My First Guitar : Tales of True Love and Lost Chords from 70 Legendary Musicians

371 Pages·2012·5.65 MB·English

by  Julia Crowe

MY FIRST GUITAR
TALES OF TRUE LOVE
AND LOST CHORDS
JULIA CROWE
FOREWORD BY
ANDY SUMMERS
ECW Press
To Terrence & Taidgh
with all my love.
Foreword
In the pages of this book you will read the stories of many guitarists who have reached the world with
their guitars — those who have affected us, changed us and stirred our emotions with their passion for
this most wonderful of instruments.
The character of the guitar is such that it tends to bring about a relationship that is obsessive,
engaging, unrelenting in its pull back toward that magic matrix of frets and strings. Probably, for most
of the players in this book, this is a fact of life. The first guitar is then, by definition, the beginning of a
musical life. It is the primary instrument that ignites the germinal instinct to make music, to pluck a
string. And after all the other guitars that are sought, collected, lusted after, specially built,
exchanged, bought back and cried over, it is the first guitar that has a special place, no matter how
cheap, battered or unplayable it might have been. This first guitar is the herald, the awakener of the
impulse to play and the impulse that will become a life-long rapport.
Just after my thirteenth birthday I was handed a battered old Spanish guitar by an uncle who had
no use for it anymore. When he placed it in my hands I suppose I received the call, because it felt as if
my heart had stopped beating, as if I had pulled Excalibur from the stone. I could not play a note but it
didn’t matter because I was so thrilled to have this object in my life. Aged and beaten as it was, I
absolutely loved it, like a child with a tattered rag doll that is preferred to all the shiny new toys. With
this first guitar my life changed as if, in an instant, an alchemy had taken place. I transformed from a
typical rowdy English schoolboy who couldn’t be bothered with homework, who was late for school,
who made trouble with a pack of other boys, who sneaked into the pictures without paying — into a
hardcore guitar aficionado.
From here on I became a loner. Just me and the guitar, unless I was sitting and swapping chords
with another aspiring guitarist. And it was on this first guitar, after I had finally got a sixth string for it,
that I learned the rudimentary chords, ran my fingers up to the twelfth fret, twanged the low E string
and finally learned how to tune it to the piano. This was the adventure, this was the thrill and the
knowledge that had to be constantly sought after no matter how hard the battle. Later I moved to
other guitars that were sleeker, faster, smoother in their response. But my first guitar, with its already
lived life of a thousand songs, changes of strings and strummed chords, will always remain in my
memory as the signifier, the flame that began the rest of my life.
— Andy Summers,
solo artist and guitarist for The Police,
author of One Train Later
Prologue
My idea for writing this book came about in late autumn 2003, when the
classical guitar duo Michael Newman and Laura Oltman had invited me to
attend a house concert CD release party for a save-music-in-schools compilation
of guitarists. The party was hosted in a Central Park West apartment with sky-
high panoramic views overlooking the park. The place conveyed the fabulous
kind of ease and generous space that one only sees in movies or else real estate
ads printed in the back of the New York Times magazine.
The head of Tower Records’ classical music department muttered that the
bathroom alone was bigger than his entire apartment. I darted between white-
jacketed waiters bearing silver platters of hors d’oeuvres to search for Michael
and Laura, and burst into a little girl’s frilly fantasy of a bedroom. There sat
Gary Lucas of Captain Beefheart — and songwriting collaborator of Jeff
Buckley — perched on the edge of a floral-patterned bed, dressed head-to-toe in
badass black as he tuned his 1930s vintage nickel steel Dobro.
He peered at me from beneath the brim of his hat and grimaced. Then he
decided to get up off this bed, with its heap of ruffle-edged pillows, and
extended his hand for a proper introduction. I noticed that he left behind a
staggering menagerie of mashed and flattened soft animals. A small pink giraffe
teetered and tumbled over the edge of the bed and bounced against the floor.
This is the image that conceived this book. I knew that, in a few years, the
toys would more than likely lose favor to newer infatuations, stuffed animals
exchanged for musical heroes peering down from an array of posters taped up on
the walls. Odds were, in a few years, a guitar would sit tucked in the corner.
Just how does anyone become so passionate about the guitar that they
cannot imagine a life without it? Where does it all begin? I wanted to know how
guitarists came into owning their first guitar and what made them realize they
had found their life’s work.
I started aggressively pursuing whatever interviews I could with anyone who
was willing. I chased down the not willing. I used my best facsimile of charm
and wit. I stuck my foot into countless doors. I attended guitar festivals and, if no
one assisted, I found my way through backstage labyrinths to corner rock
legends, backing them up against the wall and cajoling them into telling me their
stories. Sometimes, the story was tough to tell — I could personally identify
with the emotional catch in Joey Santiago’s voice when he recalled what his
father did to his guitar out of misguided parental concern. There had been
entirely unexpected connections between some of the guitarists, such as Daron
Malakian’s account of purchasing a guitar from his idol Tracii Guns when he
was 17, long before Malakian became a rock star himself. Collecting these tales
has been admittedly addictive because each story is as unique, compelling and
illuminating as the performer.
The tales that emerged surprised even those in the guitarists’ inner circles,
who had never heard some of these details before. Artists, especially rock stars,
tend to be an over-interviewed lot. In fact, a few of my guitar-obsessed friends
doubted some of my unearthed details simply because they had not read them
before elsewhere.
My intent was simple — to ask the artists to speak for themselves. There is
beauty and music in one’s own way of telling a story that is just as distinctive
