This old guitar will not play itself
About this time the year before last I was compelled to drag my old acoustic guitar out from under the stairs after not having touched it for around 35 years--a tale of my late father's guitar, friendly cajoling, a half-remembered song, and the loss the friend who prodded me into playing again that I wrote about here. After replacing the strings because several broke when I tried to tune it, I set out to see if I remembered much of anything from my earlier years of playing my own bastard form of finger-style acoustic guitar.
I must have french-fried several million brain cells between '84 or '85 and 2019. I remembered a only couple basic chords, not that I could do much with them; my tender, unpracticed fingers made playing even a simple D a wincing challenge. More complex chords, say C7 or Bm (had I somehow recalled them) were as beyond me as levitation. My original thought, and it was a hazy one, was to see how little guitar stuff was still in my head, prove my playing days were well behind me, and then store the guitar away again.
I have played every night since then. Every damn night for two years now. Tell me, class: can you pronounce compulsive? At first it was only for half an hour or so, that span broken up into pieces to give my hands time to recover and me to stop whimpering. But as my calluses built up, and my fingers got used to the demands of making chords, it got easier to play for longer periods of time. Most nights for the past year I have put in at least an hour. This winter it's not unusual for me to play, on and off, for over two hours.
So how does my playing sound, you ask? I am not bragging when I say that it is a lot better than it was two years ago. And improved from this time last year.
All right, it is difficult to objectively judge my progress. What I produce mostly sounds like music, or at worst something that sure is trying hard to be music. Some less than melodious bits can still be chalked up to physical barriers to playing well. I'm almost 68, which means very few parts of me are performing anywhere near as well as when I was in my late teens/early twenties, and first learned to play. I have smallish hands and not particularly long fingers, and they are to some degree impaired by arthritis. I broke my left wrist a few years ago, and that hand has been stiff and clumsy ever since. Last summer I crushed my left index fingertip (but kept practicing, working on my finger-picking using what chords I could manage without that finger) and that fingertip is still sometimes weirdly numb and sensitive at the same time. Quite often when practicing I capo up a couple frets to make prolonged playing easier on my left hand. Then, to make things really interesting when trying to play bar chords, I still have a ganglion cyst the size of a peanut M&M on the lowest inside pad of my left index finger.
Excuses aside, the question remains: how does my playing sound?
I tend to be self-judgmental, and a bit of a perfectionist, disinclined to award myself anything over a barely passing grade on much of anything, but I guess I can grudgingly say I have made some peculiar and uneven progress.
I've learned some songs. Older, traditional tunes like Long Black Veil, Greensleeves, Factory Girl, and She Moved through the Fair. Not quite as old standards, bits of the Beatles, David Bowie, ELO, Neil Young, Moody Blues, James Taylor, Simon & Garfunkel, Cat Stevens, The Band, Lyle Lovett, and Loreena McKinnett. I can do borderline creditable versions of some old Byrds and Eagles songs on the Yamaha 12 string I bought about a year ago--just before lockdown. Newer stuff from folks like the Decemberists and Brandi Carlisle--a woman I would catch a bullet for. I'm closing in on having Randy Newman's incomparable Sail Away nailed down, can thumb-strum but not yet pick properly Paul Simon's An American Tune (something like 46 chord changes in the first verse!). Satisfactory versions of such acoustic classics as Blackbird and Time in a Bottle still elude me. What I might have been able to learn in a weekend when I was young now may take a month to partially adhere to my brain. Imagine chords for songs printed like posters, pasted up, and slowly peeling off a brick wall.
Maybe half my playing time is devoted to playing and memorizing--something a lot harder now, after an attempt to quit smoking with Chantix a few years back went badly off the rails, trashing my memory--some of this odd set list with some fluidity.
