So You Wanna Be A Rock And Roll Star?

When I got my guitar, so many Christmases ago that I was a senior in high school, I sat in my room and pushed myself to work out the chords for my first song: "Beautiful Brown Eyed Girl". Not to be confused with Van Morrison's classic, this was about twenty measures of strumming with exactly two chords. I read and followed the instructions in my E-Z guitar book to be sure that I had the right combination and placement of fingers.
After a few hours, my fingers were sore and so was my ego. I had taken music lessons since I was in the third grade, starting with piano and moving up to brass instruments by the time I was in junior high. I was never a terrifically gifted musician, but I understood the mechanics very well. If I could plug away long enough, I was sure that I would eventually come to some primal mastery of the guitar as well. I never bothered to take lessons. I just assumed that if I practiced enough that I could become mildly proficient.
Eventually, my frustration level was reached, and the guitar went back in its case, where it stayed as I moved out to various dorm rooms and apartments in my college years. In my freshman year I met a guy with amazing spider-like fingers who played his electric guitar with an effortless grace that belied his pre-med major. I even remember on one particularly chemically enhanced evening that he attempted to play the spokes on a bike wheel, with some very tantalizing results. I never asked him for a lesson either.
My younger brother, who also enjoyed and endured a good deal of musical education picked up the guitar at about the same time he was getting ready to leave college. It was our first warning sign that he might be an artist. He learned to play some nice licks, and he liked to play them loud. I remember picking up his blue electric and thumping out the one-string version of "Smoke On The Water" with only passing satisfaction. I never asked him to show me how to play it for real.
One of my roommates in college was also digitally gifted, and even though he had given up his high school saxophone, he took an interest in my now dormant guitar. A friend of his back in high school had shown him how to play the opening of Queen's "Crazy Little Thing Called Love", and he had gotten good enough to make it look casual in front of girls at parties. Then he would abruptly put the guitar down and pretend to be humble and embarrassed. It really worked for him. I never asked him to show me how to play it.
My buddy in New York has elevated his passion for Bruce Springsteen to a passing ability to play many of his songs on a guitar. He has taken his act on the road to perform amusing songs at fortieth birthday parties across this great land of ours. He taught me how to play darts. I don't think I could ask him to show me how to play guitar.
I have spent the bulk of my life making crazy gestures with my hands whenever I hear a song on the radio that I love. I know that my right hand strums and I should hold down the frets with my left - unless I'm doing my pseudo-Eddie Van Halen hammer technique. It's taken my half a year to work up the courage, but I went out and bought Guitar Hero for our video game system. I sat down yesterday afternoon and went through the tutorials, and finally worked up to my first song: "Slow Ride" by Foghat. I followed the rush of red and green and yellow dots with my left hand and "strummed" with my right. There were moments of real enthusiasm and delight as I hit fifty-four notes in a row. Then my son took a turn. He rocked Alice Cooper's "School's Out" after just a couple tries.
I'm going to ask him how he did it.

Medium Well

 There was a couple years there where I used to stand around in my living room with a plastic guitar strapped to my chest as I flicked a control bar with my right hand and maneuvered my left across a series of colored buttons. I was pretending to play guitar. 

I have mentioned here before how much I enjoyed Guitar Hero.  

On Medium. 

Like so much of my video game experience, I don't feel like I need to push myself needlessly to extremes. This was also the case with my masquerade as a guitar hero. Every so often a guest would appear in our living room and ask if they could dial up the difficulty. "Go right ahead," was my response, and I was frequently amazed by their prowess manipulating a toy guitar and following those rainbow dots that came streaming across the screen. On all those occasions, I never met a single "real" guitar player. Friends who played "real" guitar scoffed at the charade I had made my avocation. 

It was all a vast conspiracy created to get pikers such as myself the vague feeling of playing loud music, becoming a facsimile of a rock star in the comfort and privacy of my own home. Wish fulfillment in the most clunky possible way. 

Which is pretty much how I feel about AI. Like going to an improv show and having the performers ask, "Okay, give us a situation." Then, "Alright, give us a couple characters." Finally, "Now give us a bunch of funny things to say and do." 

Creating amusing videos to fill up your stream? Memes that you were too lazy to create yourself? How about give that bit of imagination you have an extra creative shove? No matter that the end product is the result of every funny bit created before it, but we'll just call that homage.

Not theft. 

My wife and I will soon be marketing our own version called "Novel Hero." Right from that same living room where you once pretended to play guitar, you too can be a "novelist." Don't have the time or energy to push yourself to near madness looking for that perfect sentence? Don't worry. Artificial Intelligence has your back. Heck, half an idea is better than no idea at all. And if you're more inclined to the visual arts, coming next fall, "Paint Hero." You don't have to be a Picasso, especially since we've already got all his best bits right here in a box. 

On Medium.  

