On playing the guitar and the temple of music

The author, circa 1995

(Reprinted from a post on my old Tiny Island blog, Tuesday, April 26, 2005)

I’ve been playing the guitar for a long time. This coming summer marks the 31st year since I first took up the instrument. The desire to play the guitar first entered my mind when I was about ten. On my way home from school, I used to pass by “Tony Saks Guitarland,” a small music store in Norfolk, Virginia. One day, in the front display window, there was a shining banjo. I thought it was beautiful. After a couple of days of admiring the engravings and inlays, I got up my courage and went in to ask about it.

The man inside patiently explained to me that it cost nearly $2000. In those days, you could buy a new car for that kind of money. I was amazed that an instrument could cost as much as a car!

The man asked me if I might be interested in the guitar. He took down a guitar off the wall and strummed a few chords. I was enchanted by the sound. I don’t know what he played, but that sound thrilled me. I had seen the Beatles when they played the Ed Sullivan Show when I was about four. But there is a distinctively different experience to be had when you hear a solo guitar played live as opposed to seeing a guitar in a group on TV. I left the store and floated home. That’s when the begging began.

My dad finally relented and a buddy of his gave him or sold him an old beat-up guitar with no name. It looked like it was home made. It was the only guitar I ever saw with a pine top. The strings were a mile off the neck and it was really hard to press down. It came with a Mel Bay Book #1. I think I got to about the third string notes before I lost interest. The guitar went into the attic eventually and moved with us a couple of times to new homes.

In the summer of 1974, there was a lot of exciting stuff happening. I was totally into music as a listener. My favorite groups were Led Zeppelin and Chicago. I used to do my homework listening to the 8-track tapes of Chicago at Carnegie Hall. That album is the reason I nearly failed Algebra. The choice was to either concentrate on quadratic equations or Terry Kath’s glorious strumming in the last movement of “Ballet for a Girl in Buchannon.” Algebra lost that battle hands down.

I still harbored a desire to learn to play the guitar. I had seen Chigago in concert the year before and I dreamed of having a guitar like Terry Kath’s. He played a white Fender Telecaster, which I only recognize now after the fact. I also had a great love for that “wah-wah” sound that the guitarist had in the old Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. I love that modern brass sound and the “wah-ka-chik-ah” sound in tunes like “Theme from Shaft” and “Papa was a Rolling Stone.”

Well fortune smiled upon me that summer and I was offered the chance to go away with a friend’s family to a vacation resort in White Lake, North Carolina. It was what every teenager dreams of: a week away from mom and dad. My friend’s parents were familiar with the area because they went there every year. Their relaxed attitudes gave us the freedom to run the place with little supervision. We went swimming, played in the arcades (not video games…they were the mechanical kinds like pinball), and flirted with a couple of girls who were about our age. It was great fun.

My friend’s cousin Steve came with us on the trip. Steve was our hero. He was 19, on his own (free!) and he had car. He also had just bought a brand new Gibson acoustic guitar for $350 to learn to play guitar. We though that was crazy, but cool. Nevertheless, after about six weeks of playing, Steve was strumming chords and singing Neil Young songs. The bells went off in my head. If Steve could do that in six weeks, so could I. Our last night there, my friend and I asked out the two girls and we spent part of the evening with Steve strumming the guitar for us, singing the songs he’d learned. We walked the girls back to the rooms where they were staying with their families and my friend and I each got our first kiss goodnight. I spent the next several days after I got home “walking on air.” I also went up in the attic and dusted off the old guitar. I started playing and haven’t stopped since.

That summer, there seemed to be a wealth of popular songs with easy-to-learn guitar parts. There were songs by the Eagles, ZZ Topp, the Doobie Brothers, John Denver, America, and any others. I learned more quickly than I could have dreamed. During the following school year, “Stairway to Heaven” came out. I figured out the song by ear and my friends were amazed. I was completely self-taught, but I always wanted to take lessons. When I got my chance, after playing about two years, the guitar teacher told my parents he really couldn’t show me anything new on the guitar. I already was playing better than he. The guy was a middle-school band teacher and guitar wasn’t his main instrument. He did teach me to read music and a bunch of music theory.

We were living in a little town in Southeast, Alaska at the time. Ketchikan is a tiny town on an island (that’s where the blog gets its name). The Trans-Alaska Pipeline was being built in those days and there were a lot of transient guys that came up to get jobs on the pipeline and make some big money. The jobs were only available to those who had connections, so a few of those guys ended up teaching guitar in the town’s only music store. I studied with a guy who introduced me to Leo Kottke and John Fahey fingerpicking styles. When that teacher left for a job on the pipeline, the guy who took his place a few months later was a jazzer. I only took a few lessons from him.

