The Santa Cruz Guitar Company, affectionately known as SCGC, makes high end acoustic guitars in small batches for dealers in the US, Europe, and Asia.  They average about 750 completed instruments a year, in deep contrast to Martin Guitars, which makes about 750 instruments a day.

I was happily on my way to Santa Cruz that Saturday to celebrate the birthday of my favorite guitar brand, renew acquaintances with Richard Hoover and the SCGC crew.   I was also hoping for the chance to jam with some of Santa Cruz’s finest musicians.  I was not disappointed.

I arrived shortly after two in the afternoon.  Traffic was thick for a Saturday in the Bay Area.  It took me two and a half hours to get there.  But the weather was magnificent, so from Pelandale Avenue to California Route 9 the stereo was up and the windows were down.  I find it nearly impossible to get frustrated with traffic listening to Eric Skye, Richard Thompson, Maria McKee, and Emmy Lou Harris.

The community hall at Harvey West Park was all done up in cowboy style.   Bails of hay were augmented with cowboy boots, saddles, ropes, chaps, etc.  And a life-size cardboard cut out of the best singing cowboy around, Don Edwards, stood next to the front door welcoming us to the party.  The décor went hand in glove with a recent marketing effort centered on a contest to name the cowgirl in the new cowgirl images SCGC may (or may not –I’m not privy to these things) continue to use.

Upon arrival I stowed my instruments and chatted a bit with a few friends.  They described the previous night’s revels in some detail.  Apparently I missed an excellent show.  Conversation the turned to the impending completion of a custom-ordered SCGC guitar, one that I hope to get to play sometime.  The details of this guitar are likely to be exciting only to those of us steeped in the minutiae of acoustic guitar materials and production, but attention to such details by both the purchaser and the maker ensure that this guitar will be sonically and visually gorgeous.

Discussion of a wonderful new instrument had whetted my appetite to play, so I went looking for my bassist and friend, Matt.   When I discovered him he too was in the throes of new-instrument ecstasy.   Matt had acquired a new upright bass and was itching to put it through its paces.  Ever obliging, I retrieved my mandolin, and we took our time warming up on some of our more basic material.  Matt needed time to get acquainted with the both the tone and the dimensions of his new bass.  Getting comfortable with a new instrument can be a bit like breaking in a baseball mitt –in reverse.  In this case, the player has to come to an accommodation with instrument rather than forcing the instrument to conform to the player.

The two of us made a non-guitar duo at a guitar party.  I felt only a little odd about this because I knew that our hosts enjoyed it, and there were guitars all over the place.  So our little impromptu performance could have been compared in an epicurean mind to a sherbet between the meat and fish courses of a large formal meal.

After a bit of chatting with both old and new friends, I fell into another larger jam with some of Santa Cruz’s finest local talent.  Ukulele Dick and his band swapped tunes with me and Matt for a time.  Our jam circle consisted of bass, ukulele, 3 different varieties of guitar, and myself on mandolin. We filled the deck outside the community building with an appreciative audience when we rambled into a spirited version of Paul Simon’s “Under African Skies.”  We held them for a few tunes with an upbeat 4/4 version of Dylan’s “Farewell Angelina” and a blues by Matt called “Duo Glide.”

About the same time the audience wandered back into the hall to hear Don Edwards regale them with his effortless and soulful renditions of cowboy ballads.  I heard the performance was amazing from a friend who is not usually a fan of cowboy music, but I remained nailed to my spot. Guitarist and rhythmatist Bob Brozman joined our little jam, and injected an element of challenging musical fun.

Bob led us through some very cleverly written Calypso tunes from the 20s and 30s, explaining the complexity of rhythmic structure and pointing out the simplicity of the harmonic structure.  Ukulele Dick and his band added fun jazz-pop tunes from the same era to the mix, so our jam kept rolling along.  Matt and I hung on for the ride.  I think we sat in that circle for at least 3 hours, because it was nearly time for dinner before I knew what had happened.

After a lovely picnic meal and some seriously rich chocolate cake we toasted Richard Hoover and his band of accomplished artisans.  They make, in my humble opinion, guitars that can only be equaled, never surpassed.  SCGC’s continued success as a business is an oasis of excellent news in our current economic climate, and it’s a testament to the old adage, “Do what you love and the money will follow.”

They also know how to host one heck of a party.  Hopefully we’ll get to do it again before another 35 years goes by.

