You know what’s crazy. I’ll tell you what’s crazy.™
The first guitar lesson.
I just watched my son take his first instruction.
He’s holding my acoustic guitar on his lap. His arm is draped over the front of the instrument which covers him like a gigantic sandwich board.
His hand is bent. It is awkward, like a teenage boy pinning a corsage on his prom date in front of her dad.
His fingers are straining to reach the right string on the right frets. It’s a complex act that requires confidence and dexterity, neither of which he possesses right now.
The guitar is a bit too big for him. He looks like a dwarf carrying a canoe. He has a spastic quality about him, sort of Adam Sandler like, as his fingers search for the right strings.
As his digits mash down a combination of strings and he strums a D major, there is a convulsion of sound. It is not clean. It sounds like a sand storm blowing against a beach trailer. He continues to strum and fight through the sound. It resonates like a chain saw gnawing through a knot in a log.
The boy never wavers. He is persistent and sticks with it, forcing the strings down, making the reverberation pure.
Suddenly a D sharp resonates across the instrument and a sense of satisfaction crosses the boy’s cherubic face.
It takes me back.
When my hand was awkward and the notes sounded like chimpanzees mating.
I took guitar lessons in college. It was a 2 unit class and I needed the easy grade. I bought a cheap guitar and a tuning fork.
My instructor was a USC music major who got credit for teaching dummies like me. We hit it off. We were the same age and had similar musical influences. He taught me some easy riffs and easy Blues bars that I still use today.
I learned to strum a few chords between keg parties and a constant array of night time news internships.
The problem was, when the notes got sour, I had no ear for fixing it. A guitar goes out of tune. That is what it does. Most tune the instrument and move on. I did not have this ability. For some reason, I could not do it. I could not move on.
A guitar out of tune is as useful as a flashlight with no batteries. It’s a baseball glove with no ball. It’s a chalkboard without chalk.
Back in the day, we used a tuning fork to find the harmonic convergence.
But no matter how many times I banged that piece of metal, no matter how many times I hummed, no matter how many times I twisted the knobs trying to get the string to emulate the pitch, I just couldn’t do it.
The more I twisted those knobs, the more I created a musical monster, a Godzilla of string instruments.
Suddenly Brown Eyed Girl became a blood curdling screech from the bogs of hell.
I always asked my guitar teacher to tune my ax.
“How does it get like this?” he would ask quickly synchronizing all six strings to perfection.
I would shrug knowing that I had the musical ear of a tin plate.
He would teach me marvelous things, and I would go back to my room and practice.
But eventually, over time, a knob would move, a string would stretch and so did my ability to play songs that sounded like songs.
Eventually I would strum chords that sounded like broken glass being swept up in the street with a metal shovel.
I went from making beautiful music to becoming the Jack the Ripper in four four time.
When I was a young man, I had little patience. When my guitar became an instrument of disenchantment, my volatility levels would rise.
I remember on more than one occasion putting on my own Who concert. I would strum some ugly chords pretending to be Pete Townsend and then when the sounds were so hideously distorted that I couldn’t take it any more. I would raise the wooden instrument over my head and then with an angry forcefulness, begin smashing the guitar on the floor.
The anger would dissipate with every destructive smash.
Bong. Bang. Clang.
A guitar sounds more like a bass drum when its hitting the floor at the speed of sound.
In no time, I am holding a neck with some tangled strings, standing in a pile of wood fibers and plastic.
I would throw the guitar down, all the while knowing that it was the master and I just the apprentice.
Friends would walk in and see a smashed guitar and ask me whether I had anger management issues?
No, just can’t tune a guitar I would say.
So after 4 acoustics, I bought an electronic tuner. Best invention ever as far as I am concerned.
It has saved me a ton of money on broken guitars.
I’ve had the same guitar for several years. It doesn’t know how lucky it is not to be kindling for some cub scout troop.
So my son is fortunate to be living in a world where you can google the chords to the Green Day song you want to play, you can look at how to play those chords on your iphone and then sit down and play them on a guitar that you can tune with an electronic meter.
Life is surely crazy.™