It has been a bit over a year since I dragged my old guitar out from under the stairs, equipped it with fresh strings--half the ones on it broke trying to tune them--and set out to see if I remembered much of anything about playing. I had not played a note in about 35 years. The story of that hiatus, the late friend who kept pushing me to play again, and the circumstances that finally got me going again is available here in an earlier diary.
'Playing guitar is just like riding a bicycle,' several (mostly non-playing) people assured me when they learned what I was doing, suggesting the ability to play never went away. My reply to that soon became, 'If that was true I'd be dead on the fucking sidewalk.' I had probably forgotten more about high school calculus, but not by much. At the beginning I was doubtful that I would keep playing; I figured I'd give it a couple weeks to see how far playing was in my rear view mirror, store my guitar away again, and maybe take up something more suitable to my eroded musical ability. Maybe the kazoo, or cowbell.
My old Epiphone six-string, bought new about '72 and set 'temporarily' aside '84 or '85, has gotten played every night since then. For the last few months the noises I make with it have started to sound more and more like music. I know this because our dog has stopped hiding when I pick it up.
It has been, and continues to be a challenge. I'm 67, have rheumatoid arthritis, and all last year up until mid-December the work I do left my hands already clapped out by day's end from swinging a hammer and paint brush, climbing ladders, using power tools and wrenches, hauling heavy lumber and other stuff around--work I went back to late March. A few years back I rode a ladder down the side of a building, landing in a perfect Spiderman crouch. One problem: the ladder came down on my arm, breaking my left wrist. So my left hand, the one used to form chords, has been slow, stiff, weak, and limited in stretch, flexibility, and speed ever since. Then there's this ganglion cyst the size of a peanut M&M on the first pad of my index finger, and that sure makes bar chords and other things a lot more difficult.
In spite of all this I have kept at it. The amount that I have to be relearn is staggering; sometimes it threatens to have me be the one going under the stairs. With an adequate supply of adult beverages to make it all go away.
Most songs are built around three or four chords--but which three? You have to know them all, CDEFGAB. Both as major chords, and as minor chords. Plus the flat/sharp versions of those that have them. Then the 4ths, 7ths, and suspended forms. And the versions of those chords played as bar chords. And how to hammer on and pull off notes of those chords. Plus how to bend individual notes if you are feeling bluesy. Scales for those notes. Plus--you get the idea.
Back in the day my playing was largely finger-picking, thumb for the lower three strings, three fingers for the three higher strings. I also used to cheater-pick, using only thumb and index finger, and use both a flat pick and thumb pick. Cheater-picking came back fairly quickly, and remains my main way of playing. I have mostly made peace with the flat pick--meaning I've largely stopped losing it inside the guitar. Finger-picking is coming back very slowly; faster than trees grow, but it's not coming to me the way it did the first time around. My strumming lacks any particular merit; my timing is about what you'd expect from a clock full of mouse nests and molasses.
Learning songs is slow, perhaps because age has filled my head with the same gum and detritus as that clock. I also blame an attempt to stop smoking with Chantex about three years back. I didn't get any of the crazed mood swings they warn about--or any lessening in the urge to smoke--but the stuff blew out my memory and reduced my mental acuity to that of a particularly dull-ended fence post. I stopped taking it after a couple-three weeks, but as with my wrist, I didn't get everything back in the condition it was in before. That's ageing: things getting shed, lost, or whittled away.
The first time around I mostly made up my own odd instrumental pieces. That perverse inclination has not deserted me because I am still prone to going down melodic rabbit-holes. Sevenths and suspendeds fascinate me, as do open chords played up the neck, like D minor played at the third, fifth and seventh frets with added and subtracted notes. I'll hit an odd, slightly dissonant chord by accident. Half an hour later I'm still dicking around with this strange, unnamed chord, finding its variations, and trying to mate it up with other weird chords, or odd picking patterns.
One thing is different this time. I'm (again, slowly) teaching myself to read and write tablature, so I can scribble this stuff down. Some of the odd little bits I've constructed so far may well be rusty fragments of stuff I made up before. Since none of it was written down then, and the brain fart now seems to be my natural state of mind, I can't remember back that far and so will never know.
I get asked: Isn't it fun? Don't you enjoy it?
You'd think it would be easy to answer that, but it's not. A good chunk of my playing is done in scowling determination, trying to flog my traitorous hands and mushy brain into submission. I'm constitutionally incapable of saying 'good enough' when I manage to do something in a half-assed way. I do get some satisfaction when I do manage to nearly re-master something, but it's more akin to the 'at least you're not a total idiot' ping I get solving a gnarly clue when I do The Nation's now extinct (but still available online) cryptic crossword. The one bit of slack I have cut myself is deciding that I can accept playing a song in a way that veers markedly away from the original if my version is interesting and his its own charms; the finger-picked, classical-flavored version of Don't Fear The Reaper I've been intermittently fooling around with is one example.
I'm a regular habits sort of person, slightly frosted with OCD. Guitar time is usually from 9 in the evening on. Sometimes I can't make a whole hour before my hands give out, sometimes I manage to play until 10:30, official Happy Hour, possibly having earlier switched over for a few minutes on my 12 string. I play a lot up two or more frets with the capo, not to change key, it’s just that my fingers don’t need to stretch so far. My wife usually goes to bed around 11:30. Some nights--a lot of nights, okay, most nights--after that I pick the guitar up again for a few more minutes before going to bed. By then I've had a couple drinks and maybe a very mild bit of weedy self-medication. I've warmed up already, I'm looser, nobody is listening--and that's important; now as before I am the opposite of a performer, a sort of bantamweight Bigfoot-shy guitar-slinger. Sometimes during these before-bed sessions I stop putting myself in between me and my guitar, and some of the old magic comes back. I'm playing by instinct, not by intention; I'm on a Zen roll, I'm not thinking about playing, I just am.
Those are the moments that keep me coming back for more.
Note: this diary was begun well before Covid started kicking the shit out of civilization, and got back-burnered due to other demands on my time. I am back working full time--by myself, and usually at least a quarter mile from the nearest human being--so more practice time has not come my way. But I still cling to my practice regimen, the timing of it meaning I often provide a peculiar soundtrack to Rachel Maddow. She has not scowled at me once. Songs I am now trying to get a handle on are Paul Simon's An American Tune, Beatles/McCartney Blackbird, Andra Day's anthem Rise Up, the old Mama's and Papas tune California Dreaming, and of particular furrowed-brow pleasure, one of the greatest pieces of American music ever written, Randy Newman's incomparable and incomparably subversive Sail Away. Grappling with it I continue to try to cross that mighty ocean of rustiness and physical failing into the Charleston Bay of minimal competence.
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2019/3/4/1839462/-Five-thumbed-and-fretful-relearning-to-play-the-guitar