Before I had trouble finding the right button on a website, I had trouble finding the right chord. This was better trouble. A guitar has never once asked me to verify my email address before letting me try again.
The system is simple. You put your fingers somewhere. You hit the strings. The instrument offers its opinion. If the result sounds like a folding chair falling down a staircase, you move your fingers. Eventually something musical happens, and you feel you have discovered your purpose on earth. Then you try changing chords, and your purpose on earth falls down the staircase with the chair.
The eighties left their mark on me, mostly in the left hand. Certain guitar parts of that era required stretches suggesting the composer had an extra joint, or a very understanding chiropractor. One finger had business across town. Another was supposed to stay home. My thumb supervised under protest. The record always sounded relaxed, which struck me as unnecessarily smug.
But practice did something. The hands learned. Notes connected. What had sounded impossible began to sound familiar, then easy, then like something I had always known, which is how pride sneaks in the side door. There is enormous satisfaction in hearing music come out of an object you were recently holding like a confused plumber.
Alone, I could stop whenever I pleased. Everyone waited, by which I mean nobody, while I investigated a matter of international importance near the seventh fret. Then I joined bands, and the arrangement got complicated. Other people showed up carrying instruments and expectations. They were not especially interested in my investigation. Some of them had investigations of their own.
Over the years there were bands with names like Zeus Browne, Exodus, and Another Roadside Attraction. If you have heard of them, thank you. If you have not, you are in the majority, and the majority is very comfortable there. We played anywhere that had electricity and a door. Several places had only one of those.
Here is the central truth of band life. Everybody can be talented, sincere, and well rehearsed, and together you can still sound like five different songs meeting unexpectedly in a parking lot. Nobody is wrong. Everybody is loud. The drummer believes he is the band. The singer knows he is the band. The bass player is quietly correct about everything and nobody asks him.
The solution, it turns out, is listening. Hear the drums. Hear the bass. Leave room for the voice. Notice when somebody else already has the part you were about to add. This is hard for a guitarist. We tend to believe another guitar part would improve most situations, including situations already suffering from several guitar parts. I have improved many songs nearly to death this way.
Sometimes the right part is small. Hold the chord. Let another instrument move. Wait. There are no trading cards for tasteful restraint, no poster on a teenager’s wall that says He Played Less. The song appreciates it anyway. I wish I had applied this lesson to conversations, arguments, and most of my forties.
And there were moments when it worked. When everybody listened closely enough that we stopped being five people and became one sound. Nobody disappeared. Everybody stayed themselves. But together we made something none of us could make alone. If you have felt that, you know. If you have not, I hope you do someday, whether in a band, a choir, a kitchen, or a church. It is about as close to heaven as I have gotten while standing on a sticky floor.
In 1994 I made an album, with recording sessions in Decatur and some gifted people helping out. I will keep most of their names private, but their work mattered, and their patience with me mattered more. Any recording studio is a small country with its own laws, and the main law is that the tape is always running when you make your worst face.
A recording preserves something peculiar. The younger man keeps playing exactly the way he did that day, forever. Meanwhile the older man listening has developed responsibilities, reading glasses, and a more complicated relationship with stairs. I want to lean toward the speaker and offer advice. Listen longer. Take better care. Stop assuming there will always be another afternoon. Unfortunately, recordings do not accept messages from the future. The older fellow has to take his own advice, which is the least appealing kind.
I have learned not to let nostalgia run the mixing board. It turns down the inconvenient frequencies until everything sounds warm and everyone behaved beautifully. We did not all behave beautifully. I was frequently the one turned up too loud. Still, the music is allowed to be good. A happy memory does not need to apologize for surviving a complicated life.
A song can reach people before their defenses show up. They hear an opening, remember something, lean closer. For a few minutes, nobody has to announce which side they are on. I like that arrangement. My opinions can wait. They have never had any trouble finding another opportunity.
Musicians also learn about rests. A rest is written right into the music. You count through it. Something is still happening while you are quiet. I have spent much of my life treating silence as an emergency requiring my immediate contribution. Learning to leave space would have improved my playing. It would have improved several relationships even more.
These days I have the equipment for a home studio. I have discussed recording again enthusiastically, repeatedly, and with considerable vision. Not one cable has connected itself. I can picture the finished room, the music, the audience, the possibilities. Then reality asks me to clear off a table. My fresh start arrived without the orchestra I expected. Probably for the best. I lack space for a bassoon.
So I am starting smaller. Connect one thing. Test it. Put it where I can find it again. A microphone stand does not need to carry my whole artistic destiny. It would prefer to hold a microphone. I can respect that.
There is still experience in these hands, and affection for the music, and curiosity, which has survived some fairly rough weather. I have lived more now. Some of it hurt. Some of it gave me something worth saying. The Psalms talk about a new song. I like knowing there can still be something new to make, even after the old arrangements stop fitting. The next song can carry both.
“And he hath put a new song in my mouth, even praise unto our God: many shall see it, and fear, and shall trust in the LORD.”
Psalm 40:3 (KJV)
— JC
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