Can You Be Too Old To Learn How To Ski? Well, actually, yeah, probably, now that I think of it.

Joanne Shaw Taylor--"Who Do You Want Me To Be?" (mp3)



The following is adapted from some comments on life-long learning that I made to the student body this morning:



There was a time when I thought I was destined to be the next Jimi Hendrix. I was about to get a guitar, I was left-handed, I had cool hair, and, well, look at me, I rocked. And I could hum “The Star Spangled Banner.”



In 1975, for my 18th birthday, my parents bought me a guitar. It was a Yamaha FG-160, a very pedestrian guitar for the day. The guitar cost something around $120. They didn't want to spend too much on a starter guitar; they didn't know if I'd stick with it.



When I went into the guitar store, I expected to get a left-handed guitar, me being left-handed like Jimi Hendrix. "Oh, no," she said to my mother. "We don't carry those." And then she looked at me. "You're going to learn to play it the right way."



And so it began. I never became the next Jimi Hendrix. I also learned pretty quickly that I wasn't ever going to be a shredder or a precision player of notes. But I learned to fingerpick. Some. And I learned to flatpick. Some. And I learned how to strum the guitar and keep pretty good time while I was doing it. And while I couldn't really emulate Eric Clapton as a lead guitarist, I could pretty much keep up with Neil Young.



Let me back up: in 1975, at the age of 18, my parents bought me a guitar. At an age close to the age of the oldest of you in this room, I embarked upon the journey of learning to play an instrument. I don’t count the organ lessons my parents made me take when I was eight years old from a woman who smelled like Play-Doh. Even back then, in 1975, when ROCK was king, when it ruled the FM airwaves, if you started playing guitar at the age of 18, you got the societal message that you were already too old to learn the instrument. Put it in a different perspective, one that Mr. K------ will understand. In May of 1975, I was 18 and about to learn to pluck the melody of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” In May of 1975, Bruce Springsteen was about 26, only 8 years older than me, and was about to release Born To Run. I had some serious catching up to do.



Two days ago, I had a student in my office who is 16 or 17, who has already decided that he can't do art. He has artistic ideas, but he imagines others with artistic skill carrying those ideas out. Art is not his thing. He is wrong, unless he wants to be. If you know that I'm 54 years old now and you do the math, you realize that I have been playing the guitar off and on for the past 36 years. What if I had spent those years learning to paint?



There isn't some amazing update to my story. It’s pretty mundane, really. At the start of college, I practiced in the stairwells of the dorms, hoping to meet girls interested in a sensitive, guitar-playing guy. It might have helped if I could play an entire song. Sophomore year, I tried to write songs with my next door neighbor the wrestler. And, after four years of college with time to practice, I got decent. In graduate school, I played in talent shows and learned how to do multi-track recording. As a young teacher, I was a founding member of the now-defunct Faculty Jams, I was part of the band for the Student Hunger Strikes, I played the Octoberfest down on the field where the sports is now, I played all of the early Jamnesties. Then, in the late 80's, I played in a Grateful Dead cover band up at Sewanee, a fine institution, I highly recommend it, with a former student. We played Shenanigans and the Student Union. I fell into the role of lead guitarist and was kind of okay at it.



I continue to play. As recently as last Spring, I played as part of the band at "Dylan Night" at Mr. K-------'s house. We had such a good time that we plan to have Neil Young Night, Springsteen Night, British Invasion Night, and who knows what else. Making music is simply fun, is simply one of the most primal human activities.



Along the way, I have owned a dulcimer until it broke, a lap steel until I gave it away, a purple '72 Strat until it seemed like a student's older brother would get more use out of it, a ukelele when I went to teach in Korea a few summers ago. One stringed instrument makes you comfortable with another. The logic of the strings makes sense on other instruments. You never know where it might lead. And, so, in short, that one birthday when I was 18 was the beginning of a major theme in my life ever since.



I hope you realize, though, that much as I love music, this isn’t about music. It doesn't have to be music, although one of the lessons I learned when I was in Korea was that a culture that steers every one of its children toward playing a musical instrument is, frankly, in some ways more cultured. But it doesn't have to be music. It could be golf or tennis, it could be pottery or poetry, it could be sports medicine or counseling or a desire to go to Divinity school.



