A while back, in the days before Covid, I extracted my old Epiphone acoustic guitar out from under the stairs and started to see if I could re-learn how to play after a layoff of about thirty-five years. I wrote about embarking on this misadventure here, with irregular reports on and off since.
Just recently I ran across a dated file that made me stop and think: Whoa, this is my fifth anniversary of making music-adjacent noises. Being old, and the sort of person given to pondering, I’ve been mulling over what I have learned and gained.
As often happens when I set out to do something, the results have been slightly odd. Over this past winter I have slowly come to the entirely subjective (and quite possibly erroneous) conclusion that while my playing isn’t as fluid, fast, or sure-fingered as when I was young, in some ways I’m a better guitarist than I was then. This is the sort of contradiction that defines much of my life.
Once again largely self-taught, I had more help this time. A new—or returning--player these days has advantages I never could have imagined back in the seventies and early eighties. Say I need to look up a chord not listed in my tattered Hal Leonard reference. I can do it on my computer—I can look it up on my damn phone; in 1980 I had a rotary phone on a four-party line. Now if I want to know the chords for, say, Whiter Shade of Pale, no problem. I can even find several videos showing me how to play it, note for note.
This easily accessed wealth of information has helped me learn more chords, by name even, and cobble together a half-assed understanding of the relationship between them with a preschool level grasp of music theory. That means that if I need a C minor 7 somewhere up the neck I can figure one out if I don’t already know one.
As before, there is an innate and essential weirdness I bring to playing. My fascination with open string/drone chords and discordant chords continues unabated, and I have a real knack for finding really difficult (for me, at least) to play chords, and an inability to avoid the hand torment that comes from trying to master them. Having small hands, arthritis, and residual damage from a broken left wrist are of no particular help. Edibles and vodka are.
I seem to be reflexively averse to making much noise when I play. Most times I play quietly, as if trying to contain the damage. The Taylor acoustic I play now has a pickup and I have an amp, but every time I contemplate plugging in I find myself shrinking from how much louder that will make me. I have a Yamaha 12 string, and I put a bit of time in on it every few days, but again, it’s so darn loud.
This may be an extension of my natural inclination to keep a lower profile than dust on a tabletop. I am the opposite of a performer; I practice and play in a small bubble of my own making, one that pops at pointed outside attention. If someone is listening and watching, everything I can do on and with a guitar flies out of my head like pigeons flushed from a belfry by a tolling bell; all that remains is birdshit and shed feathers. My hands turn into blocks of wood. I play self-consciously, and badly.
I’m on the board of a nearby library. We host a monthly open mike night, the spotlight on Bluegrass, Country, Gospel, and to plaster over the cracks, Folk. Attempts to recruit me to join in are made periodically, and they fail. I plead stage fright and not knowing the repertoire. I probably have the chops to follow along, I might even be able to play harmony an octave higher—if I hid behind another player with my back toward the audience. Whilst self-medicated to a point just shy of being comatose. But there is one other impediment. I’m not much of a fan of Bluegrass, the majority of Country leaves me cold, and as a lifelong atheist, Gospel has never been on my hit parade. Folk is nice, but not much played at these events.
Other than the above, what have I learned in these five years? Here are a few takeaways, in no particular order.
It is possible to retrieve what seems lost. I went without playing for close to 35 years, and in that span forgot most of what I’d learned the first time around. It was—and is—not easy to reconstruct this skill set, but with time stolen from the rest of your life, the determination of an ant trying to carry away a whole bagel, and patience of the owner/trainer of a garden slug circus, it can be done.
A sort of low-level insanity helps. When I picked up the guitar again I half-expected to fart around with it a couple weeks and then put it aside again. But once I had my instrument restrung and playable I spent time every night playing and practicing. In these five years I have missed putting in at minimum half an hour of nightly guitar time exactly once: the night last year I came uncomfortably close to croaking from a severe and unexpected allergic reaction; it was only the next morning that I figured out that the shrimp (or, more likely, the sulfites used to keep the shells from browning) were why I couldn’t breathe. Or play. The insanity is manic commitment.
Rethinking base assumptions can be helpful, even necessary. I’m coming up on the two-year anniversary of breaking down and going to town, explaining to Dr. Guitar the problems I was having playing—hand cramps, the need to capo up to make it easier to play more than a few minutes at a time, and asking if maybe he had a guitar that was easier to play. When I left the store I had with me the guitar I have played every night (except Anaphylactic Shock Night) since. It made a world of difference; my playing improved immediately, practice was less of an exercise of masochism. That tale is told here.
It helps to understand what you want or expect to get in reward. You go out fishing, you hope to catch fish. You go hunting with Dick Cheney, you hope you won’t get shot in the face. I’ve never wanted to be in the spotlight, never wanted applause and underwear thrown on the stage. One thing I dimly remembered from the first time around, and wanted to reclaim: submerging myself in a deep pool of music of my own making. Stumbling on a new—new to me, anyway—melodic bit, following it, finding out where it can go, and surfacing minutes later, perhaps back where I started, maybe far away in some new place, pausing and smiling as I treaded water before the next dive.
Be aware that if you pick up that instrument from your past—or your old paintbrushes, unfinished novel or play—and it clicks, some part of your life will be taken over by it. That time for playing (or painting or writing or juggling or what have you) will become a sort of big rock plunked in the middle of your life. You will have to flow everything else around it, and there will be turbulence. Time you might have spent on something else will become earmarked for it. You may find it harder to go out to dinner, out to the neighborhood tavern. Time for binge-watching some recorded or streaming show, or watching movies, or playing video games may start dribbling or swirling away. Playing becomes a stronger compulsion, one that must be obeyed.
One key to keeping going is having realistic expectations. I spend a certain amount of time every night aggravated, even pissed off, because my hands are incapable of delivering what I demand of them. It’s frustrating trying to claw your way past your limitations. Sometimes brutal repetition will get me there. Sometimes I have to finally admit that my hands are just too damn stiff and slow. You can’t let what you can’t do stop you, you have let what you can do keep you going.
Five years in I think the keeping at it is worthwhile.