A Man's Got To Know His Limitations

There I was, shredding away as one-third of the triple guitar attack that was Lynyrd Skynyrd, as the accelerando kicked in and sent me into a solo frenzy. Then, abruptly, the song was over. Not that we had finished, but our bass player had drifted into the red, and before we could complete "Freebird," we were booed off the stage. I sighed and realized that I was only a reset button away from making good on the monster of all encores. I also knew that I probably wouldn't get the nine more minutes of southern rock intensity out of my bandmates to make this a reality.
Jimmy Page doesn't care for Guitar Hero. Guitar God Page said he can't imagine that people are really learning anything significant about playing instruments by playing video games. I don't know how to answer that criticism exactly. I often find myself wondering if the decade I spent studying piano, low brass, and associated music theory makes any impact on my "play." I know what a triplet is, and I know syncopation when I hear it, and all of this still begs the question: Am I learning anything about playing instruments by playing video games?
A friend of mine, after spending an hour or so peeking into the Guitar Hero universe, wondered why I didn't move on up to the "Hard" level. I explained that I had found my comfort zone with "Medium," and I enjoyed the level of confidence I feel when I know that I can make it all the way through most any song at that stage. He asked me what the difference was between the two, and I told him, "The orange button. You have to move your fingers."
"Wouldn't that be more like playing guitar?"
He had me dead to rights. It would be a lot more like playing guitar. But I guess that's not why I'm doing it. I'm playing a video game. I'm not playing an instrument. Playing an instrument requires practice. With a fairly shallow learning curve, I have mastered Medium. Now I can play along with Brian May and Joe Perry and Mike Ness. I know that I am not recreating the music. I am doing electronic pantomime.
And that's okay. My wife has periodically wondered aloud how much it has cost us to get my son to play "Under The Sea." How many lessons did that take? I haven't asked her if we need to break it down by note, but I understand the quandary. Now I wonder if my parents would have paid for all those years of lessons if they knew that I would be using them to strap a toy guitar on my chest and flick away while on the TV Ozzy Osbourne roars away. On Medium.

Virtual Buzz Kill

Well, that's it. I have officially lived through an era. Way back when I brought home my first plastic guitar in a box with Slash on the front, and my son said, "Is that for us?" I couldn't imagine that it would all come to an end so very abruptly. That is, if you count four years as "abrupt." Activision has pulled the plug out of the virtual Marshall stack and cancelled any further iterations of its Guitar Hero franchise. A moment of virtual silence, please.
I have expressly fond memories of the first time I plonked through Alice Cooper's "School's Out," and the first time I survived the galloping triplets of "Knights of Cydonia." It filled a void that I could only manage to sputter about to my wife. The idea that I could make noises as I played along on my prop guitar with Black Sabbath and the Rolling Stones was too much for me to make intelligent sentences. After a day or two of listening to my exasperated noises, my wife shrugged her shoulders and told me if that was the toy I really wanted, I should go and get it.
Since then, I have purchased most of the iterations of the Guitar Hero franchise. I even scored a copy of the Van Halen version by being one of the first to buy the fifth volume of streaming red, blue, green, yellow and orange dots. On those weekend afternoons when the rest of the family was busy or out of the house, dad would strap on his faux Stratocaster and shred the night away.
I was a loyalist for a long time, steering clear of the MTV sponsored Rock Band, preferring the essential nature of almost-air guitar to the complex nature of microphones and drums. Until Rock Band nabbed the Beatles' catalog, and I surrendered. When they lassoed Green Day, it was all over in my house.
In some ways, I can only blame myself for the decline of Guitar Hero. I didn't buy "Warriors of Rock." I spent my fun money on Rock Band Three. Now I won't have Johnny Napalm to kick out the jams with anymore. I know I just lived through a trend. Like arcades and Intellivision before it, Guitar Hero will live on in the hearts of those who seek it out. With proper care, I should be able to keep my plastic axe in tune, and on those nights when the family allows me to turn the volume up to eleven, you'll still hear me rocking the night away.

Licks Off Of Records

Last night I dreamed that I was strolling about my home, strumming a guitar. I wasn't doing anything too flashy, but it was some nice folksy sort of picking and grinning that made people (myself included) feel like singing. In my dream, it was effortless.
At the same time, even while I was still sleeping, I knew that it wasn't. I know what it takes to play guitar like that, not because I ever achieved anything of the sort, but because I have seen friends and acquaintances over the years acquire the skills of guitar. They have nimble fingers with callouses and a head full of chords that make sense to them. I never managed to get anywhere near that.
For Christmas my parents bought me a guitar: a steel string Martin and a beginner's book of how to play. This was in my senior year of high school, and I had been taking music lessons of one sort or another for ten years, and I never even entertained the idea of having a guitar teacher. I spent a week, over Christmas vacation, staring at pictures and chord diagrams trying to imagine how to keep my fingers on the strings with my left hand, and strum with my right.
I had a notion that I was doomed from the start, since the digits on both my hands are best used for blunt force trauma, or maybe pushing the valves of a sousaphone. Even my piano playing suffered from my stubby appendages, and I started to become disillusioned even before I headed back to school.
I carried that guitar with me when I moved away for college. I didn't work at it very hard. Every so often, I would take out my beginner's book and try to make it through "Beautiful Brown Eyes" (two chords), and after an hour of futility, it was back in the case and into the closet for another few months. I had a roommate who, with his quick spidery fingers managed to teach himself the opening of Queen's "Crazy Little Thing Called Love" - about four bars of cheery strumming. He used to break that out at parties, and girls would beg for more. "Not right now," he'd say with all the humility in the world. He couldn't play a lick after that, but how would the girls know that?
My father left a banjo as part of his legacy. He always wanted to be able to sit out on the porch of our cabin, playing "Foggy Mountain Breakdown". He never managed to get past the first couple of lessons. I felt his pain. I play air guitar with the best of them, and my younger brother makes it look easy when he picks up his acoustic for a bash. For now, I'll play in my dreams, and keep my fingers callous-free.

