A long time ago, and in a part of my life that now seems a million miles behind me, I used to play guitar. I started playing in the early Seventies and stopped in the mid-Eighties. I'll do the math for you: I quit playing over thirty years ago.
It is sometimes hard to remember--or make sense of-- what the hell we were thinking when we were young. Near as I can recall three main factors led to letting my playing lapse. That was about the time I started getting serious about writing fiction, and I focused most of my creative energy on that, just as I largely gave up drawing and painting when I started playing. I had hit a sort of plateau, and was feeling increasingly impatient with my playing. Worst of all, I'd mastered the guitar well enough play circles around my father, a man who could rarely resist pointing out how he would improve on something I did. In demonstrating just what I could do on a guitar one night I think I probably partly ruined playing for both of us. An old regret, that.
Back then I mostly composed my own music, intricate instrumental pieces inspired by classical guitar, and such players as Michael Hedges, Michael Dunford of Renaissance, and Robert Fripp. I largely played fingerpick style, on both six string, and a borrowed Ovation twelve string.
Various influences and events over the last year made me start thinking maybe I should haul my old guitar out, scrape off the dust, and see if I remembered anything about playing. The slow lead-up to taking the idea seriously has had a soundtrack: over the last decade the acoustic guitar playing of Colin Meloy of the Decembrists kept catching my ear, making me remember playing well enough to make sounds like that, and thinking it would be nice to do it again.
Still, returning to playing remained a vague, half-tuned thought until last year. That's when I asked my friend John, who has a long history of buying, selling, trading, and of course playing guitars to check out and appraise my father's late 1940's vintage LG-2 Gibson. I took my 40 year old Epiphone FT-130 along when I took him the Gibson. Dad's guitar proved to be worth considerably more than mine, which was not a surprise. John asked me if I was going to play the Gibson. I told him about my three decade hiatus from setting fingers to frets, and said if I ever did try playing again it would be with my own guitar.
The Gibson is an enviable guitar to play. It has a rich, deep, bell-like tone that lends every note authority. It is, and was, also harder to play than my Epi. I'd adjusted the neck and bridge to make the Gibson easier to play for my father back in the day, but it still retained a stiff action that's hard on the fingers. I bought my Epiphone new back in '72 or '73, and it was love at first touch; the moment I played a couple chords on it I knew it had to be mine. I don't have very large hands, and the Epi had a slimmer neck than the old and beat-up Silvertone $30 special I was learning on at the time-or on the Gibson. It had--and still has--a light, responsive action, and a sweet, jewel-bright tone.
Then a few weeks ago I saw a Gary, a local guy who plays mostly classical guitar, perform at a coffeehouse. I went to finally hear him; I've helped recruit him to play at several events at the library where I am a board member, but during those events I've always been too busy to stop and listen. At one point I had a flash of recognition, and surprised both him and myself by asking if he'd just played the Liona Boyd version of a Bach piece. Afterward I found myself thinking: did I remember more than I thought I did?
The answer is both yes and no. Mostly no. For every chord I surprise myself by remembering and being able to play there are three where I wonder how the hell I ever got my fingers to do that.
Being old enough for Medicare isn't any kind of advantage in this endeavor. My arthritis isn't much help either. The fact that I broke my left wrist a few years back, and that hand has never been quite as strong and flexible as it was before then hasn't helped either. They call Clapton 'Slow Hand'. If I stick with it I may well be doomed to be 'Glacier Hand' or 'Watch Paint Dry Between Chords Hand'.
Obviously I can't jump from not playing to writing music again in one wondrous leap. I have to try to work my way back in by learning to play other people's songs, and that takes me to one of the reasons I used to be focused on creating my own instrumental pieces.
I can't sing. As a kid I was forced to go to church, and when everyone rose to sing a hymn my mother stayed seated and kept her mouth shut. She was doing everyone a favor. While my father could sing quite well, I inherited my mother's voice. Ma had a tin ear, and wasn't even slightly musical. My ear is fairly good, but the sounds I produce if trying to sing are better left unvoiced; I make Tom Waits sound like Freddie Mercury. Most pop, rock, or folk pieces are only three or four chords. It's singing the words that turn them into songs, into music. It might help if I could whistle, but I can barely call our dog.
I hauled my guitar out from under the stairs not quite three weeks ago. I'm putting in at least an hour most nights--and that's gotten easier since I put new, extra-light strings on, and started redeveloping enough callus that playing isn't three strums of a D or G chord and then a half minute of cursing, whimpering, and shaking the pain out of my fingers.
With typical perversity most of the songs I'm trying to learn to play are ones that would draw blank looks if you requested them from a bar band: works by such bands as The Decembrists, and Of Monsters And Men. But I am also working on ones by Neil Young--and no, Neil's singing voice is superior to mine the same way his guitar playing is superior to hitting a power pole guy wire with a squeaky toy--John Fogarty, and up a couple notches in difficulty, Paul Simon.
Will I relearn to play, and keep playing? I really don't know. My left hand is improving, a bit, and when I get impatient or discouraged I have to remind myself it took years the first time around. I've got some of the basic chords back, though A still gives me a cramp, and B flat and anything barred remains mostly clunk, buzz, and expletives. I've managed to recall a bit of primitive finger-picking. I've also seemingly forgotten everything I ever knew about strumming, and that was hard-won knowledge since I have an inherently shitty sense of rhythm. That's why I just armed myself with an el Cheapo combination tuner and metronome. Sort of musical Depends.
I put in thousands of hours on that now-old Epiphone back in the days before home computers and the internet, CD players and cell phones. Most of what I learned--and created--then has been lost, almost certainly beyond recovery.
Still, it is a bit of a rush in those fleeting moments when it clicks, my old guitar comes alive in my hands again, and the two of us produce exactly the sound we want, and that sound is beautiful.