You all face a very interesting challenge. There are so many places at a school like this that want all of your energy for immediate challenges, leadership needs, and current teams--things that this school needs you to do, things that I need you to do. But at the same time, you owe it to yourself to work on lifelong habits--in health, in reading, in community service and other developing passions. How do you prepare for both the now and the future?



There is no easy answer, but there are some simple realities. If you put just 30 minutes a day into guitar practice, by the time you reached my age, you would have put 6,570 hours into practicing the guitar. While I realize that only puts you a third of the way on the path to becoming a Malcolm Gladwell Outliers 20,000 Hours Stud, I also know that once you got into it, you wouldn’t practice only 30 minute a day. You’d start jamming, you’d play in a band, you’d perform, you’d work on a song or some scales or an idea or the recording of a track, sometimes for hours, maybe even days, at a time.



The other reality is that when you start something new, you aren’t very good at it. It may be some time before you are able to or are asked to do something very significant with it. But the time matters, the practice matters, the focus matters.



Playing guitar for a guy like me is not a vocation; it is an alternative lifestyle, a parallel universe. There is my life with wife and family, there is my school life, and there is my life with guitar, with music, with CDs, with learning and playing and writing and singing songs. Sometimes these lives intersect, and that is good. But sometimes they don’t, and when they don’t, then I realize that I have enough years in with the guitar that it deserves some of my attention.



None of you sitting in the pews in this room know, really know, which of your myriad experiences here at school will stick, will take you in a different direction for the rest of your lives. I don’t either. But I promise you that something will. I’ve known students for whom one book, one team, one club, one person, one course, one casual experience with a CD that they heard in someone else’s dorm room or in someone else’s car changed everything that followed. I’ve known students who turned a stint on the school paper into a career in journalism. I’ve even known a student who saw the movie Top Gun and immediately quit college and joined the Navy to go to flight school.



But we simply cannot know what experiences here will affect you the most. What we do know is that something will. These are impressionable, formative years for you, when your minds are still forming, when you are still trying out ideas, and so, we are obligated to present you with a mix of what you can accomplish now and what you might not even wake up to for another 10 or 20 years and say, Oh, I think I’d be interested in doing that once again. I urge you, please, to look for the balance between what you are good at now and what will take some time to develop.



So consider the piano or the 9 iron or the culinary club kitchen or the kayak or the story for the Argonaut or the tutoring of children or the open 9th grade spots on Student Council or a camera or the Senior Chapel Talk or the spot on the Student Vestry. What might they lead to?



Or even the guitar. Who knows? Maybe you’ll be the next Jimi Hendrix. I’ve left that door open for you.

Fingerpickin' Good

Sean Siegfried--"Sam's Brewery" (mp3)
Sean Siegfried--"Passionate Rag" (mp3)


You will think this is about playing guitar, but it's really more about listening to music. If there was mandatory training for guitarists, especially for those who expected to be in situations where they must accompany themselves with no one else to help, then fingerpicking should be at the top of that skill list.

Strumming, unless there is something unique about it, is boring. Oh, the singer can get away with it for a song or two. If he or she has interesting chord changes, like Joni Mitchell, or a dramatic, percussive attack, like the Edge or Billy Bragg, then strumming can be pretty interesting to listen to. But song after song after song that is simply strummed, regardless of how interesting the melodies might be, creates a flat, redundant presence. If you're listening to it, or at least if I am, you can't help but wonder, 'Couldn't you spend a little more time learning how to play the guitar?' or 'Don't some songs benefit from the different kinds of rhythms you can get by picking individual notes or pairs?' The answer to both questions should be yes.

And that's where fingerpicking comes in. While there are all kinds of patterns to fingerpicking, the basic technique involves alternating bass and treble strings. Put simply, it makes the guitar sound more like a piano.