Pickin' and Grinnin'

First things first, I love the new Bruce Springsteen album, "We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions." There wasn't a huge doubt that I would find it at least moderately entertaining, but it was quite the revelation to hear Bruce hip-deep in hootenanny. Even so, when the second track "Jesse James" started up, I couldn't help but feel just a little wistful. There's a lot of banjo on that track. There's a lot of banjo on the album. Most of the time I agree with Steve Martin's assertion: "The banjo is such a happy instrument--you can't play a sad song on the banjo - it always comes out so cheerful. "
To prove his point, he starts to play a little riff and sings "Oh death, and grief, and sorrow and murder..." It's funny. The part of the banjo experience that tweaks my wistful button is the fact that my father longed to play it. After he died, we loaded a banjo in its case out of the mountain cabin where my father lived. Like so many things that eluded him, he just never had the chance or didn't make time or kept putting off learning how to play the banjo. It's just a little more sad because he would have been great at it - it would have been a perfect complement to his corny songs and stories. He took a lesson or two, but he never gave himself the chance to become a banjo player.
I had a guitar once. I had a notion that I would learn how to play window-rattling electric one day, but the right way to do it was to learn on an acoustic. My parents bought me this amazing steel string Martin and a beginner's book with chord diagrams. I learned a few chords and most of the song "My Beautiful Brown-Eyed Girl" and then I shoved it under my bed. I dragged it around with me through college - always with the idea that I would eventually pick it up and commence to strumming just like David Gilmour, or Bob Mothersbaugh, or maybe Bruce Springsteen. I took some solace in the fact that other guitar players I met looked at my fingers and shook their heads. "How can you play with big ol' fingers like that?" I was physically limited by the fleshiness of my digits.
My friend and frequent room mate Darren discovered my guitar at the beginning of our sophomore year, and he taught himself the first two chords of Queen's "Crazy Little Thing Called Love." At parties he would pull out the guitar and strum away - for just a couple bars, and then set it down, appearing far too shy and humble to play any more. We all knew that he didn't know any more, but the girls who showed up at our apartment didn't. It was one of the most calculated things I've ever seen.
The guitar went away after I graduated. My father kept his banjo, propped in a corner with his beginner's book curled around the neck inside the case. Maybe he was keeping it in case he got real sad one day. Pete Seeger had this to say about the banjo: "This machine surrounds hate and forces it to surrender." Oh alright - I surrender.

So You Wanna Be A Rock And Roll Star?

There are a couple of things I know for sure:
First of all, my younger brother dropped by last Sunday for a visit, and we spent a couple of hours playing various iterations of Guitar Hero. He sang and I played guitar. To his credit, he was actually singing, while I was flapping away in my cyber-pantomime way on my "guitar-controller." When we were done, we both felt as if we had been put through a wringer. We wondered aloud how anybody could do that for a living.
Second, I know that Billie Joe Armstrong is younger than I am, but he still managed to run and jump and sing and play a real guitar for more than two hours on Tuesday night. Part cheerleader, part ringmaster, part clown and all musician, he drove the Green Day show I saw in San Jose like he hoped the wheels might just pop off. I still don't know how he was able to keep up the pace and never miss a note or a cue. Maybe it's the ten years I've got on Billie Joe, but he made it look easy. He made the correct career choice.
Then there was the matter of the lights and pyrotechnics. I know that at some point it became fashionable to eschew the smudge pots and lasers to "focus on the music." I went to an Electric Light Orchestra show way back when, and I know that there was a time when stagecraft overwhelmed what was actually happening on stage. But there has to be a way to put on a show without getting all Spinal Tap about it. What if you could get the spaceship to land right where you wanted it and still hit that high note? I am here to tell you that, through the smoke and flames and flashing lights, Green Day delivered.
Tre Cool pounded maniacally, and Mike Dirnt disciplined his bass, while three other musicians kept the ball in the air as Mister Armstrong worked himself and the rest of us into a frenzy. It was a rock and roll show that threatened to blow the roof right off the Shark Tank. After all, as we were reminded early in the evening, we weren't there to watch hockey. We were there for the spectacle. And I'm still tired.