and unique as the tonal quality and instantly recognizable sound these artists are
renowned for coaxing from the guitar.
It has been a privilege, a joy and an unforgettable experience for me to
participate in such personal conversations with music legends. It is my hope that
readers can see themselves within these stories and come to discover, or even
rediscover, their own love for the guitar. And it is also my fervent hope that the
passion in these fascinating stories encourages readers to expand their musical
interests to genres that they might have not yet explored or considered.
Traveling Seven Hours for a Cup of Coffee
Many years ago, during a hiatus from college, I arrived at London’s Heathrow Airport wearing my
sincerity and best dress with the misguided notion that I would be taken seriously for at least not
looking like a grungy backpacker. I approached the stone-faced customs officer to explain the reason
for my visit: I was a writer working on my first book. I planned to visit London for three days and spend
the rest of my time hanging out with sheep in Ireland. The officer scrutinized the glaringly empty
contents of my brand new passport, as blank as my unwritten book. She then sized up my youth and
asked the fatal question: “What’s the book about?” Jet lag is its own truth serum. I told her I had no
idea because I had only started writing it. Anything could happen, just like life itself. How can you
accurately plot what may happen before you arrive?
I was having a brand new panic attack now, reliving this episode now that I was going to be
traveling again to London. Jimmy Page had invited me to meet him for coffee. This time, I told the
customs officer that I was on holiday. It wasn’t a complete lie. According to my friends, I was on
holiday from all common sense to be traveling eight-plus hours from New York via Charlotte, North
Carolina, to London to meet a rock star with a lurid reputation, who may or may not show, all for a
dubious cup of coffee.
Two months earlier, I’d received an email from a lady, stating that Mr. Page would like to meet
me over said cup of coffee to discuss a new book I was writing. He was keenly interested in being part
of it. I had assumed this was a prank because a few friends knew I was compiling interviews with
famous guitarists for a book proposal. I refused to bite. I mean, what self-respecting Englishman
drinks coffee? Weeks later, a second email arrived from the same address. It was not a joke.
When the postal clerk at Church Street Station asked my reason for a passport renewal, I
hesitated then told her the truth, thinking this might possibly seem a little more real if I confessed it
to a complete stranger. I was excited but uncertain about what I was getting into with all this.
“No shit! Jimmy Page” was the clerk’s response. “My brother made me listen to all those Led
Zeppelin albums when they first came out. Drove me crazy, always saying, ‘You’ve got to hear this.’”
She waved my passport form up into the air, turned her head and bellowed to the rest of her
coworkers, “Yo! We gotta process this on the double because this lady here is gonna be meeting
Mistah Jimmy Page in London, ENGLAND!” I slinked away, aware of heads straining curiously from
postal booths. I could hear some joker from the back singing the guitar lick from “Kashmir” so loudly
it echoed off the stately marble walls: “DUN-na-nunt. NUNNA-nunt. DUH-na-nunt Nunna-nunt.
NUNNA-nunt!”
Next, I visited the local bookstore to buy Led Zeppelin CDs. Sure I’d heard their music before but,
as a classical musician, I knew it best in an indirect sense. For example, I knew that Matt Haimovitz
plays his own cool rendition of “Kashmir” on cello. I wanted to absorb the original albums in their
proper sequential order. I listened to them on a portable CD player stuffed into my coat pocket
because I could not afford an iPod. In fact, I did not even know how I was going to pay for this trip.
Besides writing for peanuts for guitar magazines, I teach guitar and spend my days criss-crossing
Manhattan on foot like a doctor making musical house calls to guitar students, realigning their hand
positions upon the fretboard and curing phobias about playing barre chords. I was loping up to Union
Square to one of these lessons when I realized just how good a guitarist Page truly is. Most guitar
magazines will insist that I spell out the exact diatonic scale, mode and key signature in both notation
and tab with a comprehensive sidebar on gear, but let’s just set all the piranha-jock posturing on the
anatomical and technical details of the music aside for a moment and say my realization had been
simply like that scene from the film Easter Parade, when Fred Astaire suggests to Judy Garland that
she walk ahead of him and prove she has the magical ability to turn men’s heads. Garland pulls this
off by making a cross-eyed, blowfish face. I swung along at a good clip, thoroughly spaced out in my
own mental zone, until it dawned on me that strangers were rubbernecking at me on the sidewalk. I
had not been making any face but I was plugged into the 12-bar blues song “Rock ’n’ Roll,” from Led
Zeppelin IV. Let’s just say that listening to classical guitar by headphones rarely alters one’s gait. Nor
does it cause strangers’ heads to turn when one is walking innocently down the street. After this
musical epiphany, I knew I had to go to London.
Lisa Hoffman, the mother of my guitar student Alex, generously advanced me a couple months’
worth of lesson fees to cover my airfare to London. On her living room wall, Lisa has a gigantic
autographed “Born to Run” poster alongside a framed, coffee table photograph of her younger self
gleefully embracing The Boss himself.
I informed my U.K. magazine publisher, Maurice Summerfield, that I was coming to London and
asked if there might be any concert for me to review while I was there to help defray expenses. “Have
you heard of the expression ‘Carrying coals to Newcastle’?” he asked me. “I have twenty editors in
London, which is why you’re in New York. And Jimmy Page?” A hint of disdain inflected his voice. “Why
not Brian May? Brian May performed for the Queen’s Fiftieth Jubilee, you know.”
I discovered that when it comes to Jimmy Page everyone has an opinion. Or a request.
“Didn’t Page chew the head off a bat?” someone asked. “Or was that Ozzie? He did something,
though. Occult stuff. I think the whole band worshipped the Devil.”