I go to work early to avoid the emptiness of my apartment and to keep my mind busy.  Even so, thoughts of you can be powerful distractions.  I may sit at my desk staring into space for a full minute just holding your image in my mind.  Then I shake myself awake and get back to the task at hand.

Fall semester has begun and I am teaching again.  Two nights a week I am occupied by class preparation and teaching.  It’s work I love, and a subject I enjoy enough to sustain me for my entire professional life.  But every once in a while in the middle of class I look down at my phone and touch the screen so that I can see your face.

The picture I snapped at the Mexican restaurant in Santa Cruz lights up.  I am fully aware that you don’t like this picture. But I love it.  You didn’t smile or pose.  You weren’t aware I was taking your picture. The image takes me to a point in time when you were sitting beside me, enjoying my company, and sharing a meal.

In a perfectly candid moment you’re not looking at me.  You’re looking off into the middle distance forming a thought, and about to say something that I am deeply interested in hearing.   The ability to step into that moment, whether I want to relive the past or anticipate the future, is a gift I will never take for granted.

I continue to dive into every opportunity to play music.  My weekends, since you left, have been filled with practices, jams, and gigs.  I have stayed busy and kept moving.  Our friends in Niles have been supportive and comforting while they have watched me fall in love with you and then wrestle with my anguish at your departure.

Matt and I played for nearly 12 hours on a Saturday and let it bleed into a Sunday.  We started in his driveway, practicing while he and the rest of the town conducted an annual yard sale.  We played for you via Skype.  (Thank God for Skype!)  After that we attended a party in Oakland where we played a few more hours, pulling out songs I had no idea we both could play.  And by 10:30pm we were back in Niles at another party where we closed the evening.

Gluttons to the last, that Sunday Matt and I hosted a jam.  But I have to admit that I was not up to form.  Fatigue had set in and my mind was not in full contact with either my ears or my fingers.  I was so exhausted that I am not sure how I made the trip home.

Do you remember the day we met?  You came to Matt’s jam and played “West Country Girl” in the key of G-sharp, with a capo on the first fret of your guitar.  As a mandolin player I avoid the use of capos, which made my job a little bit more difficult when you snapped one on.  G-sharp is a devilish key for me.  No open strings except the 7^th note of the scale on the G strings.  Playing the 7^th note all the way at the lowest end of the mandolin’s range usually requires a little more musical bravery than I can muster.

But I was in tune –or attuned– that day.  The melody seemed to float about me.  I caught pieces of it under my fingers and explored their musical implications between your lyric phrases.  I played either with my eyes closed or focused on the fret board of my mandolin.  At the instrumental break I simply kept following wherever the melody led me.  Eight bars went by, then 16 bars.

After 24 bars I decided everyone liked what I was doing enough to give me two breaks (32 bars), so when that ended I forced myself out of my musical reverie and looked up to see if anyone else was going to jump in or if we were going to end the song.  When I opened my eyes, it seemed like everyone was quietly agape: as lost in the moment as I was.

I have always been of two minds at jams, practices, or even gigs.  One mind was in the moment, focused, and loving the task of playing music with –and for– people.  The other mind was pinned to obligations to someone who could not understand let alone share my passion for music.  My second mind kept an eye on the clock or looked for non-verbal cues to see if it was time to go.

But that day no second mind appeared, all my attention was focused on your song.  For the first time, I did not watch the clock and I did not need to be aware of someone else’s impending impatience and boredom.   I was free to dig deep into myself and discover where the act of playing music could take me.

For the moment I have two minds again.  You went home to England and now a bigger part of me than ever watches a clock in the middle of a jam and counts days out of a calendar, aching for your return.   This time, though, I do not feel conflicted about keeping one mind somewhere else when I play music.  I know you will return, and I know that when you do I will never need to divide my musical attention again.

I keep myself busy until that day comes.

So the bike has stood in the corner of my dining room patient and insistent.  It waits for the day when I am home, the sun is shining, and the morning air is cool.  A day just like today.

It came packed inside two boxes, swaddled inside a bubble wrap blanket, and cushioned by styrofoam peanuts.  But it has no significant monetary value.  Banjo-ukuleles, sometimes called banjoleles, have never been sought after.  Even when they were being made in large mid-western musical instrument factories they were novelty items, nearly toys.