Rock On

 I don't generally do requests, but I got a text from a college friend that tweaked that nerve. That nerve that drives the word-linking process to the actual sitting down and generating sentences. He started, cleverly enough, with a link to a Bruce Springsteen performance of his song Ghost of Tom Joad. Tom Morello, guitarist for Rage Against the Machine appeared with Bruce in this clip, and it raised the question of guitars and noises made with them. From there, it was my friend's opinion that auto-tune is a "technology with great potential that has been abused horribly by subpar vocalists." 

I could not argue with that viewpoint. But I felt more inclined to discuss the noises made with electric guitars. This was the guy who introduced me to Robert Fripp, Adrian Belew and all the wonderful sounds of King Crimson. It was his passion for six strings and his understanding of the way they could be used to make music that simultaneously crushed my dreams of playing rock guitar at the same instant the furthered my passion for the music other people were making. He showed up in this blog once upon a time before. See if you can pick him out. 

There are two profound memories of this man's guitar prowess that come to the fore in my mind: Him sitting in the hallway of my apartment, straddling the front wheel of a bicycle, plucking at the spokes in a contemplative re-imagining of the way Mr. Spock played his Vulcan lute. The other vision is that of lugging his amp into the bathroom of our freshman dorm, turning it up to eleven and watching the terrified faces of the boys reacting to the power chords he slammed into that tile echo chamber. 

Ultimately, he grew up to be a physician. Not a musician. Not professionally anyway. Which brings some of the same pains I feel when people watch me make cartoons. "Why did you give it up?" 

I didn't give it up. Neither did he. Those things slipped down the ladder to avocation. The talent to make interesting sounds or shapes does not die an easy death. On the contrary. They live on in our hearts and minds while our hands are busy writing today's assignment on the board or saving the lives of those who need saving. 

And when I hear that roar of a guitar, even if it's through the speaker of my phone as I remember that time when I saw it. I heard it. I felt it. In the hallway of my apartment. In the dorm bathroom. 

Auto-tune sucks. Rock and roll is forever. 

Rock And Roll Animal

"Some cereal. 'sposed to be good for you." - Mikey's Brother
There I was, relaxing on the couch after yet another heroic bout of Rock Band with my younger brother, flipping through all the downloadable tunes that were available to add on to our pretend-music experience. Much in the same way that we pondered each additional song as we generated our playlist for the marathon set we had only recently finished, each title was considered before moving on. Did it rock hard? Would it be possible to sing in the mucho gusto style to which my brother constantly aspired? Were there some wicked licks for me to shred on my plastic guitar? To give you some sense of our general outlook, we were using Motorhead's "Ace of Spades" as our litmus, though we weren't afraid to slow things down a little with something like Dylan's "Tangled Up In Blue."
Our tastes were, to put it mildly, eclectic. Which is why I was surprised when flipping through the songs we might eventually add and I came to Joe Satriani's "Surfing With The Alien," I got a mildly adverse reaction from across the room. I asked my brother what he meant.
"I know, we're supposed to like it because he's like an amazing guitarist, but who really listens to that stuff?"
"Yeah," I sniffed, choosing not to mention that it was one of my favorite albums from back in the day, partly because of the Marvel Comics-inspired cover art, but also because of the perfect storm of fretwork by Maestro Satriani. Before I ever had a plastic guitar with buttons on it, I played along with the air to the maximum: eleven.
"It's like jazz," my brother continued, making a small confession of his own, "I know we're supposed to like jazz, but when do you ever really listen to it?"
I got his point. He is, after all, my brother. In spite of the fact that my son gets up every morning to go and play in his middle school's jazz band, I could not remember the last time I pulled out my Dave Brubeck CD, or turned up Dizzy Gillespie when I heard him on the radio. We were both raised to appreciate all kinds of music. We listened to opera, played classical piano, and various other instruments, including a brief sting on the accordion. But we were products of our generation. We ate up the popular music of our age and now we spit it out. Both of us came to the realization that we had arrived at the point in history where we were the dominant demographic. Halftime shows and commercials now feature music from our formative years, and even though my younger brother owns and plays his own guitar, he still enjoys dropping by my house on occasion to channel his inner rock star. And I'm only happy to be his axe man. Even if he doesn't go big for those all-instrumental tracks.

Some People Really Should Back Down

 A story about Tom Petty (the late): Way back in 1984, while he was pushing himself and his band through the completion of the album that would become Southern Accents, he became frustrated upon hearing yet another disappointing demo track. At which point, Tom hit the wall. Actually hit a wall in the studio. With his left hand. The one he used to play the guitar. In his words, he "completely shattered my hand. I shattered it. To powder.” Initial X-rays and doctor's prognosis suggested that he might not ever play the guitar again. There were wags, at the time including yours truly, who made jokes about "Tom Petty and the Handbreakers."

That story has a happy ending. Eight months later, after lots of physical therapy and plenty of practice, Tom Petty was playing the guitar again. He went right on doing so until 2017, when he stopped playing here on earth and took his act to play the great gig in the sky. 

