I am not a good guitarist, but I am a pretty happy one. There are a few chords I return to, that fit my fingers and that notch near the top of my range where it almost feels like singing. I play it almost every day, running through the small inventory of what I know and pushing out just a little more (after David Bowie died I learned the opening riff to "Rebel, Rebel," a little finesse move around a first position D, that tight little triangle on the high strings).
It's only been in the past four or five years that I've started playing again. I found a column from 1998 where I talked about hardly even picking up a guitar except to dust it. Now I can hardly pass by a guitar without touching the strings, setting off a soft vibration, a gentle ring. People do change, or at least break old and form new habits.
What happened was an old bass-playing friend called me and said he had given some of my old songs to a new band he was working with--was that OK? I said sure, and he asked if I had any new ones, and maybe I did. Or maybe I just had some old ones he'd never heard. So I got out the guitar and the microphones and sat down in front of the computer and made him a CD. And started playing again, just like that.
Mostly I play for the dogs--for Dublin anyway. Paris is usually out stalking chipmunks, and Audi pads off to look for a soft place to lie down. But Dublin cocks her head at me, and so I put her name in every song.
I play for the instruments as well. It takes some time for an acoustic guitar to learn it's no longer a tree, sometimes 40 or more years, and the more you cause the top to vibrate the sooner it catches on. My guitars deserve a better musician--the least I can do is to help them open up, assist them with their transition to the afterlife.
It surprises me that I have gotten better, though I'm not sure why. I thought I had unlocked all my potential years ago. Now I realize I never really gave it a proper shot. I've never had a real lesson, never tried to memorize the fretboard or unlock any theory deeper than the circle of fifths or the CAGED system. By some lights, I suppose I can barely play at all--put sheet music in front of me and I'm lost. Drop me into a guitar pull and I'm watching where the bass player puts his fingers.
I don't know that I could have been good, even if I had applied myself the way that others did. I might have been better, but to what end? There are many great players, people who have the math in their hands and a preternatural sense of tone and touch. There are plenty of people who are freakishly good with the instrument. I use a guitar the way I use a typewriter, I can make things with it, write songs, and that's all I ever really wanted to do. I never imagined being a virtuoso.
I took it up early, but put it down, and took it up again. It wasn't the music that drew me to it--I liked how I thought I would look holding one. Girls liked boys who played guitar, and so I got a cheap Yahama with an impossibly high action that cut into my fingertips. I got a Mel Bay instruction manual and a Kris Kristofferson songbook with chord diagrams.
Soon I was "jamming" with my buddies. I remember my friend J.D. had a Fender Mustang but no amp, so we figured out how to play it through my bedroom stereo, and how we could rig it to play it along with records. We formed bands that never played a gig and hardly ever practiced. They were thought experiments more than anything else: I knew a kid who built a harpsichord from a kit and we talked about the "project" we were going to do together, a studio-only group which would have us as the only permanent members. We'd bring in other musicians as needed to realize the symphonies we had swirling through our heads. I left a spiral notebook full of lyrics with him, but we never played together.
Aside from promoting my brand as a guitar guy, I only wanted to play chords so I might have something to pin the lyrics and melodies that flashed through my head against. In a way I set out to become a rudimentary guitar player, and so it shouldn't be surprising that's exactly what I became.
I figured out enough to play a little in public in college and afterward; I was probably in a dozen bands all told, and somehow no one ever called me out as a fraud. I could keep time and watch the hands of real players, I found a way to use my voice that was all right. I went on the Merv Griffin Show after a song a college friend and I had written won a national contest; I even made a record in a real studio with a band that considered me the front man, if not exactly the leader.
Tom Ayres, who knew Bowie, produced those sides, and he brought in a guitar player who had worked with Rod Stewart to wring sounds I could barely imagine out of my 1976 Tokai Stratocaster copy, a remarkably hot number that was superior to many Fender instruments of the same vintage. (A fact Fender recognized, and which led them to resurrect the Squier brand for lower-priced versions of their instruments made in Japan.)
He wanted to buy it, and I should have sold it to him. I got rid of it anyway a few years later. It deserved a better master.
I have lost track of how many guitars have passed through my hands over the years--they are fungible instruments, easily traded, easily converted to cash if need be. I have heard people argue that they are good investments, in that if you get your hands on a pre-war Martin dreadnought you might be able to sell it for a profit, no matter how much you paid for it, but I can't think of them that way.
I just love them, and the way they make me feel. Even if I can't play a lick.
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Editorial on 02/14/2016