole lot of music getting made around here other than the kind originating with magical fruit. Is there anything sadder than a neglected musical instrument? Well I guess there’s beached whales and war orphans and cancer and...so yes, lots of things are sadder than a neglected musical instrument. But still, I always let out a sigh at the sight all the dust gathered on the headstock. Dust shows up really well on black.

Nobody ever said, “I wish I’d played less music” on their deathbed.

So like George Michael, my guitar’s now out of the closet and has no plans to go back in. Next to it sits a single-speaker Marshall practice amp that, in my opinion, sounds an assload better than the old Fender I used to use. This is becoming a regular thing. As in daily. And it feels nice.

A funny thing happened while I was playing earlier. My five-year-old came down, watched me for a minute, then went and found the case with my ancient acoustic. The thing is tiny. As in, you could be forgiven for mistaking it for a large ukulele. It’s still a bit large for his little hands, but the way he’s growing, that won’t be the case for long. He sat down on the bed next to me and asked me to show him how to play the guitar.

Stop and consider that: my son asked me to teach him how to play the guitar.

The first and I guess only guitar teacher I ever had was a guy named Robert that was the spitting image of David Lee Roth’s hair and smoked cigarettes in the little room at the back of H&H Music where he taught classes. He spent the first five to ten minutes of every lesson noodling around on his guitar, presumably to show me how awesome I, too, could be if I kept practicing. The first song he taught me was “Wanted Dead Or Alive” by Bon Jovi. I wasn't what you'd call a Bon Jovi fan, but I practiced the shit out of that opening bit. Props, Richie Sambora. Props.

All the same, I won’t be teaching my kid any Bon Jovi.

So I showed him a few basics and then it was time for dinner and then we did some other stuff and then later we were all over the house all doing our own thing, my thing being playing my guitar again, and the little dude came back in, sat the acoustic on his lap, and declared:

“I almost forgot, it’s time for my guitar lesson.”

Time for your....? Oh, okay, um, yeah, we can do that. So here, let’s do....

So I showed him a few more things. He struggled, mostly because he’s still a little dude and his fingers just aren’t quite strong enough. But struggle he did.

“When do I get a guitar like that one?” he asked, pointing at my electric. It’s not anything fancy, an Epiphone (i.e. budget Gibson brand) version of the SG. But it does look cool, and it sounds nice.

“Before you can get one like this, you need to practice on this one,” I told him, indicating the acoustic sitting in his lap.

“But I like yours,” he said.

“I like mine too. But this one,” I said, placing my hand on the curve of the acoustic’s wooden body, “is the very first guitar I ever played. It’s the one I learned on. I told my mom I wanted to learn how to play the guitar, so she pulled this one down out of the attic and took it to the guitar store. They fixed it up for her, put new strings on it, and then she took me take guitar lessons.”

I don’t mind telling you, I got a bit misty recounting that memory to my son. My mom did that for me. She didn’t know the first thing about guitars other than that her kid wanted to know how to play one. She could have put me off, maybe I’d have found a way on my own, or maybe I’d be walking around all these years later with a guitar shaped hole in my soul. And wouldn’t that suck? But she didn’t. She found a way to make it happen.

“Can I get guitar lessons?” he asked.

“Yes, with me," I said, feeling like I should grab a fly out of the air with my chopsticks as I said it. "And I’ll make you a deal.”

Here’s the part where I make a deal.

“If you’ll do some lessons with me and practice and keep it up over the next year or so, then we’ll see about getting you something that’s a little nicer. In your size, of course. What do you think of that?”

“Good.”

So who knows where it’ll go. He might forget all about the stupid guitar tomorrow, or he might decide after a few lessons that guitars are for chumps.

But not before he learns how to play a power chord.

Fat Cigars and Bass Guitars

One morning not too long ago, on the way to drop my kids at daycare, I was waiting at a red light when what should pass before me but a perfectly fine excellent example of a quintessential old man. He navigated his shiny gold Chrysler slowly through the intersection. Funny, though it was a newer model, it still seemed to float with the boatlike grace of a much older vehicle. Fedora on his head, suit on his back, big fat cigar nestled between a smile that told me there just had to be music in that car. Something big-bandy and jazzy. 