I relate this story because the kind of passion that existed in this man would probably not have allowed someone to do a very poor cover of one of his songs. And promote it on Faux News and other right wing outlets. The song to which I refer is "I Won't Back Down," released in 1989 as the lead single from his solo album Full Moon Fever. It has been recorded by the wife of one of the Trump Spawn. Subsequently it has become an anthem of sorts for the poor, tormented family whose fortune is being reevaluated even as we speak. Lines like "You can stand me up at the gates of Hell, but I won't back down," take on a special sort of ring when they come slithering out of one of these folk's mouths. Doubling down on this pity party, Lara Trump insists that her version is being "shadowbanned" on outlets such as Spotify and iTunes. That's what is keeping it from becoming the monster hit that is should be. 

Way back when it was released, Tom's version peaked at number twelve on the Billboard Chart. Lara whine-tweeted, "Why doesn't my song appear when you search 'I Won't Back Down'???" Perhaps because she, like so many of her clan, does not understand how things work. "They wouldn't put my song on the radio 'cause it was too political, and I think it's time we as conservatives start fighting back," she continued. 

Maybe she doesn't understand history. 

In 2000, Tom Petty sent a cease and desist letter to the Bush campaign, insisting that they stop using that song. He later played it for Al Gore at his home after Gore conceded the election to Bush. In 2020, his estate sent a letter to the former game show host's campaign that read, in part, “Trump was in no way authorized to use this song to further a campaign that leaves too many Americans and common sense behind. Both the late Tom Petty and his family firmly stand against racism and discrimination of any kind. Tom Petty would never want a song of his used for a campaign of hate. He liked to bring people together.” After the election, President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris played “I Won’t Back Down” at their victory speech in Wilmington, Delaware. Petty’s family later wrote on Instagram that they were “touched to see Tom included on such an important night in America.”

In short, Lara: The song is great. We like the song. We just don't like you. 

Rock On

A long time ago, in a galaxy much like this one, since it is this one, I read a review of a DEVO show that included a pithy comment about there being no guitar solos at a DEVO concert. As a fan, I took immediate exception to this since I was aware of at least one from the show the reviewer was referencing, and have always enjoyed the crunchy guitar riffs of Bob Mothersbaugh. While I understand that the public at large will remember the DEVO's catalog as synth-heavy, that's not what I recall.
Maybe that's why I so thoroughly enjoyed seeing the Spudboys from Akron on their Hardcore Tour last week. They only played songs from their earliest recordings, some forty years ago. Yes, there were some keyboards, but mostly they were playing drums and guitars in new and confounding ways, like their cover of the Rolling Stones' "Satisfaction." As they have related for years in interviews, they made it hard for themselves to get booked into bars that were looking for bands that sounded like Foghat. They sure didn't look like Foghat. I never went to see Foghat play live. I've been going to see DEVO when they came to my town for more than thirty years.
I wore my souvenir T-shirt from that first show when I went with my wife and son to see what was more than just a revival, it was a memorial. The other Bob in DEVO, Bob Casale, had passed away earlier this year and the tour was organized as a tribute to him and part of the proceeds were being passed along to his family. I was pleased and happy to support the cause, though it was odd to see just four members of the band on stage. DEVO waited until the very last song of the show to mention Bob 2's absence, and when they played "Clockout," they invited Bob's son Alex out to play bass as his father had so many years ago. Mark played keyboards. Jerry sang. Alan Myers wasn't there to play drums, having left the planet just ahead of Bob 2 on their tour of the universe. Josh Freese was behind the kit, as he has been for almost twenty years. And Bob 1 was playing guitar. In their own peculiar way, they rocked the house. I don't remember the synths. I remember the guitars.

Careful With That Axe, Eugene!

And finally, some good news. At least that's the way I am choosing to see it. Here it is: British newspaper The Times reports this week that up to two and a half million children in the United Kingdom have graduated from playing toy instruments in video games to playing real guitars and drums. As a Guitar Hero devotee for most of a year, I believe this is the leading edge of the Hope and Change wave that will be spreading over our own great land in the coming months.
Much in the same way that we all fretted about our children picking up automatic weapons and trenchcoats after spending hours in front of their first-person shooter games, we can now start worrying about the price of music lessons. Instead of watching my son sit slack-jawed in front of our TV for hours at a time, I now stand slack-jawed next to him, windmilling and strumming for all we're worth.
I took a lot of smug satisfaction from this particular report, having to defend my mild obsession to various friends and relatives. "Do you really think that your son will be more interested in playing a real guitar after playing that game?" Yes, I do. He has been picking up my wife's ukulele and picking out "Smoke On The Water."
Meanwhile, I have been introduced to Linkin Park and my son has a growing appreciation for Ozzy Osbourne. We have shared many happy Father and Son air-guitar battles in those moments when we didn't have access to our "real" instruments. It's a renaissance of my own adolescence. We both know enough to shudder at Ted Nugent's politics, but we still appreciate the virtuosity of his jam on "Stranglehold."
My son is eleven, and I know that a certain amount of rebellion is inevitable, but I will be fascinated to see what form it takes, considering I'm the one who gave him his first Green Day album. Will he start his own band? Will he grow his hair long and give up the piano for something he can plug in to a Marshall stack? Will he end up playing the keytar? Who cares as long as it's loud.

