Birth of an Obsession - February 07


hunter60
Humble student
Joined: 06/12/05
Posts: 1,579
hunter60
Humble student
Joined: 06/12/05
Posts: 1,579
01/26/2007 7:30 pm
Birth of an Obsession #4

By Hunter 60



It didn’t take more than a week to realize that trying to learn how to play the guitar from a book would, for me, be the equivalent of a rhesus monkey trying to learn how to fly by watching planes take off at the airport. He might, on pure chance, make his way into the plane but the odds of him getting it in the air were astronomical.

That first week was somewhat illuminating. First, I had no idea that there was actual physical pain involved in this. When I had watched people play the guitar, they always looked like they were having fun. Some had that far away, drifting appearance of having been transported somewhere else by the music they were playing. I had quickly memorized a few open chords and spent hours trying to get my fingers to do what my mind knew they should do. After the first ten minutes, my left hand felt like someone had ground off the tips with a cheese grater and my right hand cramped so bad, it took on the appearance of the talons of some prehistoric bird of prey. I happened to catch sight of myself in the mirror and there was no happiness, no peaceful transportation. It was pain. Plain and simple.

The chords that I was attempting to strum were buzzing at one point, lapsing into a dull ‘thunk’ the next. The instructional book that I was trying to learn with came with a CD. I had the disc playing and was following along with the exercises. It wasn’t even close. It was as if we weren’t playing the same instrument. The musician on the disc was playing the guitar; I, on the other hand, was playing a garbage can with coaxial cables stretched across the top. It was summer and my windows were open during those first tenuous practice sessions. On one of those particular evenings, I heard a far away neighbor cry “Oh for the love of God, please stop torturing that poor instrument.”

I knew at that point, I needed a teacher. A real, honest and earnest, instructor. Someone who could actually show me what I needed to be doing. So I set out to search for a guide. Yes, I was to be an eager, young (alright, you have to suspend a little disbelief here) Skywalker seeking out my Obi Wan Kenobi.

I found my first instructor by a stroke of pure serendipity. I walked into a local drum shop seeking, yes, more strings. Sitting behind a counter was a rather, large, somewhat bulbous, older man. He had a black cowboy shirt pulled taut across his huge expanse of a stomach; black jeans and a small black cowboy hat perched on top of his head. The hat was two sizes too small and yet on him, it seemed at home.

He had the outline of a graying goatee splayed across chin and dark, black circles under his eyes. They were so heavy and full, they gave the appearance that he was trying to smuggle tea bags out of a grocery store. I asked him for some guitar strings and he leaned back slightly on his stool, stroked the stubble on his chin and said “Aren’t you in a band or something?” Before I could stop myself, I laughed out loud. I assumed that the shaved head must have thrown him off. “No, I’m not in a band. As a matter of fact, I’m just learning to play.” He smiled wide. “Well, you’re in luck. I’m the guitar instructor here. If you are interested in a teacher, I would be glad to sign you up for some lessons.”

Before I could answer, he pulled a dinged up Martin out from under the counter, propped it on his knee and proceeded to rip through some amazing material, flowing from Neil Young to Clapton to Dylan to Pete Townsend and even an acoustic version of ‘Little Wing’ that literally made me a weak in the knees. His left hand moved so quickly that I had a hard time following it. He was picking with his fingers and working a plectrum with his right hand at the same time, moving from string to string with a ferocity that sent the sound right through my skull. “I can teach you to play just like that.”
I think I knew somewhere in the back of my mind that this guy was playing me as well as he was playing that Martin but I wanted to believe. “Okay. We’ll try it.”

After I had signed up for a series of lessons, I realized that I done so without asking a question that needed to be asked. “How do you teach?” He looked at me with a puzzled expression and said “I play something, show you how to play it and then you play it. Not sure there’s any other way to teach guitar, do you?”

I shook my head. “No. I suppose not.” I had a bad feeling about how this was going to go and he did not disappoint.
[FONT=Tahoma]"All I can do is be me ... whoever that is". Bob Dylan [/FONT]
# 1

Please register with a free account to post on the forum.