In 8th grade, as an aspiring rocker, I asked my dad to get me the cheap electric guitar and amp they had at the mall music store for Christmas. It was a pretty crappy Japanese made ‘Strat that came with an even worse no-name-amp, but it was electric and the amp had a gain knob so I knew I could distort the crap out of it. The price also came in within my family’s general Christmas limit as well. I couldn’t wait for Christmas this year!
So when I ripped open the wrapping and pulled out this classical acoustic guitar, I was furious! When getting a guitar, I had envisioned myself driving across the country in a beat up old van, taking lots of drugs and screwing lots of hot groupies! This thing didn’t live up to this fantasy at all!
My dad had apparently listened to the advice of the people at the music store. He told me that everyone thought it was much better to learn guitar on an acoustic and not move up to electric until you got the basics down really well. All that distortion and electronics would just distract me from learning to really play—they said! Jeez, I didn’t care so much about playing really well, I just wanted to make noise and live the rock and roll lifestyle! Live fast and hard and die young!
My best friend at the time tried to put as positive a spin as he could, saying, “You love David Bowie and he always plays a 12-string.” Yeah, Bowie was and probably will always be the most important and influential musician/performer in my life, but I never expected that I could *be* David Bowie! At the time, I could imagine being a member of The Stooges or maybe the Alice Cooper Band (seeing myself on the back cover of Killer)! There’s a big difference between loving someone’s music and imagining yourself following in their footsteps.
Then, recognizing my disappointment, my dad made the deal with me that if I went and took lessons for six months and developed any real talent, he would buy me the electric guitar. It seemed fair enough, but the guy at the mall who gave me lessons, didn’t understand me or know any of the bands I liked. He didn’t understand at all where I wanted to go so he just tried to force me to learn my major scales and learn to read sheet music! SHEET MUSIC! Stoner/rockers rarely bother learning to read sheet music!
Granted, in the big picture, learning to read music at this time wouldn’t have been completely useless, but the repetitive exercises made me quickly hate this guitar! Looking back, had the instructor at least shown me the basics of the Pentatonic scale and taught me a few easy blues or rock licks, it probably would have gone a long way to getting me excited about playing, but he didn’t. He told me I needed to focus on scales and exercisers for a few years before I could expect to actually play any songs. What a buzz-kill! I did manage to figure out a few chord progressions that sounded ok and enjoyed playing them, but the instructor told my parents that I wasn’t practicing what he was assigning and that I was wasting both our time.
Now, as an adult, who is self-taught, I’m pretty sure that when starting off, teaching someone the I-IV-V chord progressions and the Pentatonic/Blues scales and how you can use them to improvise is an easy way to get them excited about playing music. Then add the fundamentals of music theory.
When one of my kids was interested in messing around with a guitar, I got him a cheap kit Strat like I wanted and printed out a page with the D-A-E chord shapes on it and told him, however he played these three chords together, it would make a song. While he never really took to guitar (“No one plays guitar anymore, dad!”), he did have fun with it before moving onto a keyboard. I don’t know how far he’ll go with that either, but having fun and challenging yourself with music is always a positive activity.
Anyway, the irony I see looking at this photo is that last year I found a really super online deal for a student grade Cordoba C5 classical guitar, and this year, it’s pretty much all I’ve been playing. Who’d have thought it! When I got started playing later in life and on my own terms, I did start out playing an electric guitar with pedals (etc.), but maybe it’s just that I’m getting old, but I’ve shifted to really preferring acoustic guitar—first steel string guitars played with a pick and now classical finger picking/strumming. Maybe it’s that I’m no longer dreaming of all the drugs and groupies or the fame, but playing guitar is more about expressing things important to me to express, whether anyone likes it or not! I like the expressiveness and mellowness of a classical guitar now.
I used my Cordoba classical guitar for all songs recorded for my upcoming album, First Day of Forever.
Guitar vs. Meds 