However, this particular banjo-uke belonged to my grandmother, Helen Louise Nestlerode, and it was an instrument she played her entire adult life.   She played it around the campfire and in the kitchen while Jana, her youngest daughter, washed dishes.  None of Helen’s children took up the uke, but Jana made sure that the instrument her mother used to serenade the family remained intact.

I never heard my grandmother Helen play or sing, she was always busy with one thing or another around the house. In fact, she never gave me an inkling that she was musical.  (Indeed when I took up the guitar, I thought I was the first in my family to do anything musical in at least 3 generations.)  I first saw her banjo-uke laying at the bottom of a closet in my grandparents big old house in Elmira, New York.  I was 21, my grandfather had recently died, and she was hoping I might find a memento of him somewhere in that chamber of artifacts.

I was enchanted by the size and novelty of the banjo-uke, and brought it out to show her.  I was surprised to learn it was hers and she wanted to keep it.  I can remember thinking, “Wow.  I had no idea.”

Years later, after Helen died, I asked about it.  But no one seemed to know where it was or what had happened to it.  The news saddened me a bit.  Musical instruments are frail uncertain things. Ignorance of instruments often leads to wild over-estimation of their monetary value.   But I was not worried that someone had attempted to profit from the sale of grandmother’s old banjo-uke.  I was worried that it had found its way to the bottom of a discard pile or been snapped but by a stranger at the estate sale.

I heard nothing about it for more than 15 years, so I just assumed it was gone.

A few summers ago I was back east for a family reunion, when my aunt Jana brought out Helen’s old Mauna Loa banjo-ukulele.   She must have had it all along.  I was both relieved and surprised.  Jana sought my knowledge regarding its proper upkeep and possible value (negligible).

Her boyfriend had strung the thing with steel guitar strings and securely wound those strings tight to the tuning machines.  The strings weaved in and out of the tuning machine post holes making it impossible to remove them without some serious cutting. I was afraid that any tool capable of cutting the guitar strings might also damage the fragile old friction tuners.   Worse, the strings, when tuned to pitch, were effectively folding the poor little thing in half.  And the tension had already damaged the original animal skin head.

In the end, all I could do was take the tension off the strings and suggest that my aunt take the banjo-uke to Vintage Instruments in Philadelphia.  That is the last time I saw it or heard about it until about a month ago when the old banjo uke arrived at my front door.

The email came from out of nowhere.   Did I still want Helen’s banjo-uke?  Absoloutely.  A week later the little Mauna Loa was freed from the confines of its shipping container and resting on my lap.

The first thing I noticed were the nylon strings, tied by experienced hands onto the tail-piece and wound around the tuning pegs.  Second I noticed the synthetic banjo head.  A pity really, but better than leaving the original damaged skin head on the instrument.  Aunt Jana had followed my advice: an expert had brought the instrument back from near collapse.

Musical instruments more than other inanimate objects seem to become the repositories of our memories.  Cheap guitars and toy ukuleles reflect the feelings we have about the people who played them in our lives.  They remind us visually and aurally about the people who played them.

“Barney Google” may have been a throw away, silly song for my grandmother.   But the fact that she sang it to her children made a deep impression on them.  It became a treasured memory.  After she died the only extant connection to those memories was her old, nearly discarded and abused, banjo ukuele.  It is the instrument she used to make those memories.

Receiving this instrument is an honor bestowed upon me by my aunt.  It is not an insignificant thing for most of the members of my family.  Like an African Griot, I have been given the responsibility of stewarding my aunts and uncles’ memories of their mother and carrying the tradition of touching lives with music.

The best way I know to honor the memory of Helen’s music is to make sure that the instrument on which she made that music continues to ring.  If I don’t it will become an inanimate object and lose connection with the life and love it has held for more than 70 years.

A few minutes after I cracked open the boxes, I set Helen’s uke up on a bookshelf and snapped a picture.  Then I sent Aunt Jana an email that included the photo letting her know that her prize had arrived safe and sound 2600 miles west of where it had started.  Now it is incumbent upon on me to play the thing, a happy responsibility.

As a young man learning to play, the guitar became the center of my sense of community.  Perhaps a dozen of my high school peers played guitar, as a group of enthusiasts we got together, shared songs, discussed music, and coveted higher quality instruments than we owned.  We were often competitive, but our shared interests and common location made us a community.

