One of the unwelcome side effects of writing a book about guitars is not having much time to play the guitar. And one of the cruel lessons of this is to discover that no, folks, playing the guitar is not like riding a bike. (Please: if anyone convincingly disagrees, would love to hear from you.)
A few weeks ago I called up a friend, a teacher and professional musician and occasional drinking buddy, to come over to play. In the years that he’s given me lessons, we’d gone through three notebooks of material and many bottles of single malt. In the last year or two, though, we’ve hardly gotten together. It was always because of “the book.” Well, the book’s out, and so there we were, trying to pick it up. Not easy. First I asked him if he knew “Spike Driver’s Blues,” a Mississippi John Hurt song that’s been stuck in my head for a while. He didn’t, but with a skill that still seems magical to me, he started listening to it on my iPod and within a minute or two started playing what he was hearing. Then he chuckled. You know, he said, it’s just one chord. Great: I couldn’t figure out a song with just one chord. Granted, because it was a speeded up old recording, my friend had to play it in A flat with a capo on the first fret, so that could partly explain why I had trouble. But really, to be defeated by a song entirely in first-position G?
Next we played “Stormy Monday,” which I still knew by heart. That went ok until, as always, it was my turn to take the solo. I froze and fumbled and fell out of key again and again. It’s a completely humbling experience, and I can only imagine that this is what toddlers feel like when they’re starting to walk. Except they’re not painfully self-conscious. They just get up and plow on. I plow on and, well, you don’t want to hear it. The next morning, I found myself humming some great riffs to the song, and it occurred to me: why is it so hard to listen and play at the same time? and why, with a guitar in my hand, do I cut off instead of tap into whatever music is inside me? (Again: anyone having the same problem — or knows the solution — please write.)
After “Stormy Monday,” my friend suggested we go through the notebooks and just pick out stuff we both like to play, kind of a review. “Here Comes the Sun.” “Freight Train.” “Romanza.” “Delia” in drop D. The Jorma version of “I Know You Rider.” On and on. What’s interesting is that the notebooks show a cyclic progression. I knew enough when we originally started out that we didn’t have to start at the beginning, and my progress with him must have been pretty quick, because just a few pages into the first book were jazz standards like “Summertime” and “The Girl from Ipanema.” But it was also very clear where we pushed too hard. For example, following several arrangements from the album Kind of Blue is really easy fingerstyle stuff like “My Creole Belle.” A later page gives his hand-written formula for creating complex chords like 11ths and 13ths, followed by “Honey Pie,” a funky blues in E. Your basic advance and retreat.
And then, in the third notebook, about a quarter of the way in, is my teacher’s brilliant arrangement of “Here, There, and Everywhere.” This showed up just before work on the book took over, and though I’ve played it at least a hundred times while sight-reading, I’ve never been able to get smoothly past the middle section, and I’ve never been able to memorize it. Is it just this song, or the end of the road? Will I ever get back to my pre-book chops, whatever they were? Even more discouraging, the piece before it is a chord solo arrangement for “Moonglow.” It wasn’t all that long ago that I would have been able to read and play that piece. Now, I can’t. I’m stuck on “Here, There, and Everywhere.”
Which feels like nowhere.