Just For One Day

"We could be heroes."
These were the words that went through my head last night as I watched my son bash away at a cardboard guitar to the strains of Green Day's "Holiday". Saying that I was proud seems too simple for the feeling I had as I watched his act unfold. He and three of his friends were performing as an "air band" - a kind of exaggerated lip-synch routine that included special effects that included a fog machine and a strobe light. When the guitar solo came, and he stepped to the front of the stage, my mind reeled.
I could remember how he didn't want to be anywhere near a stage just three years ago. The fact that his father was in charge of his school's variety show seemed to burden him. He's always been a fairly introverted kid, building Legos and reading books. At that time he probably would have rather cleaned his own room than be dragged on stage.
That started to change last year when he decided that maybe standing up in the spotlight next to his dad wouldn't be too hard. After all, if his dad could do it, why not him? In the intervening year, there was some talk about putting together his own act: a skit, or even jamming on keyboards with his guitar playing buddy on "Smoke on the Water," or "The song from the second Bionicle movie" - something that really rocked. When February came around, it was time to settle in on an act or wait until next year. He got his buddies together and decided on the Green Day tune.
They spent an afternoon in our living room watching the video and learning the words and the moves. Over the following weeks they each practiced their parts and waited for the first full rehearsal. I confess that part of the fun for me was being able to blast a Green Day song through the school's auditorium sound system. The boys had practiced, and they seemed to know their bits, especially their lead singer who had obviously spent a good deal of time in front of a mirror getting his vibe just right.
The night of the big show, my son wore his new black velvet jacket with his tie-dyed t-shirt and helped me introduce all the acts. All of them except one - "Green Air". When the curtain opened and the smoke and lights poured out on the stage, the crowd went wild. The screams, whistles, stomps and cheers were for him and his band. And yes, I was very proud.

Pretend Genius

I was recently bemoaning my lack of science and math prowess, and it occurred to me that maybe I have been looking at it all wrong. For all the appreciation and interest I have in explanations for How Things Work, I should be focusing more on the theoretical. Once I learn that gravity and coincidence has somehow delivered us a moon that appears the same size in the sky as our sun, then a whole lot of mysteries about lunar eclipses are neatly wrapped up. I won't get too wrapped up in explaining how this came to pass, since that might require math with parentheses. Instead, I will marvel at the way the play of light and shadows can make amateur astronomers swoon, as was the case with last week's Super Blood Wolf Moon.
Not just your standard Blood Moon. The Super Blood Wolf Moon. Two more adjectives. Made possible by the same science that allows kindergartners to make butterfly hand puppets on a screen in front of a projector.
Theoretically.
Then it occurs to me that I live in this world much in the same way that I live in the world of rock and roll. I have endless appreciation for all manner of bands and musicians, and it is my years of study of piano, trombone and tuba that allow me to understand the rudiments of what they are doing. What this allows me to do is to pantomime wildly as if I were playing those guitars and drums. And, given a large and loud enough crowd, sing along. This mild devotion to air guitar was finally rewarded by the invention of the video game Guitar Hero, which became an obsession in my life for a number of years until I realized that I was actually coming no closer to my dreams of rock and roll stardom, stuck as I was on Medium.
Which isn't to say that I don't get what Eric Clapton is doing. Or Neil Peart. Or any one of a thousand different players whose notes I have imagined recreating in that overbite-eyes-closed state that somehow makes my flailings more sincere. Not an accurate recreation, but a generic simulation of gestures that could be confused with playing music.
And something about stars.

The Only Living Boy In New York

I would buy you some Art, a Picasso or Garfunkel." This is one of the suggestions made by Barenaked Ladies in their hit "If I Had A Million Dollars." That would be a good deal, since that would be a way to get Mister Garfunkel paid and maybe tamp down some of the bitterness and vitriol he feels lo these many years down the road for his partner Paul Simon. Former partner. Somewhat infrequent collaborator. Trusted friend. Or perhaps, to borrow from the current lingo: Frenemy.

For history's sake, it should be pointed out that it has been forty-four years since the sweet-singing folk duo, formerly known as Tom and Jerry, broke up. This was after a personal and professional relationship of more than eighteen years, having met as kids in Queens.

In the intervening decades, both men have stayed busy. Art has had a career in film that has spanned a great chunk of that time, as well as a solo recording career that has carried him through, including the opportunity to recently induct Cat Stevens into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Art is no stranger to the Hall, having been inducted himself back in 1990. Along with his partner, Paul Simon has been busy too. He was at that same celebration back in 1990, with his buddy Art. And he was back again eleven years later to be enshrined all by his lonesome. Paul has done some recording on his own as well. Not many more than Art, but let's just say that they were "more well-received" than those crafted by the guy who didn't play guitar. If this was your former business partner, wouldn't you feel a little jealous?