My friends conned me into joining the community jazz band during the summer break between my sophomore and junior year. I was so intimidated by the jazz charts, I just turned the volume way down and tried to hide. I couldn’t figure out what a F#m7b5 and such chords were. They were like algebra to me, which of course I failed because I was listening to Terry Kath playing chords like F#m7b5. I bought a chord book with 7,488 voicings and tried to memorize as many of them as I could. I couldn’t solo more than to play a blues scale. I started to quit, but my friends made me feel so bad, I couldn’t do it. It was long way from playing John Denver to Sammy Nestico or Duke Ellington.

Eventually, I started to get the hang of it. When September rolled around and it was time to go back to school, the one guitar slot in the jazz band was filled by a senior girl who had been there for a couple of years already. Instead, I signed up for a driver’s education class so I could get my driver’s license. On the fifth day of school, my friends came running into the class after the last hour and said breathlessly, “Greg! Glenda can’t play in the band. She has a schedule conflict! You need to come sign up now!” The fifth day was the last day you could request changes to your class schedule. I went down and changed my schedule and I became an official member of the jazz band. Because I quit driver’s-ed, I ended up not getting my license until I was 18.

The first concert of the year came in October. It was a blast. It was the first time my parents ever saw me perform with a group. They had heard me practice, but it never sounded like much. The told me afterwards, “Wow. You really can play the guitar!” I think they always expected me to drop it and move on to something more “serious” at some point.

Author, circa 2004

The guitar has always been a great friend to me. When I feel down, I can go play a tune and it cheers me up. If I’ve had a bad day at work, the blues definitely has a therapeutic effect. If I had a really bad commute, nothing blasts out that aggression like pounding out some heavy metal riffs. Beyond that, it has been an education to me. I’ve learned that I get out of it what I put into it. It taught me a work ethic. It taught me to set a high standard and strive to reach it. Music doesn’t lie. Either you can play or you can’t. An audience knows if you’re faking it.

There’s a certain amount of self-searching it takes to go beyond being a hobbyist. If you can play the guitar for fun and then put it down, then good for you. For some of us, it grabs you and takes hold of you. It becomes an extension of your personality. It becomes the way you express things that you just can’t articulate any other way. It becomes a spiritual thing. The only time I’ve ever stopped playing was for something spiritual. I left the guitar behind for two years as I went out to be a missionary. It was my “offering” to lay it down for that time. Though my hands didn’t play the guitar, I still explored it mentally. I composed a couple of my best songs during that time without having the guitar in hand. I had to “learn” to play those pieces once I returned home.

The guitar isn’t for everybody. I’m like a missionary now, looking for guitar converts. I want to convert them to my “guitar religion.” As a teacher, I have students that come and learn scales and work through tablatures and they eventually leave and go on. There are some students I find who have what it takes to become disciples of music. These are the ones who press on through the scales and chords and mechanics of playing into the heart of music itself. It takes work and discipline, neither of which are very popular nowadays.

There was a kid who came to me once and told me, “I want to audition for the school jazz band. I’ve got three weeks to prepare. Can you teach me jazz in three weeks?” I hesitated. Jazz is an art form that takes a lifetime. I didn’t want to give him any false hopes. The deeper question he was asking was, “Can you turn me into a musician in three weeks.” I could, but it largely depended on his committment and effort.

The kid was a basic rocker who knew Nirvana, Metallica, etc. He had played sax for a time and he could read music a little. I asked him, “If you come three days a week for an hour each, and you memorize and study the stuff I give you, you’ll make it. If not, there’s no chance.” He reflected a minute and said, “Ok. I’ll do it.” His mom paid me and we set our appointments. We began with a quick review of note reading, rhythms, and then started on key signatures. I made him write out and memorize every scale so he could repeat them from memory. He worked like no one I’ve ever seen before. He came back with the stuff memorized and I showed him intervals, triads, and how chords are built. I gave him a bunch of stuff to memorize and he came back with it all at his command. Over the next several lessons, we applied chords to scales, arpeggios, and all sorts of things which applied the knowledge he’d memorized to the fretboard. It was amazing to see how fast he picked it all up. It was all due to his effort. He didn’t slack off. He had a goal and he wanted to meet it.

