Rain again today. Seattle rain. A steady drizzle. I like it. The summerlike weather is supposed to return over the weekend, and I’ll be glad of that. But at the moment this kind of suits my mood.
It’s Skype day. A couple of Guitar Craft lessons at a distance. Internet video is not my favorite medium for teaching, for all sorts of reasons. But in circumstances like this, where there are not that many instructors in the world, and the team is spread out all over the place, it is a pretty great option to have. It is interesting, as I’m in this space of evaluating my practice, that most of my GC-related students are outside of Seattle and on Skype now. A reflection of the maturation of the group here in Seattle, which hasn’t gotten any smaller in the years since I arrived, but isn’t expanding either.
Jimi Hendrix on the stereo at all times when I’m not otherwise occupied (and at a few times when I really should have been otherwise occupied). I came out of school on Sep 18 1970 and headed to the parking lot to meet my friend Izzy, who had graduated a year earlier. The first words out of his mouth were, “poor Jimi.” What? I was in shock for days.
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Not to stretch this out more than necessary…
Basically, from the moment I bought that Sears Tiesco Del Ray electric guitar, and my father bought me that pawn shop amplifier, I identified myself as a guitar player. My friends and I spent all available time being musicians, whatever that meant: trading stuff we had figured out, or playing records and figuring stuff out. In my imagination, when I walked down the hall of the junior high, I was recognized as “the guitar player”. The fact that there were lots of people playing guitar didn’t seem to phase me much. At any gathering there was always someone considerably less hip than me who could pick up a guitar and strum any number of songs that everyone knew. I couldn’t do that. Well, maybe House of the Rising Sun. But mostly I could pick up a guitar and play the riff to The Last Time or the lead line to Wipeout, but that required them to be able to imagine the rest of the band. At the end of the last year of junior high school, my band (The Bannd, for the record. Somewhere in my collected junk I still have the band’s business card) played the school talent show, wearing Sgt Pepper costumes we had had made for us just for the occasion. We performed 2 surfy instrumental tunes written by Jeff, the other guitar player, who was, incidentally, a much better guitar player than me. I spent the summer between junior high and high school with my friends, diving into the revolution. My Gibson SG Standard and my Fender Super Reverb and my fuzz tone. Taking on the world.
Within the first couple of weeks of high school, I had figured out who the musicians were. I also quickly figured out how much better they played than me. I can remember the first jam session I set up with Jerry. He picked up his Fender Telecaster and began playing, and for the first time I heard a sound coming from someone my age that actually sounded like the guitar players I listened to on record. A dark day for my ego.
In Guitar Craft there is an aphorism:
If we wish to know, breathe the air around someone who knows.
This is more or less the approach I instinctively adopted, although at the time I’m quite certain there was nothing even vaguely conscious or intentional about it. It was just me going along being me. It wasn’t as though I “took up the mantle of humility” as part of a plan to gain musical enlightenment. I don’t think I’ve ever been humble in my life. But I made it my business to hang out with players who were better than me.
Jam sessions have always had a competitive quality – kind of a gun slinger’s vibe – and I threw myself in with complete bravado. You went in with the intention to show somebody up. Big egos going at it. When it was really on, we would drive one another to excel; by trying to outdo one another, we would outdo ourselves and gain something that we couldn’t have found sitting home practicing. But there was also this kind of code that required us to acknowledge when we’d been beaten, and I got beaten all the time. Yeah man, you cut me good. In fact, if there wasn’t someone there to give me at least a run for my money, I wasn’t all that interested it turning up. And when I knew there were going to be some really big guns coming, I was totally happy to sit back and be the designated rhythm guitarist all night, just so I could watch and learn.
By the time I graduated high school, there weren’t so many guitarists. The wave of enthusiasm that the Beatles and British invasion had spawned, when it seemed like everyone played guitar, had ebbed. I’m sure most houses had a guitar in a closet somewhere, but they didn’t get pulled out so often. Real life was approaching. Getting into college and planning a career and a life was the primary focus of the people I had grown up with. As a musician I was still pretty much the little fish, but the pond was also a lot smaller. When I walked down the hall, I really was recognized as one of the guitar players (or, one of them fucking hippy fag guitar players – it was, after all still Virginia). We were a more exclusive group. Not many of us were contemplating college. I went through the motions, in some measure just to prove to my mother that I could get into college. Given the nosedive my grades had taken, she was convinced I’d blown my chances to get accepted anywhere. I applied. I got several acceptances. I had spent my entire life assuming that I would go to college, so if nothing else, this exercise made it abundantly clear that I had zero interest in going to school for another 4-6 years.
So I didn’t. I joined a rock and roll band.
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