Later on, in college, I gigged around State College, Pennsylvania looking for a community to join.  But none of the people I fell in with were very good at creating or maintaining a sense of community.  State College is the home of Penn State, and as such has a high rate of residential turnover.  Since most of my band maters, jamming buddies, and fellow solo artists were only going to be in State College for a few years, none of them felt the need to create a community based around their musical endeavors.  And I had no idea that doing so would make playing music more sustaining and more rewarding.

I moved to Davis, California in 1988 to start a new band with some boyhood friends.  We very nearly pulled it off.  Again, not knowing the importance of community, we took our friends and fans for granted.  That nonchalance about the people who appreciated us pushed me out of the band and back to school.

My girlfriend at the time supported in my decision to leave the band despite the fact that it was the reason we met.  We married a few years later.  Thus, even my marriage was evidence of seeking community through music.

As both an undergrad and a graduate student at Sonoma State University, I focused on my studies.  Music became a spice of life rather than the staff of life.  And so I spent most of the 1990s fumbling around with a sort of psychological blindfold on.  I could neither find nor create a community that provided me a sense of complete belonging.

I discovered Bluegrass music about ten years ago.  My attraction to it has never been the music itself, though I like it well enough and I respect its better practitioners as excellent musicians.  What drew me to Bluegrass was the sense of community.  Here was an entire population who played, listened to, and enjoyed not only the music but each other’s company.  The community is tight knit, very organized, and it creates a strong sense of belonging.  I had stumbled (still without knowing it) into the very reason I started to enjoy music in the first place.  I was suitably hooked.

Recently I have been working on a musical project with a friend who lives in Niles.  Niles is a small enclave of the city of Fremont that is geographically isolated from the rest of the city and has a separate history.  These folks do community!  Local gardeners supply local restaurateurs.  Local musicians organize performances for the community and perform in them.  Everyone, it seems, in Niles feel like they are a part of something special and unique.  They honor it and draw both sustenance and enjoyment out of it.

As luck would have it, I have been made an honorary Nilesian.  (The regulars took a vote in Michael McNevin’s Mud Puddle Shop during a local jam.  [Look up Michael McNevin, he’s an excellent songwriter and singer who deserves your attention.]  Moreover, many a Nilesian has stopped to suggest I move to the town.  I have to admit a strong pull.  Such a warm, welcoming, and musical community seems like heaven to me.  I have good friends there and would be exposed to a lot of opportunities to play music.

Recently, my other (current) musical endeavor started gigging and finally settled on a name.  Beggar’s Banquet has played a couple of Riverbank’s “Sip & Stroll” events, performed in the lobby of the State Theater during a Modesto Art Walk, and most recently has served as a “tweener” for local Bluegrass band, Red Dog Ash.

Playing with Red Dog Ash was the inspiration for this column.  I noticed at the gig that the band had brought friends, family members, and even kids to the show.  The audience was diverse in age and background, but they seemed to know one another.  The connections are intricate and convoluted but they are there, and the guys in Red Dog Ash foster and support those connections.

It was a great night for a gig and a sort of epiphany for me. I realized upon reflection that Red Dog Ash is actively seeking to create a community.  Then I realized that I have been searching for a sense of belonging to a community through the act of sharing music.  And for one night I was exactly where I wanted to be.  I am happy to be a member of their community, and thrilled that they think Beggars Banquet can be an active part of it.

Suitably inspired by both Niles and Red Dog Ash, I’d like to begin to create my own musical community.  The trick for me is putting myself out there, letting people know who I am, what I do, and that they might enjoy it.  I am a bit shy about sharing my musical endeavors, and I’m a lousy self-promoter.  So I’ll need to turn over a backyard full of Modesto Ash and Sycamore leaves to change that about myself.  Leaf number one: I invite you to look me up on Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, or just Google me.  Contact me and come to a gig.  Maybe you and I can become part of each other’s community.

I play both acoustic and electric.  Context rules the choice of instrument.

• The contemporary folk band I’m in, Beggar’s Banquet, is all acoustic.  I tried using electric on a couple of tunes, but it did not work.  Using an electric changed the nature of the band entirely.  We started sounding more country and less folky.  So I stick with my Gary Vessel F5.

• Backing other “folk” artists like Michael McNevin I use the F5 as well.  Most people listen with their eyes.  If you’re playing acoustic music, they want to see an acoustic instrument.  As a mandolin player that means I need to use the F5.  Otherwise a significant portion of the audience will be thinking about what instrument I’m playing rather than enjoying the music.

