Guitar Philosophy

Like a lot of guys my age, I got a guitar in the sixties, learned the requisite three chords, and thought I was gonna be the next Bob Dylan. A buddy with about the same ability and I and his wife formed a folk trio and wrote some dreadful and pedantic protest music, which we croaked at anybody who would slow down enough to listen. Did a couple of coffee house gigs, hootnannies in the park, like that. Where have all the flowers gone? Eve of Destruction. Blowin' in the Wind ...

Cut a demo tape long ago and far away, but I suspect it went straight into the agent's garbage can the second we walked out the door ...

We were awful. Couldn't play, couldn't sing, but since that didn't stop Dylan, we figured what-the-hell.

Thing is, we couldn't write, either, and he could.

About 1968 or thereabouts, my buddy went to Leavenworth for eighteen months, as a result of taking a long vacation from the Army without their permission, and I stashed the guitar next to the file cabinet for the next thirty-odd years.

A couple years ago, after watching my silat teacher play -- he's a world-class guitarist -- I decided I need some other way to be creative besides writing, so I dusted off the old guitar and started trying to teach myself how to play. On a scale of 1-10, I'm probably about a 2.5. I know a few simple instrumental tunes, and I can sing along with a few others. I spend an hour or thereabouts a day practicing, and the dogs haven't run off yet ...

I do like listening to guitar players who know how to do it, from classical to pop to rock to blues to country to, well, pretty much anybody who can nail it down. Like silat, I won't live long enough to get good, but we do what we can with what we got.

Which brings me to my header slogan: If you do the best you can, nothing else matters worth a damn.

I have several of those slogans which form the core of my life philosophy. Three of them are posted over my desk, the fourth is on a little brass plaque on my gun cleaning kit.

"And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make." (Lennon and McCartney, last line of the last song on the last Beatle album.)

"Minimize expectations to avoid being disappointed." (From a Chinese fortune cookie.)

"Lesson for the Millennium: Be in the moment." (My version of Be Here Now.)

"When you know who you are, you know what to do." (George Emery, the Emissaries of Divine Light.)

There are worse things to live by ...