After dropping the boys off, I found myself waiting at yet another red light because that’s just the kind of luck I have. Walking through a parking lot next to me was a boy of about  sixteen. He wore those tight jeans that all the kids are so fond of these days and a Batman tee-shirt of the style that was so popular around the time that Tim Burton’s take on the Caped Crusader hit theaters. But the detail most compelling about this lad was the black bass guitar he carried. He had it slung over his shoulder as if it were a literal axe. No case, no amp, just the instrument itself, as if he’d just gotten his hands on it, perhaps borrowed or purchased after scrimping and saving for months so he could finally take that first step from just listening to music to making it. I hoped he wasn’t headed to a pawn shop.

I saved an entire summer to buy my first guitar. I know it sounds like a fucking Bryan Adams song, but it’s true. It was a black Ibanez and it had a whammy bar. Nobody should die without striking a power chord at least once in their life.

Have you ever had a thought just pop into your head? Of course you have. I might as well ask if you’ve ever farted at an inopportune moment. As I pulled away from that intersection, it occurred to me, “I bet that kid is that old guy’s grandson.” Why in the world I thought it, why it should be so, I can’t tell you. But I liked the idea. I liked the thought of this cigar-chomping old man and his teenage grandson riding around in that gold Chrysler, each trying to impress upon the other an appreciation for the music that they loved. Like maybe after a few of Benny Goodman’s greatest hits, the old fellow would let the boy pop in his band’s CD. And even if it’s not his cup of tea, which of course it won’t be because nothing compares to the music of one’s youth, the old man will glow with pride that his grandchild is doing his part to organize sound and noise into something recognizable as music.

It’s true, no music touches us as deeply as the music of our formative years. All the same, I hate it when people bitch that there hasn’t been any good music created in X number of years where X = Bitching Person’s Current Age - Bitching Person’s Most Recent Formative Age (typically somewhere between 18 and 23). 

The old man pulls up to a house, the house of his grandson’s friend, the friend whose dad has a bunch of old musical equipment in the garage that he lets the kids use, even though he hates their sound. They sit for a moment, letting the song finish. The old man has softened a bit with age, and finds it easier to express to his grandson the kind of praise that he wishes he had lauded more freely upon his own children. He was always proud of them, sure, but for whatever reason, he was never able to muster the kind of enthusiasm for his children’s pursuits that he feels for this boy’s first foray into making music. The boy gets his bass out of the back seat and goes to band practice smelling like cigar smoke.

At least that’s the way I imagined it.

I am the Awesome

At least according to fellow Austin blogger Quirkee James I am. For you see, he has bestowed upon me this little beauty:

And really, how could I turn down such a perfect award? It includes two words that I've been overusing for almost twenty years, one of my favorite hand signals, and my favorite guitar, the beautiful Gibson SG. If I could have one in every color of the rainbow, well, I'd maybe sell you the yellow one. As it is, my status as guitarist lies safely in the amateur realm, so I content myself with the cheaper Epiphone version.

So it is now my job to pass this award on to another awesome dude blogger. I'm assuming that the use of the term "dude" here is gender neutral, especially since I label both guys and dolls as dudes on a nearly daily basis (see aforementioned overuse of certain words). To do so, I believe it is customary to hold some sort of contest on one's blog. If I hadn't just done the caption contest thing in the previous blog, I would go that route, but alas, I can't bring myself to do two caption contests in a row. Thus, I'm going to try something slightly more complicated. I may be shooting myself in the foot here, as the complexity may scare some folks off, and I might just have to give this here award away. But for those of you not frightened of a completely pointless challenge, here is your task: we all know that the original Star Wars trilogy was some of the greatest bit of film ever to warm a screen. But what if the ensemble had been different? Your job is to come up with an alternate cast to Star Wars. Feel free to cast as many characters as you like, but all the main players need to be covered. Polls close in 72 hours.