The first song I learned to fingerpick was Paul Simon's "The Boxer." It's a fairly basic version of what I've just described, with a few little tricks like descending bass runs and some strumming on the chorus for sheer volume, but when I got it down, I knew that I had made a big leap in my guitar-playing abilities. Suddenly, any song that I had been strumming I could alter dramatically by putting it to (even a basic) fingerpicked pattern instead. From there,

But this isn't about me so much as it's about fingerpicking, the beauty of it, the joys of hearing it. As I've mentioned before on these pages, I first got a taste of it in the 1970's. The "gateway drug" of fingerpicked guitar for me was Jorma Kaukonen's Quah, a collection of stunning acoustic songs that built on his study of the Reverend Gary Davis and other solo blues players. From there, the journey went sideways, backwards, and forwards all at once--Leo Kottke back to John Fahey and over to Peter Lang, instructional stuff from Stephan Grossman, a splash of Leon Redbone, a journey out to the West Coast and Bob Hadley, a guy who I think was a street musician. How he got recorded and how I got his records, I don't really remember. Eventually, I travelled all the way over to Windham Hill, that record label with George Winston and all of that kind of light, airy, a little out there jazzy stuff. The guitar players were particularly ethereal and probably somewhat to blame for the "New Age" stuff that followed.

Fingerpicking itself, though, is guitar for guitar's sake. Somewhere along the way, the singing either became secondary or dropped out all together, and I realized that I was seeking out songs just to hear the picking. Largely, though, fingerpicking has either fallen more to the side, has been pushed to the fringe, is an esoteric pursuit. Too bad. There are so many life situations where there is no better soundtrack that a fingerstyle guitar piece.

The journey does continue. A few years ago, I came across The Art Of Fingerstyle Guitar, a collection of pieces by different performers, mostly British, I think. It may be that I play this CD more than any one that I own. It is a Sunday morning CD, a working-casually-in-the-office CD, a conversation with friends CD (where they get to talk, and I get to listen...to the CD!).

And, finally, a month or so ago, we received through our BOTG mailbox, an offering from a British guy named Sean Siegfried. They have their own brand of fingerpickers over there--Bert Jansch (a major Neil Young influence), Dave Evans, and others. When I played Mr. Siegfried's stuff, I was pleasantly shocked to discover that, among the glut of somewhere-between-almost-and-not-quite-there musical submissions we receive, here was an accomplished musician whose playing skills seemed to exceed his years and whose songs drew from an old, deep river. I exchanged a few emails with him, and I was so uplifted to discover that fingerpicking is alive and well and in good hands. Literally.

Sean Siegfried's EP is available at his website here.

My First Guitar, Pt. 2

Grateful Dead--"Dark Hollow (live)" (mp3)

I have often been intrigued by how people's musical behaviors mutate as they age. Some abandon the rock that they listened to when they were young in favor of something that is safer and more sanitary, like country. Some move with a greater awareness of musical sophistication toward jazz or even classical. Or they do so with pretension.

Some never were rock 'n rollers, they were pop music listeners, so they continue to listen to whatever is the popular music of the day. Most alarming to me, some people simply stop listening to music, or only have it as something playing quietly in the background, as if the entire concept of music was a childish fancy that serves no adult purpose other than window dressing.

Me, I'm pretty much the way I've always been, and then some. I listen to what I did when I was sixteen; I listen to some of what sixteen-year-olds are listening to now, and quite a bit of what came in between.

I attribute that to playing the guitar. When you play, you don't abandon what you once did. You add to it. If you are a casual player like I am, you rarely pick up the guitar with the intention of playing a particular song. Instead, you just kind of start noodling around and see where it takes you, based on the chord you start or where your fingers settle on the frets.

So, you might end up playing "Willin'" or "Dark Hollow," songs you've been playing since college, or you might find yourself trying to figure out "Hey, Yeah" because you've been listening to Outkast in the car with your daughter. You might play the "Mexican Hat Dance," because three year olds at your house like to dance to it. You might get a music book that pushes you in a new or more complicated direction.

I've never really moved on; I've tried to take it all with me. If my sense of music was a house, I would be one of those hoarders who had been holding onto everything. You never really know what you might find among the dusty albums, the rows of CDs, and now the wealth of songs carelessly and haphazardly stored on an external hard drive. Or in my head.

Or, believe it or not, in my guitar. I think there is nothing surprising about the idea that Neil Young has Hank Williams' guitar and that the guitar has its own history and ghosts and that, when composing, certain kinds of songs will come out of it, but others will only develop on a different guitar. I have no doubt that even my own Yamaha guitar carries its years well, knows where it's been and what's been played on it.

I can tell you that, at least, it's been coast-to-coast twice, has been as far south as Florida, as far north as New Hampshire and Washington.

