By Hunter60
So I had done it. I had taken those first wobbly, toddler-like steps towards learning, actually learning, how to play the guitar. The day of my initial lesson with P. was coming up quickly. For whatever reason, I was nervous. It never occurred to me until much later that I wasn’t the one that should have had a case of the nerves; it should have been the teacher. I had charged him with what is starting to look like impossibility. I was paying the man to teach me how to play an instrument. This was not my first foray into musicianship.
Growing up, my mother played piano and organ in our church and taught piano for years until her hearing loss forced her to stop. When I was eight years old, she asked me if I thought I would like to try and learn how to play. Sure, I thought. Why not? There was no reason for me not to learn. There was a piano in the house and my mother was a sought after instructor. Most of the people in our neighborhood found her to be a wonderful instructor, very patient and very talented. Besides, I was convinced that I could learn. I had seen her teach Jimmy R., the little fat kid from the neighborhood who was missing a portion of two of his fingers on his right hand from a lawn dart accident and Carolyn H., the nervous girl from my school with the over-active bladder, constant runny nose and a laugh that gave you the same sort of headache you get from eating ice cream too fast. If they could learn, I could learn.
At the end of the sixth lesson, my mother pulled me aside and in the kindest way possible said “Learning to play an instrument takes a certain something and, well, I just don’t think you have that.” With that, she promptly signed me up for Little League.
It took less than six practices for my mother, the coach, all of the other players and me to realize that I was even worse at playing baseball.
But here I was, 38 years later, walking into a tiny drum store, carrying my beat up Washburn, brushing past a showroom of dusty drum kits and a gaggle of kids either waiting for or coming from their lessons, blinking at me, the ‘old man’, wandering down the steps the basement for my lesson with P.
The lesson was held in the basement, the space was packed to the hilt with the skeletal remains of old drum kits and stacks of drum skins. A bare light bulb hung over a threadbare imitation Persian rug. P. leaned back precariously on a metal folding chair, his Martin appeared to bobbing on the wide expanse of his lap.
We faced each other, guitars in hand. P. did a quick flourish and played a set of scales and chords that went by so fast that I couldn’t identify any of them. “So,” he smiled, “you tell me. What do you know?”
“Uh, well, I don’t really know much about the guitar but I can pick one out of a line-up.”
He snorted a half-hearted laugh and proceeded to show me the names of the strings. “Okay, E-A-D-G-B-E’ from top to bottom. Now the thick string here,” he said, pointing to the E, “is at the top of the neck. I taught myself and have always said that this end of the fret board is the top so when I say first string, this is the one I mean.”
What? In every book I had seen, this was the sixth string, not the first.
“So,” he continued, “if that’s the first string, then this one,” he pointed to the high E, “is the sixth string. Also, when I say move up the neck, I’m talking about moving towards the headstock. Down the neck is towards the bridge.”
Before even striking one note, I was so confused to the point of being cross-eyed. “So, what sort of music do you like?”
That was easy. “I love the blues.”
He laughed. “Of course you do. The anthem of up-tight suburban white boys. Well, I can teach you some blues but let’s start out with something easy. Let me show you Neil Young’s ‘The Needle and The Damage Done.’” He played the song straight through, stopped and looked at me. “Okay. Go ahead.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“Nope. You saw what I did. Now you try it.”
I made it through the first few strums of the D major before I managed to get my thumb stuck underneath the sixth, er, first E string. The big string. You know which one I mean, right?
My first lesson ended up on a rather sickly note.
[FONT=Tahoma]"All I can do is be me ... whoever that is". Bob Dylan [/FONT]