In a new interview, Artie calls his chum "an idiot" for breaking up the group at the height of its popularity. It makes a pretty tawdry Hollywood story. To hear Mister Garfunkel tell it: “I’d just got married and moved to Connecticut, and there was a nearby preparatory school and so I taught math there. It was a weird stage of my life, to leave Simon & Garfunkel at the height of our success and become a math teacher. I would talk them through a math problem and ask if anyone had any questions and they would say: 'What were the Beatles like?'” 

Broken up, Art. Just like you. Along the way, he has been thrown the occasional bone, like a concert in Central Park or maybe a cameo on one of the many Paul Simon-hosted Saturday Night Lives. For a guy who stands just five feet three inches tall, he has cast quite a shadow. Bitter? Angry? Frustrated? All of the above. But when asked about another Simon and Garfunkel reunion tour?  “Will I do another tour with Paul? Well, that’s quite do-able. When we get together with his guitar, it's a delight to both of our ears. A little bubble comes over us and it seems effortless. We blend. So as far as this half is concerned, I would say, 'Why not, while we're still alive?'" And now, for the rest of the day, I give you this challenge: Try not to think about Art Garfunkel sitting in his living room, staring at the phone, waiting for it to ring. 

But He Could Play A Guitar Just Like Ringing A Bell

 "Clapton is God." That's what fans used to spray paint on walls back in the day. Eric Clapton describes his reaction at then as, "disgusted and pleased at the same time." I was not one of those fans. I always appreciated his talent, but his blues always seemed somewhat self-imposed. I found his hovering around the Beatles amusing, and his friendship with George Harrison bordering on the sycophantic. Clapton wrote Layla as a paean to his best friend's wife. Whom he later married after she initially turned him down. That rejection set young Eric on a four year heroin bender, from which he popped up long enough to catch the ex-Ms. Harrison on the rebound. 

By his own admission, Eric Clapton was self-medicated for the better part of twenty years, right up until the moment that his son Conor fell from the balcony of his fifty-third story apartment in New York City. Conor's mother was not the ex-Ms. Harrison but rather another woman with whom Eric had been having an affair with while married to the ex-Ms. Harrison. It was after this and a string of tragedy that has been fodder for rock journalists for decades that Mister Clapton decided to get sober. 

Happy ending?

Well, except for the part where it turns out that Eric Clapton is a vocal anti-vaxxer, going so far as to record a song with fellow rock dinosaur Van Morrison called Stand and Deliver, smearing the public health's response to COVID-19. In interviews, he has complained about his reaction to the vaccine which he claims he was coerced into. He says that he was afraid that he might never play again after a reaction to his second shot. His stated rant about the response to the virus was, “I’ve been a rebel all my life, against tyranny and arrogant authority, which is what we have now, but I also crave fellowship, compassion and love, and that I find here. I believe with these things we can prevail.”

Two things should be noted at this point: Eric Clapton recovered from the vaccine's side effects, and he has not contracted the virus. 

So, it turns out he's not God after all. He's a guitar player of note. 

The Show Has An End

I regularly quote a lyric from an Emerson, Lake and Palmer song when greeting people at work: "Welcome back my friends to the show that never ends," I tell them. I don't think about it much, since it's become something of a habit. Or I didn't until I heard that Keith Emerson was dead. For Keith, the show was now over,and now it occurred to me that I might consider coming up with a different way to show those around me how hooked into pop culture I am. The pop culture of the 1970's, anyway.
Like so many of the cool musical introductions that were made for me back in those days, it was my older brother who sat me down to listen to my first ELP album, their eponymous first. This was no collection of pop hits. It was a seminal piece of the progressive rock canon. Songs that would never be played on AM radio. Songs without lyrics, for heaven's sake. But how could that matter when there was all that stuff going on? These virtuosi were generating ornate soundscapes that were, as I was instructed by my older brother, best appreciated through a pair of headphones.
That's where I lived, for most of my junior high years, between those roaring cans. Eyes closed and imagining the sweeping vistas and detailed backdrops to that music that would eventually be labeled "prog-rock." Short for "progressive." In some ways, I never felt completely comfortable with that label, since much of their work recalled previous compositions, especially on their synthesized revision of Mussorgsky's "Pictures At An Exhibition." This provided me with the perfect link between my classical music education and the world of electronic sounds that were swirling around me every day.
It was my senior year in high school when our band director selected ELP's "Canario" as our concert piece for marching band show. Based on Spanish composer Joaquin Rodrigo's concerto for guitar and orchestra, we used the opportunity to showcase all our high school marching band prog-rock chops. We all took pride in the way we blew our guts out and beat those drums. For those four minutes, we were one with Emerson, Lake and Palmer. We left it all out there on the field. Or at least that's the way we liked to talk about it.
By this time, ELP had disbanded, having fulfilled what they declared was their contractual obligation with the album from whence "Canario" came: Love Beach. The title and the cover photo with the artists posing as furry-chested pop stars didn't jive with the music inside. But it was the 1980's, and the time was no longer right for twenty minute organ solos or entire sides of a record devoted to the tale of a World War Two soldier. Genesis was now being run by Phil Collins. Pink Floyd was crumbling beneath their own psychic weight. The indulgences were now those of the listeners, not the artists.
When I heard that Keith Emerson was gone, I went back and took the time to listen to that music once again. It was fascinating and unique. It was complex and it was fun. It made me want to play air guitar, keyboards and drums all at once. This was the music that came from the mind of Keith Emerson. Thank you Keith, for stomping on the musical Terra. Aloha from Love Beach.