• But I have a duo that does original music.  Bass and mandolin.  (We’re going to add a cajón player and make it a trio soon.) We aren’t as utterly inventive as Edgar Meyer and Chris Thile.  But we’re pretty good.  After listening back to some rough practice recordings, I decided to switch from the F5 to the electrics.

Here’s why…

1.  Sustain.  Matt, bass player, has a pretty active left hand.  Likewise, the standard archtop acoustic mandolin needs an active right hand because of a lack of sustain inherent in the instrument.  Going electric allows me to control sustain.
2. Shaping tone in lieu of midrange.  I can add chorus, flange, overdrive, delay, etc to an electric mandolin’s signal chain (though I think I’d like an effects loop soon).  This goes some way to filling the space normally taken up by guitar.  It provides aural interest and it allows me to more dramatically separate the solos from the rest of the song.
3. Versatility.  I’ve got three different electrics.  All of them are distinct in their basic tone and output levels.  This also allows me to shape tone in a way that I can’t if I stick with the F5.  For example, my Epiphone mandobird can achieve a tone that very closely resembles Carlos Santana’s guitar tone.  A little smooth overdrive is all I need and I’m ready for “Black Magic Woman.”  My Fender has an uncanny ability to mimic Jerry Garcia’s Strat tones.  And my new JBovier EMS comes off like a Les Paul in the hands of Slash.

Other benefits include…

1. Freedom from feedback issues in an amplified situation.  Solid body instruments don’t resonate to amplified frequencies.
2. Increased volume capacity.  I can get loud enough to be heard over a drummer.
3. Ease of play.  The 4 and 5 string electrics require less effort to play than my F5 because the lack double string courses.

If you’re a mandolin player and any of these issues sound familiar, think about grabbing an electric mandolin and an amp.  You won’t be sorry.

Six months after moving into my apartment, I began to wade through three large boxes holding more than 20 years of musical detritus.  Books, notebooks, sheet music, disembodied guitar parts, batteries, small tools, newspaper articles, and old magazines were scattered in heaps in the cardboard cartons.

At the bottom of one of them I found an old Tupperware cosmetics case containing wires, plugs, jacks, and a very or penknife. I also found a small balsa wood coffin protecting a shiny metal guitar pick.  And in a moment I was catapulted back more than two decades to Davis where I played in a rock band that for three years was the toast of the town.

The source of the pick was a man whose name I never really knew.  His handle was “Ice-Man,” he rode his bike everywhere, played passable guitar at local open mic nights, and loved the Grateful Dead.

Ice-Man also hand crafted guitar picks.  Small, one of-a-kind pieces of art, made of sheet metal and brass.  He called them “Ice Picks” and put uncounted hours of effort into their creation.  One day he handed me Ice Pick #6.

The band I was in had two other guitar players both of whom were better than me.  They should have been the recipients if Ice-Man had been making an objective decision.  So he must have thought I was more approachable, a safer place to risk the rejection of his handiwork.

I did not take it for granted.  I don’t remember the transaction, but I’m sure I said, “Thank you.” I am also sure that was the end of the interaction.

I thought enough of the pick to try it out, but as a guitar pick it did not work for me.  From then on the Ice Pick became a question.  I had no idea what to do with it.  I had no idea how to respect the giver and the gift.

Indecision became it’s own decision. The Ice Pick was too nice throw away and returning it would have embarrassed us both.  I put it in that Tupperware box and carried it with me as I moved from Davis to Modesto by way of Rohnert Park, Sebastopol, Richmond, and Emeryville.  It languished in the backs of closets and perched in the rafters of a garage until now.  It sits on my desk, here in front of me and asks me about the nature of the obligation a gift can create.

Wistfulness, regret, and apology mingle together and bubble up at the sight of this gift.  I feel like I let Ice-Man down. I kept his gift and did nothing with it.  The only way I can think to atone is to share the Ice Pick with you.  Maybe I have developed some eloquence that will serve both the giver and the gift.

Here then is Ice Pick #6…

The construction of this unique guitar accessory is simple: two thick pieces of sheet metal welded around a thin piece.  The outside pieces serve as the grips and give the pick weight.  The inside piece is free of the other two at the business end, and is intended to be the portion of the pick that contacts the strings.  The top outside piece carries Ice-Man’s emblem in brass, a lightning bolt.

