Detail of Eva with Accordion by Man Ray (1934)
June 23, 2023
I still have a vivid memory of my first guitar lesson. I was perhaps seven or eight years old. I had just gone to bed but wasn’t asleep yet. My mother was in the bathtub, and my father wasn’t home. The doorbell rang and my mom asked me to see who it was. There was a woman who said she had come to give me guitar lessons. I think she said she was from a music store, or it might have been some sort of door-to-door sales situation. I told my mom who it was, and she said I should let the woman in while she got out of the bath.
We all sat down in the living room. Instead of a guitar, the woman had brought a large accordion. I was confused but went along with it, because I was a compliant little kid and why not? I think the idea was to see if I had any basic musical ability, and if it seemed like I did, she’d come back with a guitar later. The accordion was way too big and heavy for me, and I could barely hold it, let alone play it. The woman didn’t stay for long and I never saw her again.
My mother swears this never happened. She thinks I dreamed it. Maybe I did, but I’m not so sure. it still feels like an actual memory to me, and I don’t recall any other times when I mistook a dream for reality.
I did eventually go on to take guitar lessons. And many years later, in my early 20s, I bought an accordion for $10 at a yard sale (I mean a “tag sale”) in Belchertown, Mass. I still have it, though I haven’t played it in quite a while. I never did learn how to play it properly, but I improvised with it a lot and later used it to make some pieces for dancers. Have a listen.
UPDATE: Oct. 12, 2023
After a prompt from my friend Kat and a dig through some old family photos, here’s a bit more personal guitar history.
My first guitar was a Mastro TV Pal plastic guitar, designed by Mario McCafferri. I got it as a gift on my sixth birthday. I have no idea who gave it to me or why they thought I might want a guitar. (I probably had not yet been struck by Beatlemania.) I remember taking at least one guitar lesson with it at the YMCA, but I think the guitar was pretty much impossible to tune and probably unplayable. I did not stick with it.
When I was maybe ten or eleven, for Christmas I got a nylon-string guitar – still crappy, but made of wood! I had a friend at school who took lessons, and I started going to her teacher. He was an old jazz guy named Bass Hutchinson (short for Basil but pronounced like the fish). He and his wife had a lounge duo called the Honey Bees. He tried to teach me how to read music and play lounge standards like "Autumn Leaves". By then I has discovered the Beatles and wanted to play rock music, so I didn't practice much and my parents made me quit.
When I was about fourteen my folks bought me something closer to a real guitar, a Taka dreadnought. It was still a cheap Japanese guitar (Takamine’s budget line?), but it was pretty solid and more or less sounded like a real instrument. I started taking lessons again, this time with "Mother" Mary Jenkins. She and her husband ran a music store and concert venue called the Four Muses, which was kind of the happening place in our area. She was very nice and very patient. She did not try to teach me how to read music, which I still can’t do well; she was more of a folky and taught me some basic chords and picking patterns and how to play by ear, so I could then figure out songs off of rock records. Much more immediately gratifying! I think I studied with her for most of a school year.
I never took another guitar lesson after that, and have remained a thoroughly mediocre guitarist ever since.