In case you can't tell, my first guitar is my current guitar and probably my last guitar.

And here's the funny thing: now, my cheap starter guitar is a "vintage"guitar, by virtue of its 35 (and counting) years, by virtue of it surviving all of those years, despite the knocks, scrapes, and scratches, intact. I've seen other 1975 Yamaha FG-160's listed on the Internet for upwards of $560. I've seen its now-mellow tone compared to a Martin in its depth and complexity. It is, for those who realized that a new guitar with no miles on it is inferior, desirable.

Yes, music remains extremely important to me, and the key to that is knowing that I can create, at least in some superficial fashion, much of that music on my first guitar.

My First Guitar, Pt. 1

Tony Rice--"Me and My Guitar" (mp3)

My first guitar was a Yahama FG-160. It was not an expensive guitar; I received it for my 18th birthday, but not on my birthday. I had to go to the store to pick it out. My mother went with me. Neither of us knew much of anything about guitars, but we entered the store with the specs of a guitar that a friend of mine said would be a good starter guitar. And that was the FG-160. It cost, I think, $126.

I thought I would get a left-handed guitar, me being left-handed. But the woman behind the counter said, "Oh, no, you're going to learn to play the guitar the right way."

And that was that. Who was I to argue? I like to suggest that that is the reason why I am not Jimi Hendrix. Well, one of the reasons, anyway.

To want to learn to play guitar at age 18 requires a somewhat unusual mindset. At least, for me it did. I think most of us have the idea that even by age 18, if you want to start something that is brand new, it is almost already too late. And I was coming to it with almost no background. And I was coming to it inspired by my friends who played, but with the realization that they had already been playing for many years and that I would remain hopelessly behind.

No one in my family had a single musical bone in them. We had a Wurlitzer organ for many years growing up, and we were forced to take lessons for one or two of those years, but the combination of an old woman teacher who smelled like Lestoil and my parents' desire to try to get us to play for company, especially to fill the awkward silences in the dining room when both sets of grandparents were visiting effectively killed my career as an organist. Oh yeah, and the songs I was taught to play, songs that were at least obscure to me so that I never had any idea what they were supposed to sound like.

So you would think that it was rock and roll that made me want to learn to play the guitar. After all, I had an impressive record collection, a pretty good stereo, and a basement that other family members rarely entered and all the time in the world to play records and listen to FM radio. I went to dozens of concerts. But it wasn't. It was bluegrass. It was fingerpicking.

I had a friend named Bob who had gotten fairly proficient at both of those styles. In this, as in all things, he was an expert salesman, or, perhaps better put, he had a gift for making what he did and what he had seem magical and very desirable. This was never more true (and never more safe) than where the guitar was concerned. After his lessons, he would show me the songs that he had learned, the songs that he was working on.

By that time, his parents had bought him a Martin, and he took meticulous care of it. But when he would take it out and play "The Boy Kissed The Girl (While Playing The Guitar" or "Billy In The Lowground," favorites of fingerpicking and flatpicking, respectively, I thought I had never heard anything more beautiful. The fingerpicking was syncopated, the flatpicking nailed down the chord changes like a machine gun.

Bob then became my teacher, the only guitar teacher I ever had. He taught me strings, chords, and keys, tablature and note-for-note transcription. He offered me light versions of the things that he was learning. Some of the earliest songs I mastered included Neil Young's "The Needle and the Damage Done" and the aforementioned "Billy In The Lowground."

When you are 18 and learning your first chords and first songs, when you get a little taste of how chords fit together to make songs work, there is a simultaneous awakening: you suddenly understand what once seemed to be a mystery, but at the same time, you become aware of the difference between what you can do and what players who really know what they are doing can do. It is both illuminating and awe-inspiring.

This Gun's For Hire

Joe Walsh--"Life of Illusion" (mp3)
Nils Lofgren--"Keith Don't Go (live) (mp3)
Joe Walsh--"Rivers (Of The Hidden Funk) (mp3)

The concept of the hired gun, as old as the mercenary, the ronin, the gunfighter who wanders into town and is convinced to join in the cause on one side or the other, does not work for me where rock and roll is concerned.

By all means, pursue a side project, start a new band with old friends, do session work, unplug, add new musicians, whatever it is that keeps you fresh and growing. But do not, I repeat, do not give up what you're doing to become a hired gun for an established band. Not if you're good.