It is how I spend that other half of my playing time that keeps me coming back. It did not take me long to go (degenerate? devolve?) back to what I did with a guitar the first time around: constructing my own peculiar musical compositions. So I fuss with the ones I've come up with so far, honing and sometimes changing them, then spend time messing around with other bizarre melodic contraptions in the making. Part of this is learning new chords that catch my ear, but my fingers resist shaping. One current reason to curse: D sus4 (557785) as a chord I can reliably land on, not one I have to sneak up on and slowly take by surprise.
It's been . . . interesting. I've learned/relearned a shitload of chords, and come to lean on some others I don't find listed in my trusty chord reference. Taught myself to read and write tablature at about the first grade level. Partially reclaimed the knack of instinctively picking the melody out of the chords
I have flirted with the idea of acquiring an electric guitar, since one would be much easier on my creaky left hand, but find myself curiously resistant to giving up that old wooden box with a hole in it. Our relationship goes back almost fifty years, and I feel I still owe her for that period of estrangement. So instead I am leaning toward getting a pickup that can be swapped between the three acoustic guitars I have my 48 or thereabouts year-old Epiphone, my Yamaha 12 string, and every so often the guitar that got all this going, the late 40's Gibson LG 2 that belonged to my father) and a small practice amp with effects such as echo, chorus and the like. Or perhaps a Tonewood amp because it's such an unusual device. A standard amp would let me experiment with looping.
If I get an amp it would not be for performance, or for increased volume, I'm just interested in sound--quite often odd sound. Mostly odd sound. The first time I played, and still this time around, there is nowhere inside me any urge to perform, to have an audience; I'm more likely to turn into a stock car than a rock star. Hell, I'm so used to sitting hunched over and quietly playing in a dissonant fog I'm not even sure I could play standing up; I might hit a tricky bit and fall right over.
Another curious thing. Part of the reason I put my guitar aside for 'just a little while' back in the mid-eighties was because I was starting to get some traction with my writing, selling the occasional story to genre magazines and anthologies, and I wanted to put all my energy there. Since then I've had 45 or so stories in the venerable SF magazine Analog, a few others in other mags and anthologies. I had two mass market paperback novels published back there in the past, have a few other more recent ones in Kindle editions, and have other works in progress. I am a word person who winces at misspellings, is sensitive to infelicitous grammar and punctuation, has read an average of one book a week for most of my life, completes the Sunday NY Times crossword at a reasonable clip, and is addicted to the weekly subscription cryptic from the guys who used to construct the cryptic for The Nation.
I don't/can't sing, and the music I put together almost never has words. Most of it doesn't even has a name. If I write it down, it gets identified by my shorthand version of the first three or four chords, catchy monikers like Csus4/C/Che3/G@3fr op e --or C suspended 4th, C, C hammer on high e string at the third fret, G played at the 3rd fret with an open e string. Now there's a name to make a crowd go What is this shit? even before I hit a single note--though I suppose I could perform under the name the Rotten Egg Collective.
So, for those of you who have slogged this far, or perhaps read my earlier diaries about being a prodigal guitarist, this is my second anniversary report. Still playing. Haven't played with anyone else in about a year, not since Covid closed down the Guitar Night we held monthly at the library--and where I was odd man out because I'm not into Bluegrass. Most evenings I start playing around nine, which means that weeknights I am providing a soundtrack for Rachel Maddow. Good news or bad, a little music--even fumbledy stuff--never hurts.
One final note. I've always had an aversion to going to Watertown, the small city 25 miles away, and Covid has not done much to encourage a change in that attitude. But a couple week ago I had to go down there to retrieve a screech owl from the vet. On the way in I detoured through downtown and stopped at Dr. Guitar, the place where I bought that 12 string last spring, to get a few odds and ends. It had been a year since I was in the place. I was glad to hear that the owner has hung in there through all this, and according to him lockdown has encouraged quite a few people to either take a crack at the guitar or other musical instrument for the first time, or try to take up playing again.
Will America emerge as a more musical place from this last awful year?
It would be nice if something good came out of it.
