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To
become a great guitarist, first you have to understand what the
guitar is, where it came from and what kind of person plays one.
You first have to swim in its spirit and rejoice in its romance.
Betty - My heart was beating as I waited outside the door
of the little studio where I was about to get my first lesson on
the guitar at twelve years old. I prayed to God the night
before; "I wanna play just like Jimmy Page." My new teacher
called me into the room and asked me to take out the $50 guitar
my parents bought me for Christmas. He asked me to take a good
look at it. He then asked me what I thought it looked like. I
didn't know the answer. He said; "it's shaped kinda like a girl
don't you think?" "Kinda curvy," he said. He then told me to
treat it like a girl. "Hold it gently, treat it nice and don't
let it get dirty." It's true when you think about it though.
Nobody I know names their guitar "Pete" or "Joe." They usually
give it a girl's name, like "Lucille" or something. My guitar's
name is "Betty."
Keep on moving - It is shaped like a girl, but why? Why
did the guitar get built in the first place? What makes the
guitar different from all the other instruments? I'll answer it
for you. Unlike a piano, you can carry it around with you.
That's why the guitar got invented. Most historians would agree
that it was born in or around the desert, somewhere in the east,
maybe around the Arabian Peninsula or the Persian Gulf. You see,
people had to move around a lot in those days; you went where
the water or game was. They couldn't carry a piano around on a
camel (or whatever guys rode around on in those days) so they
wired some gut strings on a wooden thing with some holes in it
to amplify the sound and carried it around with them. Without a
doubt they used it by itself or in a group to accompany
themselves, probably singing tunes about life and love and
things like that. I must stress the word accompany. You can
carry a violin around with you, but you are gonna look silly
accompanying yourself singing a tune with it. The polyphony of
the guitar, which would develop over time, is what would
eventually make the guitar the most popular instrument on the
planet.
Those guitars weren't called guitars in those days and didn't
have six strings like guitars do today. And they probably looked
different, although it was basically the same thing that Jimmy
Page played on "Whole Lotta Love" that made me get down on my
knees on the night before my first lesson. The romance of the
guitar is found in its mobility. Even the first guitarists were
rolling stones, travelers, playing under the stars.
Inroads - The guitar would eventually find its way into
Spain and the Troubadours would carry it around Europe singing
the same songs celebrating life in different languages. The
guitar would get all its strings in Spain, become popular and
eventually develop into the modern day guitar.
Appeal - One of the reasons the guitar is so accepted by
the masses is that it is the true instrument of the common man.
The problem back in the old days was there was no electricity.
These days, if you wanted to throw a party and get all your
friends over to dance, you would just plug in a radio and go to
it. Four-hundred years ago, if you wanted to dance you had to
hire an orchestra, since there where no radios. If you didn't
have any cash, you would have to make your own music. I imagine
all the neighborhood cats would bring their guitars down to the
local watering hole and play some tunes while the girls would
dance and sing and generally have a good time. This tradition is
still alive in Flamenco music today. The guitar is a radio.
Spending money - I'm gonna have to go backwards here and
give you a little history lesson. In the 1300s all of a sudden,
the European population got a middle class. It is for a reason
you would probably never imagine: The Plague. The plague killed
off about a third of all Europeans back in those days. Since all
those people died, a labor shortage was born. Since there
weren't enough workers, the workers demanded better wages.
Europe had some cash and they wanted to spend it. Since they
didn't have Gucci downtown they wanted silks from the Far East.
Also, since they didn't have electricity they didn't have
refrigerators. Since they didn't have refrigerators they also
wanted spices from the Far East, China and India. Spices would
help preserve or, yes, cover up the taste of food that was
getting a little too ripe. Spices were worth their weight in
gold. Ever wonder why food around the equator is real spicy?
Anyway, this gave birth to two things: the search for an
all-water rout to Asia and to the African slave trade. I know,
you're asking what does this have to do with the guitar. I'm
getting' to it.
Birth of a new musical era - To make a long story short,
Columbus rather than going all the way around Africa, decided to
sail west. He knew the world was round rather than flat and
figured he would sail into Asia using a shortcut. He wanted to
get there through the backdoor using an Atlantic route. He
misjudged the distance but in the process he discovered the
South American continent. He never found out the truth, and died
thinking he found India. That's why Native Americans are known
as Indians. Pretty silly if you think about it.