I understand that bands change their outlook, want to beef up their sound. Crosby, Stills and Nash want to electrify, so they add Neil. But Neil didn't have to change--he walked in with his scattershot electric and his own songs, becoming the fourth songwriter in a band with three songwriters. When Ronnie Wood replaced Mick Taylor in the Stones, it wasn't like he was giving up a thriving solo career or that the Faces weren't played out.

But what about guys with careers and identities? No way. Two cases in point: Joe Walsh and Nils Lofgren.

Joe Walsh, one of the "lovable" loonies of rock and roll, had an established career when he joined the Eagles for their later years. (Note to readers: I hate the Eagles!) Years as a leader of the James Gang, then a solo artist with a number of successful albums and hit songs. Though he may have, after "Rocky Mountain Way," used the talk box a time or two too many, his sound was distinguished in other ways, especially that thin, nasal, idiosyncratic voice and that melodic slide guitar.

Walsh, at his best, is a terrific songwriter. Is he a philospher? No. A great lyricist? Not really. But he can turn a cliche on its head, mix a metaphor with the best, and I mean in the best way, and he has a wicked sense of humor. "You lost your color/ when you painted the town," he says on "Second Hand Store." And the man has created some of the most memorable licks and riffs in rock. How'd you like to have "Funk 49," Walk Away," "Turn To Stone," "Rocky Mountain Way," "Meadows," "Life's Been Good" on your resume? You're never going to go, 'That's Joe Walsh?' He's more predictable than that, as comfortable as a bowl of macaroni and cheese.

Walsh also has a vision, a vision that isn't realized by including one of his songs on a group album. "In The City" was perfect over the closing credits of the movie The Warriors; on The Long Run, it seems out of place; it's too romantic for the jaded California aesthetic of Henley and Frey. Walsh's songs have a kind of innocence to them, a sense of justice for the average person, a hopefulness towards romance even when singing about failed love, and never anything but self-deprecation towards his own fame and fortune.

Since joining the Eagles, both his output and the quality of his output has diminished.

Nils Lofgren's story is not that different. Excellent early band called Grin that never really got much notice, but played tight, guitar-driven rock: "Like Rain," "White Lies," and "Moon Tears" all stand among my very favorite rock songs. Being asked to play on Neil Young's After The Goldrush (on piano) got him noticed a little more. He's also in Young's Tonight's The Night band, adding sizzling leads to several tracks. His guest solo on Young's "Like An Inca," off of Trans, transcends space and time.

After Grin, Lofgren, too, pursues a solo career, though, unlike Walsh, he doesn't ever have the hits. However, songs like "Back It Up," "Keith Don't Go," "Cry Tough," and "Mud In Your Eye" are all evidence of strong songwriting skills. His live act, bolstered by updated versions of classic Grin songs, is about as solid a rock set as you'll ever hear, and he has to be making some money, because he puts out a lot of albums, many of them with major backing talent

Like Walsh, Nils Lofgren also has a romantic vision, a world where Keith Richards is the inspiration for what he does, where friends and brothers stick together, where women may do you wrong, but that doesn't mean that you quit trying. He also has a distinctive high voice and a fluid playing style that, if you know it and you hear it, you go, "Oh, that's got to be Nils."

Then Miami Steve van Zandt leaves the E Street and Nils takes his place, right after Born In The USA and twenty-five years go by. At least, Lofgren has continued to have a fairly-prolific output. Most recently, he released a CD of Neil Young covers.

You know, all I will say is this: there are Lancelots out there who are too talented to remain in the service of the king(s). There are players who have more to offer than just stepping out for a few solos in somebody else's band. Walsh should have quit the Eagles when they fired his buddy, Don Felder. Lofgren should have ended his stint on E Street when van Zandt returned. I know you've got to feed the kids, I know there is money to be made, but if you've got your own vision, as these men do, then let someone else play the guitar from "Hotel California" note for note for the umpteenth time, let someone else play the simplistic slide guitar on "Lonesome Day." Let them hire somebody. Not you.

These songs are not available at Itunes. Walsh's There Goes The Neighborhood appears to be out of print. Lofgren's Authorized Bootleg never was in print. Both have been converted from vinyl using the Ion TTUSB.