At our final lesson before the audition, we were discussing the circle of fifths and how certain songs follwed patterns originating from it. All of a sudden, the kid gets this dumbfounded look on his face. I thought that I had at last overwhelmed him and he was getting ready to have a stroke or something. Then his face lit up and he looks at me and said the most profound thing I ever heard from a student. “It’s all one!”

I knew exactly what he was talking about. He had experienced a moment, not of just musical understanding, but personal enlightenment. He saw the Divine hand that had created the physical properties that govern music and the systems that allow us to understand it and use it as a creative force. He saw how music of all kinds was linked together and understood that other non-musical things are linked to music. The invisible hand of the Creator is in all things that have been created. For the guitarist who strives to understand music fully and completely, going beyond the guitar itself and deep into the music beyond, there is a big surprise. Jimi Hendrix knew it when he said, “‘Scuse me, while I kiss the sky.” That metaphor tells you that there’s something more beyond the notes, beyond technique, beyond the actual sounds.

A true musician is a “revelator” who, for brief moments, receives a whispered word of musical truth. Musicians who play for fame, money, groupies, adulation, or any other motivation rarely go beyond the surface. The John Mellencamps, Bruce Springsteens and other artists who make music their platform for political action can’t progress beyond this level, because their concerns are always worldly in nature. Abortion, gay rights, taxes, the war, etc. all have to do with the secular, physical world. Their commitment and discipline is pointed elsewhere. The evils they seek to end, however honorable their intent, will all disappear with mortality’s end.

It is rare to find the “golden fish in the pond” who can focus so deeply and leave the clamor and noise behind to find the true music within. Not everyone can find it, but those who do become emissaries to spread it and reveal it to others. The problem is that the world doesn’t like “prophets” and there’s no money in being one. The musical revelator always seems to go against popular trends and is criticized by his contemporaries. Like the ancient apostle John said, the world loves itself and worships its own image. To go beyond and find the love of God, one must forsake the world.

My son had the assignment for a science class to try to balance two eggs on their at the exact time of the spring equinox. The teacher gave him the exact time, for our time zone, that the equinox was to occur. When the day came, we set out the eggs on the kitchen table, wondering if it would really be possible to do. We started about ten minutes before the exact time and we had no luck. A couple of minutes before the actual time, we were about to give up when my son suddenly cried out, “Look!” He had successfully balanced an egg on its end. It sat there poised perfectly without so much as a wobble. Quickly, he took several more eggs and did the same thing as we watched in amazement. The eggs stayed there until a couple minutes after the equinox passed. They all fell over at the same time.

I’ve told several people about this experience over the years, and very few of them believe me. They don’t think it’s possible. I tell them, “Look, I’ve seen it with my own eyes. It can be done.” But their minds reject the possibility and they won’t believe my eyewitness account. The same can be said of music. There is something beyond music. It is a vehicle to something else. A musician who can forsake the world and seek the the true music will find it.

Robert Fripp said something once that I paraphrase here: “If we exercise discipline and practice with integrity, music will take us into her confidence and whisper into our ears.” Many will disagree or doubt, nevertheless I am an eyewitness (or should I say ear-witness). I have found that to be true.

Music is like the temple of God. To some musicians, the idea of entering the quiet confines of the temple and leaving the worldy revelry behind is a turn-off. Others create false temples that worship Bacchanalia. Wine, women, and song–sex, drugs, and rock and roll. They become false priests of a music that has no lasting value. It expends their youth and drains them of creativity and life itself.

Others are content to drive past the temple, acknowledging its existence and its manifest beauty. Some get close enough to hear the quiet strains of heavenly sound that barely escape from its walls, but they don’t qualify themselves to enter. They are content to know that this truth exists, but they don’t long to possess it. Work, bills, family issues take up their life and they are comforted that there is always something more. They tell themselves, if there’s time, they’ll eventually get to it.

Others, the smallest group, long to enter the doors and to pass beyond the veil. Many of them forsake worldly security for the sake of their vision. Others work to provide the means of physical and secular security so they can take a sabbatical from the world temporarily. Most of them who seek at this level juggle myriad responsibilities and keep their vocation central to their lives. They work long and hard to make “penance” and purify themselves sufficiently to enter with humility. When they emerge, they are renewed, having been in the Divine presence. They are witnesses of that which the world cannot experience, unless they are willing to go through the same preparations. Their reward cannot be measured in worldly terms.

To those who have paid the price, we honor you. To all the musical seekers of truth, keep practicing, be true, and keep your ears open.