I have never had a music lesson
in my life. Everything I know, I have learned through trial and error, listening,
and working on things for hours. I learned to play guitar by people showing
me a chord here and a lick there. I also learned by looking at music books and
learing the chords. I found that playing the songs along with the music did
not satisfy me, so I would take what I found useful and discard the rest.
Probably the first thing that I learned specifically about music was singing
a part. I owe that to Danny Grinstead. Danny wasn't the best friend I had at
the time, but he had one thing that had a significant influence on me, a love
for learning all the vocal parts of a song. The first song he pressed me on
was "Help" by the Beatles. We learned all the parts and could sing
it perfectly right along with the record.
I had a much better friend, perhaps my best friend of the time, Charlie Brown.
No, not the Charles Schultz character, but, rather, a pudgy, flat-topped, incredibly
good-natured kid that dared to be uncool. God, I miss him! We camped out a lot
together, and we always had a radio in the tent listening to songs early into
the morning. He liked a lot of the same songs I did: The Yardbirds’ For
Your Love; Gary Lewis and the Playboys’ This Diamond Ring; Wilson
Pickett’s In the Midnight Hour; and a lot of other great old songs.
I learned my first guitar licks from a girl who was four years older than I.
Her name was Jan Collier and she was one of five sisters who lived the next
street over from me. The five sisters were from oldest to youngest: Jan, Randy,
Shelley and the twins, Cindy and Lindy. Cindy and Lindy were actually my age,
and I briefly sort of went with Cindy. I met them when I was 12, at a time when
I was just discovering girls. The problem was that it was the same time I discovered
guitar, thanks to Jan. The first lick she taught me was the sliding guitar intro
to Pipeline. Everyone who picked up a guitar in the mid-60s learned this
lick. I can’t think of any other guitar licks she taught me, but I also
got my first kiss from her. Thanks for both, Jan.
I learned to finger pick after seeing John Sebastian of The Lovin’ Spoonful
play Daydream on Ed Sullivan. The camera homed in on his thumbpick and
I learned to do the same thing. From there, I learned most of my fingerpicking
styles from Sebastian and Jorma Kaukonen of Jefferson Airplane and Hot Tuna.
Kaukonen still holds guitar camps and teaches his techniques, which themselves
are modernized versions of some of the old masters of blues and folk, Jelly
Roll Morton and Rev. Gary Davis to name a couple.
I have prided myself in how I learned and how much I’ve learned.
One of the most humbling experiences I had when I was a young guitar player
was once in the back seat of a friend’s car. There were six of us in the
car, three in front and three in back. I had been carrying my Kawai guitar around
and had it with me. It had no case, so I was just carrying it au natural. I
don’t remember who was in the car, but there was a guy in the front center
in the center that I did not know very well. At some point while in the Charleston
Naval Base housing area, I started playing my guitar between the two guys on
each side of me. You have to remember that cars were bigger back then. I thought
I was doing a pretty good job of playing when the guy in the middle in the front
halfway turned his head toward me and said, "Hey. Did you teach yourself
how to play?"
My pride took over. "Yeah," I said while I kept playing.
"I can tell," came the reply.
I don’t know if that was a joke on his part, or if he truly felt that way
about my playing, but I remember it to this day and I’ve learned two things
from it.
First, pride can be a dangerous thing. Just when you think you are safe with
it, someone takes it completely away from you.
Second, never play guitar in the back seat of a car when there are strangers
present.