Budding Young Guitar God

Paul burst onto the scene in seventh grade, taking the stage during a school talent show and plugging his new white Strat into a Marshall stack and blowing us away with an over-amped feedback-laden thousand-extra-notes-added version of Jimi Hendrix’s “The Star-Spangled Banner,” his long hair whipped around his head as his waist gyrated slower then faster as his fingers raced up and down the neck of his low-slung guitar faster faster faster and then he looked up, face drenched with sweat, complete ecstasy in his eyes, and he hammered home the last few notes, spraying them over the heads of a stunned prepubescent audience as he fell back, utterly spent.

And thus was born another budding young guitar god. Is it any wonder that from then on Paul got all the girls?

I too wanted the girls. I too wanted the ecstasy. I too wanted the music. I begged him to show me how. He fingered the opening notes to Led Zeppelin’s “Heartbreaker” and then handed me his white Stratocaster and let me try. I carefully fingered the notes a few times, concluded I too could be a budding young guitar god, and went home and told my parents I wanted an electric guitar for my thirteenth birthday.

To save money, and decibels, they bought me an acoustic guitar.

A Yamaha steel string, dreadnought design, it wasn’t much to look at. A big dent in its bottom had relegated it to the clearance section at the music store where it waited to be rescued by my thrifty parents. The guitar had horrible action, not that I knew what was back then. I just knew that the strings were really high and hard to hold down and sometimes buzzed even when I managed to hold them down just right. Meanwhile, the heavy-gauge steel strings dug deep grooves into my finger tips. They throbbed for months until my calluses grew in.

The guitar wouldn’t stay in tune. I had no sense of pitch, and I didn’t own a tuner, so I could only wonder why “Heartbreaker” sounded so different on my guitar. Not that I was playing much “Heartbreaker,” a song that turned out to be difficult for a tone deaf beginner with throbbing finger tips to play on an out-of-tune steel-string acoustic with horrible action. Instead I was strumming songs like “She’ll Be Comin’ ‘Round the Mountain” and other three chord ditties culled from Favorite Folk Songs, a perpetually-renewed library book with the singular distinction of including EZ chord diagrams over each song.

I’ll say this for the guitar: It was loud. Man, it boomed. Not as loud as Paul’s Strat played through his Marshall amp, of course, but loud enough to drown out the wimpy little nylon-stringed guitars played by the other beginners at the group guitar lessons my parents pushed me into after hearing one too many booming fret-buzzing atonal renditions of “She’ll Be Comin’ ‘Round the Mountain.” Jammed into a little windowless tile-floored room deep in the bowels of the Learning Tree building, my errantly strummed steel-stringed guitar notes atonally reverberating back and forth over the muted strums of the nylon-stringed notes, I can safely state that when I played, every head turned.

Somehow I survived the dirty looks.

Between “She’ll Be Comin’ ‘Round the Mountain” and other Favorite Folk Songs at home, and beginner friendly fare such as “Mary Had a Little Lamb” at the Learning Tree, I wasn’t making much progress towards budding young guitar godness. I needed private lessons, preferably from a long hair dirty jeans roach-clip-on-the-guitar-strap type who’d fill me with the latest licks and riffs and let me jam on his electric guitar and then convince my parents that I really needed a Strat and a Marshall stack to realize my budding young musical potential.

Instead they found Catherine, the daughter of a couple they knew through church. Catherine was a master, or should I say mistress, of the classical guitar, a Ph.D. candidate in music who took it all very seriously. She certainly looked the part: A severe woman of ancient age – at least 22, maybe 23 – dark hair tied back in a tight bun, button-down shirts and long skirts, hose with flat-heels, all prim and proper-like, she sat stiff and straight, her little Spanish guitar propped high on her left thigh, left foot on a stand, left thumb braced behind the fretboard while her right arm rested just over the strings, fingers poised to pick out just the right notes in succession. She never used a pick or played a lick, preferring scales and traditional Spanish classical pieces. She was good, very good, I’m sure, but she was the furthest from a long hair dirty jeans roach-clip-on-the-guitar-strap type I could imagine.

Disappointed, I nevertheless played along, perfectly aware that if I quit, my parents weren’t likely to pay for lessons with anyone else, and that I was incapable of finding (and paying) my own teacher. I’m sure I sported my patented sullen and mutinous glare as I rotely fingered my way through scales, arpeggios, free strokes and rest strokes, minding my p’s and ima’s, all the while sitting straight and stiff, my right hand perpendicular to the strings, my left thumb hidden behind the fretboard, all under Catherine’s watchful eye.

She wasn’t nearly as severe as she looked, filling my morose silences with chatter and a running commentary on our lesson that always highlighted what I did right before mentioning, almost apologetically, all the stuff I’d done wrong. She addressed me as an equal, something that’s hard for a teacher to do, and something no adult had ever done with me before. She somehow managed to make learning the guitar seem like the easiest and the hardest task one could undertake, both reassuring me when I messed up and encouraging me to keep wanting it, and working at it.

This went on for many months, maybe a year, long enough for me to learn to tune my guitar, to run through a bunch of scales without looking and to play some beginner classical pieces with hardly any errant buzzes and awkward pauses. And long enough for me to develop a kinda crush on Catherine, the sort you never admit, especially when you’re a pimply-faced thirteen year old with peach fuzz under your nose and she’s at least ten years older and wearing an engagement ring.

