By Hunter60
Of the many peculiarities that run in my family, apart from our rampant neuroses, constant worrying (we’re a fretful bunch) and practically debilitating sinus problems, the one that seems to cause us the most trouble is our unfailing loyalty, especially to lost causes. That explains many things including why many of us stand in bad relationships like Christians in the lions den long after it was wise to do so and why I strenuously kept a structural monstrosity of a comb-over years after it quite being odd and went the way of an object of pity. It also explains why, after several months of lessons with P., when it was clear that I had learned virtually nothing from him that I kept walking back into that basement week after week after week.
After a few months, it occurred to me that the only thing that I had managed to load into my bag of tricks was a general understanding of a handful of open chords, the opening riffs to half a dozen songs and a virtual sack full of stories that, as far as I was concerned were entertaining but as far from truth as I was from guitar virtuosity.
My ‘lessons’ went something like this: I would get the guitar from its case and P. and I would spend five minutes tuning. He would say ‘Since I am the instructor, you tune to me. Not the other way around.” Okay, that sounds fair. Now, I had purchased a KORG tuner and always tuned to it before my lesson.
P. insisted that a ‘true’ musician never uses an electrical tuner but rather develops an ear for proper tuning. That had a very Zen sound to it so I thought that must be the truth. I would tune to the way P. had his guitar tuned. After a month or so when I had begun to question him, I would check his tuning against the tuner when I got home.
It was never even close.
After tuning, I would start to play what he had tried to show me the week before to which he would waive me off. “Naw, let’s try something new,” and he would launch into a new riff. Playing it twice through, he would nod and say, “Go ahead and work on that.” And I would struggle through, trying to figure out what he had just done. He would play along a little with me, stopping every few bars to correct. “No, you’re hitting it wrong. Like this…” and he would play it again. Back to the beginning and I would start over. Within a few minutes. P. would put his guitar back on its stand, lean back on the chair, tilt his hat forward against the folds that enveloped his eyes, cross his arms across his chest and launch into one of his stories. “Did I ever tell you about the time I was almost arrested while out partying with Frank Marino?”
Well, yes he had. Several times. But that was just one of literally thousands of stories he had from a long, weird life as a punk rocker in San Francisco in the mid-70’s to New York actor and rock and roller to heroin addict, Buddhist, agitator, radical and drug runner. He told stories of shooting junk with old street musicians in Los Angeles, to running away from home as a kid in Boston and being harbored by students in Harvard in the dorm. He would lean forward and in hushed tones tell of how he was given Hepatitis by the government because he ‘knew’ things.
The one thing that he did not seem to know was how to translate what he could do with a guitar into what I needed to learn. When I asked him how important it was to learn how to read music or understand music theory, he would laugh out loud and say “Hey, your favorite musicians, the ones you know, the ones that you want to play like, know nothing about reading music or music theory. I made a career in music and I can’t read a note. If you’re really serious about learning music, learn it like the pros do. By ear.” Now I may know virtually nothing about music but even I knew that didn’t sound right.
I knew the end was coming when a ten year old came in for his lesson after mine. He was a skinny kid with hair down to his shoulders. He never looked anyone in the eye on that rare occasion when he would speak. We had started our lessons at the same time and I would be packing up when this kid would break out his guitar and start wailing away on some leads or gut crunching riffs that would make my eyes water. And P. would join in, the two of them playing as if they had been working together in a band for twenty years. The kid would stop playing and say something like “Sorry. I just didn’t have time to practice this week. I’ll do better next week”. When I questioned P. as to why he was so much further along than I was, he looked off and said, “Well, you being an adult, I have to teach you differently.” Huh?
“Um, well, can I learn what you’re teaching him?”
“You’re not ready to learn like that yet.”
It seemed to me that he was taking a Kung Fu approach and I was to be Kwai Chang Caine, waiting for him to open some ornate, Oriental box and hold an onynx pick in his hand. “When you can take the pick from hand, you are ready to learn the Way of the Screaming Guitar.”
I took my guitar back to the truck, slid in behind the wheel and decided then that I would never go back.
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