John Butleron the life lessons learned at guitar class
Through a combination of kind fate and good parenting, I was 14 years old before I saw a grown-up cry for the first time. I don't know if it's normal for people to remember this as a landmark event in their own lives, but I clearly recall the time and place for two reasons. Firstly, when it happened, I was the only other person in the room. Secondly, when I noticed he was crying, I was elated.
Brendan was my guitar teacher, and a folk hero among our circle of friends. We all took guitar lessons with him, and we went as much for his warm personality and his way of treating us like adults as we did for his considerable musical knowledge. Sometimes he would tell us stories so packed with ribald incident that guitar playing was forgotten for the hour, but when we played guitar, time itself was forgotten. He would accompany us on his vintage Guild guitar, transforming the hateful din we had struggled with all week into something of transcendent beauty.
My friends were all joining or forming bands. I really wanted to hang around with them. It seemed everyone was a guitar player back then, so if I had wanted to join a band, I should have taken up the banjo, or the trumpet. But when you're a teenager, the only thing you want more than to stand out is to fit in. I bought a guitar.
Back then, 14-year-old guitar players wanted to be able to shred like Jimmy Page or Jimi Hendrix, but my friends and I worshipped at a different altar. We took pride in the fact that our music was different, more "difficult". We wanted to be Roddy Frame from Aztec Camera, or failing that, Django Reinhardt.
Considering this, my first lesson was a disappointment. Brendan asked me to play something for him. I gritted my teeth, gripped the neck of the guitar with a white-knuckled hand and chopped out a few jazz chords, with the sensitivity of a logger felling a tree. Brendan suggested that we start with Let it Be.
He was a philosophical guy, and his lessons focused on the idea of getting out of the way of the guitar, and letting yourself be the medium through which the music flowed. To be honest, when he talked about getting out of the way of the song I had no idea what he was saying, but when I watched him play, his eyes shut, swaying from side to side as he sang, I got it. I came to see this state of being lost in music as nirvana for aspiring musicians.
The best lessons apply to every aspect of life. It's as important to get out of the way of a golf swing or a best man speech as it is music. Having said that, if you can teach a 14-year-old to surrender his conscious mind to any artistic force, you are a great teacher. So far I was struggling, my fingers aching from pressing down on the strings.
The more I tried, the worse it got, and there was nothing worse than stopping Brendan when he was in full flow. Any time he stopped to correct my playing, it felt like I had plunged a knife into the canvas of a painting. Every time a lesson ended and he suggested taking the same song home to work on it, it hurt. I was getting in the way of the music. Nirvana was a million light years away.
For my fourth lesson, I had been practising like crazy, and I knew Desperados Waiting for a Train inside out. In fact, I couldn't wait to get out of the way of it - but Brendan was not smiling when he opened the door. While I was taking out my guitar and digging out a pick from my pocket, he told me that his father had passed away.
I stopped rooting around. Desperadoes Waiting for a Train was a tearjerker. It was about a young man and his mentor - possibly his Dad - a man who was not long for this world. We couldn't possibly play this song together now. I wasn't emotionally equipped to deal with the consequences.
He asked me what song he had given me to practise. I couldn't lie, but it wasn't about honesty; I simply didn't know any other songs. It was my fourth lesson, and the previous three had been spent grinding Let it Be by The Beatles into a fine dust. In fact, at the end of lesson three Brendan had remarked that it was a relief to get away from Lennon and McCartney. I didn't want him to think my playing was bad enough to require a full month on Let it Be, and in the end, my vanity was greater than my compassion. Desperadoes Waiting for a Train, I replied. He allowed himself a rueful smile, then played the opening chord.
Golfers call it muscle memory, when you have practised an action so often you don't require any conscious thought to complete it. I hunched over my guitar, we played, and finally, after a month of hard labour, I learned the disappearing trick. We played the song from beginning to end, and it was only when we finished that I realised he was crying. I had done it.
Whenever I hear someone using that useless cliche "those who can, do, and those who can't, teach", I am reminded of Brendan, and of the many great teachers I have had down the years. My friends and I used to snigger at the songs we had to learn. We were hip - many of us smoked cigarettes and had older brothers who listened to The Dream Syndicate. We wanted to learn how to play songs by New Order, but you never realise what you've learned until years after you stop going to class.
John Butler blogs at http://lozenge.wordpress.com