By this point I was well on my way to becoming a Segovia on steel strings, but there was something wrong. Far from being a budding young guitar god, I was now a budding young guitar geek. And only getting geekier. It was time for our come to Jesus moment, a moment that took a few weeks as I tried to screw up sufficient courage to tell her what I really wanted, a moment that came only after she looked at me funny one day and asked what was wrong and I opened my mouth and it all gushed out (all except my crush, of course) and, to my astonishment, instead of recoiling in horror and making the sign of the cross, she nodded her head, asked me to tell her exactly what I wanted to do, I mumbled the words “Led Zeppelin” and the next week I lugged my boombox and a cassette of Led Zeppelin IV into the lesson.

I watched her face intently as we listened to “Stairway to Heaven,” fearing an expression of disgusted disdain with the slop I aspired to play. She did frown, but it was out of concentration, for she stopped the tape at the part where Robert Plant starts with “There’s a lady who’s sure...,” picked up her little classical guitar and played the entire guitar part up to that point. Note perfect. First time she’d heard it.

“This is easy,” she said, starting the tape again, playing along as she heard it. “I like this part, it has a nice lilt,” she said, probably the first and only person to ever use the word “lilt” while describing Led Zeppelin. “But it’s so primitive, you really want to learn this?”

I did. We talked. She taught. And it turns out she wanted something from me, too, so we struck a deal. Each week we’d spend half the lesson on my stuff. I can still see us sitting there, just like it was yesterday, the two of us crunching our acoustic guitars to Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water,” unplugged long before there was an Unplugged.

Now when I used the words “come to Jesus moment” to describe this episode, I meant them both figuratively and literally. Figuratively in the sense that I finally confessed to Catherine my hidden love for primitive no-skill crunching guitar licks, literally in the sense that the next Sunday morning found me fulfilling my part of the deal, standing on the church alter next to Catherine as we energetically strummed the latest Christian folk hymns for hundreds of god-fearing folk gathered for the Young People’s Service. Catherine was only willing to sully my strings with satanic licks if I’d cleanse them strumming Jesus songs. My parents thought it was a great idea.

The Christian folk songs were a lot like the three-chord folk ditties from Favorite Folk Songs, maybe a few more references to Jesus, and after a year of Catherine’s formal training I’d could strum them in my sleep, so my gig as a Christian folk guitarist didn’t do anything to advance my budding young guitar godness. In fact, as a doubting young atheist it didn’t do anything to advance me towards godness. But it did give me and my guitar an audience. A good, appreciative audience. They worshipped our music. Literally.

(You know, sometimes I look back on scenes like this from my life -- this picture in my mind of a pimply-faced scowling atheistic teenager who yearned to be Jimmy Page strumming folk hymns for Christians swaying back and forth, arms open wide to receive the spirit -- and I can only sigh and say what a long strange trip it’s been.)

And thus I spent the next few years learning heavy metal licks on my acoustic guitar on Wednesdays and strumming for the Lord on Sundays, until I hit high school, started hanging out with girls late on Saturday nights, or at least trying to hang out with girls late on Saturday nights, and sleeping later and later the following Sunday until one too many no-shows moved Catherine to terminate my church gig. I’d started skipping lessons too, my interests now ranging far and wide to girls and how to find girls and what the girls were doing and what I might do with the girls. My beat-up Yamaha acoustic guitar gathered dust. My cravings for an electric guitar remained unfulfilled. Along with my budding young guitar god dream.

When I left for college, I left the guitar behind. Too big to lug across the country, I reasoned. And what was I going to do? Play Jesus tunes for my dorm mates, maybe liven things up with acoustic Deep Purple riffs?

My brother sold the guitar without telling me. I didn’t find out until years later. That’s how far I’d drifted from the guitar.

So let’s review: Just as I turn thirteen, hormones beginning to rage, my young body budding its way to maturity with pimples and peach fuzz breaking out everywhere, girls in my mind but, in the flesh, miles away for the foreseeable future, I develop this deep attraction to the guitar and its sensuous feminine curves, an instrument that with just the right touch can produce any sound, from a gentle purr as your left hand fingertips apply a little tremolo massage to the fretboard to a howling wail as your left hand races up and down the smooth stiff neck in perfect time with your rhythmically strumming right hand, all in beautiful harmony. And my infatuation with the guitar continues throughout puberty and into my adolescent years, abating just when I finally find me some girls. And today, when I see footage of a budding young guitar god in the throes of ecstasy, much like Paul, his low-slung guitar protruding straight out of his nether regions as his waist writhes rhythmically in time with his rapid stroking and caressing of the long hard neck, well, we don’t need a psychology degree to understand what’s really going on here, do we?

But, then again, sometimes a guitar is just a guitar.

At least that’s what I told myself last month as I held for the first time in my loving hands my very own electric guitar, a sweet Fender Telecaster, and, looking down to be sure the Gain and Volume dials were turned to “8” (don’t want to be too rash, yet), then looking left to check my power “G” chord, amazed my fingers are still callused after over 25 years, I closed my eyes and paused a second to contemplate the enormity of the moment as another dream is finally fulfilled, then I slashed down hard and blasted the opening notes of “Smoke on the Water” over the hillside and down into the valley below, heralding to all the rebirth of a budding old guitar god.