1/10/24
Newsletter #545
The Crack of Dawn
I have a good friend – who might read this – I’ve known since 10th grade. A bright, inquisitive, funny guy, and a reasonably talented musician. He might well be a very talented musician, but he no longer practices. One of the many lies that society perpetuates is, “Practice makes perfect.” No, it doesn’t. Practice makes tolerable; nothing is perfect. Anyway, I looked around my buddy’s apartment and it’s decorated in various types of guitars on stands. I asked, “How many guitars do you have?” He thought about it for a moment, then said, “Eleven.” Having just watched a doc (making me momentarily knowledgeable), I replied, “The Edge only has eighteen.” But I was in a playful mood, so I plunged ahead. “Can you play any of them anymore? Let’s sing a song.”
Well, I kind of opened a can of worms. Which guitar would he play? And how badly out of tune was it? Then he looked at me like, “Now what?” I said, “Play a song, preferably something I know that I can sing to.” “Like what?” he asked. I said, “Any Beatles’ song, any Crosby, Still & Nash song.” This was all becoming much too big of an ordeal for him, and he said in exasperation, “I don’t know any of them off hand.” I was ready to smack him. “Get the chords on your phone.” (“Am I not your older brother? Did I not just tell you to wrap your hand with the rag?”) He said, “Get the chords of what?” My purely arbitrary choice was, “All My Lovin’.” Well, goddam if when he had the chords in front of him, he begrudgingly played the song, and I sang it. It was fun. We ended up singing six or seven songs.
This was a standard kind of fun when we were young. At a party somebody would pick up a guitar and play. Somebody else – like me – would get them to play something I knew, then I’d sing along. Invariably, others would join in.
When I was nine or ten, my sister Ricki would play the guitar (not well) and we would sing folk songs. We sang several songs from Peter, Paul and Mary’s first album, like If I Had a Hammer and 500 Miles. Later on, in our late-teens and early twenties, we’d hang out in the Raimi’s basement and pretend we were a band. Ivan Raimi and Rob Tapert both played guitar, poorly, but exuberantly. Sam named the band, Baby Moses and the Thrillers. Our big hit, twenty-five years before M&M, was “Eight Mile Line.”
I have attempted to play the guitar a number of times in my life, all failures. When I was about fourteen, I went to my neighbor, Tommy Labret’s dad’s pawn shop and got a guitar and a case for like ten dollars. I then signed up for classes at Fava Music, which was a big music store that specialized in guitars. From the first second, I was bad at it, didn’t like it, it hurt my fingers and I didn’t practice. Apparently, my playing was so bad that the universe sent me a sign. My guitar reposed in its case in my bedroom, leaning against the wall across from my bed. As I lay blissfully asleep one night, I was abruptly awakened by a loud, cracking, Sproing! The guitar case swung open, forced by the momentum of the guitar’s neck snapping forward – undoubtedly caused by the tension of the improperly tuned strings. I got the message, so I quit.
However, I held on to my dream. My neighbor plays guitar and enjoys going to two nearby pawnshops and looking at the guitars. After accompanying him several times – back in the days when I was drinking – the guitar dream resurfaced. I paid $25 for a Lotus electric guitar, which was cheap knock-off of a Fender Stratocaster, with a whammy bar and it was bright red. I also purchased a cute little aquamarine retro plastic amplifier. I paid one friend, who is a music teacher, for a number of lessons. I was drunk, and he was as patient as he knew how, and I still didn’t get it. Plus, I was also getting instructions from my neighbor, Jerry, who lived directly behind me and played several instruments, particularly the drums. Jerry was also a drunk and we used to get our booze together every day at 5:00 PM. While showing me how to play the guitar Jerry was very patient with me too. Everybody was.
Jerry made me a couple of chord charts of easy songs that sat on my coffee table absorbing spilled beer for a year. And I really did give it a try, until the ends of my fingers were became calloused. But I didn’t get it. So, in my pickled brain, I decided that it was the guitar’s fault. Being flush at the time, I went back to the pawn shop and bought a real Fender Stratocaster (from their Mexican factory) and a decent, heavy little amp. The Strat was gray and white, and it of course had a whammy bar. And surprise, surprise, I couldn’t play it any better than the $25 Lotus.
Meanwhile, Jerry’s fortunes went slowly down the crapper. Over the course of a few years he ended up selling both of his drum kits, then his electric guitar, then even his acoustic guitar.
At first I had both guitars on stands in the living room. They were beautiful, but they taunted me. So I moved them into the closet. That didn’t solve the problem.
Finally, in runken drage, pissed off at everything in the world (as only alcohol can really do), I called Jerry and said, “How would you like a real, Mexican, Stratocaster, and an amp?” Jerry said, “You’re just not getting it, are you?” I said, “I’ll meet you at the fence.” I love this. Dead seriously, Jerry said, “You can’t do this, man. You can give away your Strat.” I laughed and said, “OK, then I’m loaning it to you forever. When I can play you a song on the Lotus, then you can give it back.” As I handed him the shit over the fence, so fucking mad that I could spit, Jerry seriously and honestly tried stopping me from ridding myself of this mocking imp of Satan.
A couple of years later, which is already a couple of years ago, Jerry called me from his home in Delaware. He was completely drunk, totally happy, and said, “Dude, listen, I can play the solo from Stairway to Heaven.” And he could.