Out Of The Mouths Of Babes

"You have a wife?"
"What's your wife's name?"
"You know who Jay-Z is?"
"Is that your bike?"
"Why don't you have a car?"
"You play Guitar Hero?"
"What's that red spot on your neck?"
"Why do you always wear that shirt?"
"Where did you get those shoes?"
"Why do you sweat?"
"You have a son?"
To these questions, each one asked countless times by numerous students from kindergarten to fifth grade, I have prepared the following answer: I do have a wife. Her name is Mrs. Caven. Jay-Z introduced us and he served as best man at our wedding. At the ceremony, he made me promise not to drive the Lamborghini that he gave us as a wedding gift, but I should ride my bike instead. The bike helps me hone my plastic guitar technique as I continue to work on rehabilitating my spine. The only way you can tell that my spine was broken is by the little red mark on my neck. The comfortable shoes that I wear came from Payless, but I got them for free because I bought this shirt. I sweat when I think about all the money I'm saving by getting my clothes so cheaply, and yes I do have a son who is very polite and would never think of asking a grownup all of these invasive questions.

Don't Worry If It's Not Good Enough For Anyone Else To Hear

Yesterday we closed out the official holiday season around here with the appearance of my younger brother. We exchanged gifts, shared a couple of meals, and experienced media of various sorts and flavors. My favorite moments were those we spent playing Guitar Hero together, with me on guitar and him on vocals. He's got the chops, as they say, and I was immediately transported back to the times that he and I have spent making music together over the years.
One of my favorites occurred on a drive back from our cousin's farm after our big family Thanksgiving feast. On a drive across eastern Colorado, it's best to try and keep things interesting, since the relatively straight lines of the highway and the horizon offer little diversion. Luckily, we found of the first album by the Police in the glove box. Much to my mother's chagrin, we turned up the volume and began to sing along. We knew every word. By the time we had finished the last song on side two, we were a little hoarse, but turning into our driveway at home. We had survived.
On another cold winter night, after closing the video store, I met up with my younger brother and a friend of his from way back in elementary school. We had a few beers, and we got to talking about music. As it turned out, my brother's friend was in a Christmas-covers band that played gigs around town. After a few more beers, I began to brag about my ability to sing the blues. In reality, my experience was based almost exclusively on the times I had sung along with my Blues Brothers album. This didn't keep us from finishing up after last call and heading out to the little shack that served as the rehearsal space for the band. My brother took some interest in the guitars, having played with more veracity that I had ever sung the blues. We put on Bruce Springsteen's "Cadillac Ranch," and I did my very best drunken slur-along with the Boss to some mild approval from my shivering cohorts.
In hindsight, it seems a little odd that both of these tales were holiday-themed. Maybe there's something about this time of year that puts a song in our collective hearts. As long as it's not "The Twelve Days of Christmas," I guess that's fine.

Toys In The Attic

"I'm growing older, but not up
my metabolic rate is pleasantly stuck" - Jimmy Buffett
For many years, these were the words that I took very much to heart as the calendar pages fell from the wall and were eventually recycled in that very environmentally conscious way I have learned as time piled up along with this metaphor. I took great pride in the way I maintained my childlike fascination with toys and all things less than mature. I bought a little more time for reckoning when my son was born. Train sets and model cars were once again a part of everyday life in my house. We used to take trips to Toys R Us just to look around. For him.
Then there was the time I went into Best Buy and walked out with Guitar Hero, my son trailing behind me wondering aloud, "Do we like stuff like that, dad?" I spent hours in front of the television, pretending to play along with rock hits from long ago. Every so often we made a family event of it, with my wife on vocals and my son on drums. Sometimes we even got our friends into the act. It was an excuse for me to play with a plastic guitar and pretend that I was in a band. I even downloaded a couple Jimmy Buffett songs so that I could play along with the Coral Reefers. I already knew all the words by heart, I just needed to learn the faux chord progressions.
These days, the plastic guitars don't get much action. The toys have been put away, for the most part, replaced by screens and consoles that offer virtual experiences that appear more mature than the mounds of Legos that used to be piled under his bed. We no longer need to rush out to the toy store after we see the latest special effects comic book extravaganza to check out the swag. I miss it. Not just for my son, but for me.
I know that fifty-two trips around the sun doesn't mean that I have to give anything up. If anything, I can afford to be the consumer of all that stuff. Honestly? I don't want it as much anymore. Way back when I used to go to Jimmy Buffett concerts every summer, my niece went along when she was just a little girl. She wanted to know where the toys were. The good news was we could get her a stuffed parrot and then we could get back to the singalong. Happy Birthday to me.