Learning the guitar

I've been playing the guitar for about twenty five years. I can't really tell you why I learned it. I don't really remember.

I was an organist - not a great one, but I had taught myself out of my mother's organ instructionals. Being a teen-ager, naturally, I wanted to be in a band. So with a friend, I started one. I don't even remember what the heck we called it, but we were awful, as most peoples' first bands are. We eventually played a coffee house. We were booed and they pulled the microphones on us. I have it all caught on audiotape somewhere.

We did a few more things, got booed some more. That summer, at a Flea market near the cottage, I bought a twenty dollar nylon string guitar. It was a piece of junk, but it was a guitar. My father soon bought one, intrigued by the idea, and we went to lessons together in the afterschool program at Glebe High School. Unlike my only mediocre skills with the organ, I was a natural at the guitar, and within three months, quickly progressed beyond the teacher and the rest of the class.

My best friend and I wrote some songs, and we did another coffee house. Unfortunately, our guitars were badly out of tune. We were still terrible, and we got booed. I rushed down to the piano and played Baba O'Reilly, doing my best Roger Daltrey and Pete Townsend impersonations. For the very first time ever, I received applause – a lot of it, even. It was a good feeling.

Saving my meager earnings from odd jobs and money my parents tossed my way for vacuuming the pool and mowing the lawn, I secretly bought an electric guitar, a Les Paul clone - real cheap one. I didn't let my parents know about it, because they definitely frowned on the whole music thing. I'm sure they thought I wanted to turn into a pot-smoking hippie. I remember one time my father took my radio away and pretended to heave it into the ravine. I was crushed – it was the only material possession, other than my guitar, that I valued. (Months later I discovered it was fine.)

My freedoms began to increase. I started jamming with a guy named Nick, whom I had met in summer school, and we began to explore the blues a little bit. Of course, our idea of blues was the Rolling Stones, and maybe some of their obvious influences like Muddy Waters. Nick brought two others, new arrivals from Edmonton, into the band – a harmonica player named Jan and a guitar player named Sue, Sue Foley. I was the only one who could sing, but they both knew a lot of material, so they were fun to run through material with, which we did while plugged into my organ. None of us had amplifiers but I had jury rigged the organ so it could be used as a guitar amplifier with multiple inputs.

Within a couple of weeks, the two newcomers had convinced Nick to kick me out of the band, and made him tell me. I was crushed. This was rejection, in the area of my life that had become most important to me. Being rejected by girls was one thing. Being kicked out of a band was an awful shock.

After moping the rest of the summer, my interest in music reignited when I arrived at Glebe for my last year of school. It was an incredibly fertile environment for music, and a number of its students have become famous (including Alanis.)

I started another band, called Tresa, named after a math teacher I had once had. We played three shows during the school year –a Halloween party, a gong show, and a coffee house. The coffee house was well-received, as was the Halloween party, which was for a group of kids at the Glebe community center. By this time, I was not yet a great guitarist, but I could keep a guitar in tune, play a handful of rudimentary solos... and I had learned to play the guitar behind my head and also with my teeth. (Foolish flashiness that I never do now. :-) But we did get gonged.

But my own outings were not important to me anymore. I was in a school that had master blues musicians. Tortoise Blue was there, who is today the best harp player in Canada. A guy named Chris could play the blues like nobody's business. And he would play – everything from Buddy Guy to Albert King, expertly. And then Stevie Ray Vaughan came along.

Nick's group had failed, so hoping to mend fences I brought him into mine. He now had a vintage telecaster, and looked just like Ron Wood. He was now into the blues in a purer form.

I would spend that summer listening to all the blues I could get my hands on. A radio show called “Blues 106” with local personality Brian Murphy gave me access to hundreds of artists, and I taped every show every week. I discovered the people who would become my guitar heroes that summer – Robert Cray, Albert Collins, Luther Guitar Junior, Jimmy Vaughan, Son Seals. And I listened to Chris from school, whom I'd joined in a band. Local guitar god Tony D sold me his amplifier, my parents bought me a mimic Stratocaster for graduation, and I now had that Fender tone.

My sound has changed somewhat over the years since that summer – I've incorporated Mark Knopfler and Eric Clapton into it, to give it a touch of finesse, along with Carlos Santana. But the blues is where my skills were born. I can play on other kinds of music, but I'm often thinking blues, even when I do. It is a music form full of heart and soul. Although it was born in suffering, it is suffused with joy.

As to the rest of my musical journey, I may tell it to you, when I get time. :-)