Anyway, when the news got out, a bunch of people wanted to go.
Who do you think raised their hands? Remember that going in a
boat to South America was probably a real drag. It probably took
months to get there and once you got there all you had was a
jungle. I can tell you for sure that it wasn't rich people. Rich
people weren't about to give up their big houses to go live in
the woods in a foreign land. It was the guys looking for a new
life who went, and they brought their guitars along with them.
Africans - That's right, it wasn't the rich, but the
other guys who went. You need a lot of people to build a New
World, so at first the Europeans used the Native Americans as
slaves. The only problem with this idea was that almost all of
them died because they had no resistance to the diseases that
the Europeans brought over. That's why the scourge of mankind,
the slave trade, started. On the way over to the New World they
stopped off in Africa and got themselves cheap help.
To make a long story short (again), the Spanish and Portuguese
workers brought over their guitars (radios) with them, combined
their musical ideas with the percussive skills of the Africans
and a new era of music was born. The Rumba would evolve in Cuba.
Meringue starts up in the Dominican Republic. Argentineans
create the Tango. The Portuguese, trying to get around Africa to
East Asia, mistakenly ran into South America (pretty funny if
you think about it) and since nobody is around, they claim part
of it and call it Brazil. The music they make is called the
Bossa Nova and the Samba. The Clave, the rhythm that can be
found in all Latin music, is a present from Africa. If you ever
get a chance to hear some genuine African drum music, you will
hear the same Clave throughout. Even in Louisiana, blues players
used the Clave to build rhythmic motifs. Check out Bo Diddly's
"Who do you Love" if you get the opportunity.
Birth of the Blues in America - In the early nineteen
hundreds, ex-slaves started carrying the guitar around the south
with them and playing blues music for mostly black audiences.
The spirit of the guitar was still the same. It was perfect to
carry around and accompany oneself with. Robert Johnson would
end up making a name for himself before he dies at the tender
age of twenty-seven in Mississippi. In 1948, twenty-eight year
old Muddy Waters moves up to Chicago from Mississippi, looking
for a better life away from the South.
Once again, a man in search of a new life carrying a guitar with
him. He finds the clubs in Chicago overwhelmingly large. So he,
like many of the guitarists started to do in those days, jumps
on the electric bandwagon and begins to pave the way for
electric blues to become musical force. Later on in the sixties
Jimmy Page and Jimi Hendrix get into the old recordings of Muddy
Waters and Robert Johnson and make their own versions of their
tunes, and I end up listening to Jimmy and Jimi at twelve and
get hooked. And that's why I find myself at twelve years old at
my first lesson. And keeping with the tradition, my teacher, on
this sunny Saturday morning, teaches me how to play a medium
shuffle twelve bar blues that I still play today with the same
feeling of adventure that I felt way back then.
Before you do anything - Before you start working on your
scales and chords and all the other things you need to do to
become the greatest guitarist around, start by understanding the
spirit of the guitar. Let's review:
The guitar is like a woman - Treat the guitar with
respect. When I meet a new student for the first time I always
play his or her guitar before I do anything else. I check to see
if the guitar is clean and well cared for. It is a reflection of
the student's attitude about guitar and music in general. The
Japanese say, if you want to find out if the Sushi chef is good
or not, check his knife.
The guitar is a radio - The guitar was built to move, not
for you to play in your room. It was designed for you to carry
with you and tell your story with it. It was made so people
could listen and sing and dance and celebrate life. The guitar
isn't about chops - it's about stories. Every time I travel with
my guitar, it makes me feel happy to know I'm carrying on in the
tradition of the Troubadours and blues musicians of the past. I
don't care if the flight attendant is perturbed because my
guitar takes up all the room in my overhead compartment. I'm
bringing it with me. And when I get where I'm going, I'm gonna
tell someone a story with it.
The guitar is about adventure - The guitar was brought
around the world by people looking for new lives and new
chances. All these people where risk takers, and their guitars
were their best friends. Don't be afraid to be a guitarist. No
matter what bad luck comes to you in life, you will always have
the guitar to play. And don't forget, the greatest joy there is,
is the joy of making music. I would rather live as a poor, happy
guitarist than a rich, unhappy banker. Always follow your heart
and you have nothing to fear.
Think about these things while I get my next column together,
the one that will deal with the next step in becoming the best
guitarist you can be. |