Ice Pick #6 is clearly hand crafted. It lacks the kind of internal uniformity and fit that indicate automated fabrication.  But this is no criticism.  In these days of ultra-high tolerances and perfect fit, the open gaps and odd angles make it both charming and unique.  Your iPhone would not function were it hand made, but such things do not matter to the function of a guitar pack.

Indeed the overall shape, a tear drop, is enhanced by the gentle irregularities.  Though it is metal and can push its way through the side of an unsuspecting aluminum can, the Ice Pick’s shape and proportions give it a warm rather than cold aspect.  It doesn’t look like it could seriously damage your guitar if it fell between the strings and into the sound hole.

The case that serves as a home for Ice Pick #6 is also unique and hand crafted.  Made of stained balsa wood and shaped like a coffin, it communicates Ice-Man’s commitment to his creation.  Carved into the lid of the coffin is the basic shape of the pick, sans lightning bolt.  The bed is made of purple felt and the clasp is made of a small piece of Velcro.

When you hold the Ice Pick, you feel that warmth and a reassuring weight.  It’s neither too heavy, nor too light.  The highly polished metal would allow the pick to slide around between your fingers if Ice-Man had not emblazoned the top with that brass lightning bolt.  So the decoration serves a purpose, and does its job well.

The last point of consideration with regard to guitar picks is always the most important.  How does it affect the sound of the guitar?  In this case, all of the effort comes to naught.  The design of the Ice Pick forces the player to use only one end of the pick, the pointed middle layer of the sandwich.  Here the sheet metal is sharp edged, flat, and extremely flexible.  These three qualities combine to impart a very scratchy percussive sound, which most players will find unattractive.

I love everything about this pick except the sound it creates on steel strings.  So it will sit in a prominent place on my bookshelf and remind me to cherish the people who come into my life.

Thank you Ice-Man for both the gift and the lesson.

Eli Arrigotti (bass), Dixon Smith (banjo), Gary Vessel (mandolin), and Jason Winfree (guitar) each bring two important qualities to the their work in Red Dog Ash.  The first is a strong sense of Bluegrass tradition.  The second is a broader sense of musical knowledge and musical expression than studying only Bluegrass tradition would allow.  The two qualities combine to influence each member a little differently.

Eli Arrigotti’s songs are atmospheric in nature but speak of traditional Bluegrass themes like childhood and weather.  Gary Vessel writes music and lyrics in a deeply traditional vein, but the tone of his mandolin and the directional choices he makes in his improvisational solos declare his love of classical, jazz, and country even while he plays Bluegrass.

Jason Winfree is a lyrical heavyweight who tackles subjects that illustrate the hard life of American laborers from the Dust Bowl and Great Depression to present day.  Migrants and miners are favorite subjects, and he treats them all with care and respect.  The result is some compelling songwriting that expands –by just a bit– the harmonic structure of traditional Bluegrass music.

Dixon Smith lacks a lyrical voice on the album, but he fits the Red Dog Ash mold.  Without Smith playing banjo in the traditional Bluegrass style a few of the songs on Red Dog Ash could easily float into Country or Folk genres.  But Smith isn’t above a little playful use of phase shifting either.

If I were forced to label the music this band makes, I’d call it Modern Traditional Bluegrass.

I have been told I am talented.  It is a compliment I hope I receive graciously.  I’m not all that good at taking compliments, but the real reason I say, “I hope” because it is a sentiment that holds a basic concept with which I disagree.

Common among dictionary definitions of  “talent” is the idea that some people are born with an ability that makes them superior to most of the rest of us; a sort pre-natal leg up in the world.  Frankly, I don’t buy it.  Repeated studies by psychologists show that the only ability humans are born with is the ability to suckle.

I think we hold to a demonstrably inaccurate belief in “natural ability” because most folks cannot imagine being very skilled at an endeavor that fails to coincide with modern cultural norms of leisure and vocational activities.

Most of us come home from work and engage in a mindless activity.  We turn on the television of the computer.  We watch the creative output of people with whom we have no acquaintance let alone local contact.  The effect is compounded.  First, we consume creative output, we don’t engage in it.  Second, we do not have a lot of exposure to people who do spend their leisure time being creative.  So being in the presence of serious creative output that comes from local people is unusual and incomparable to events in everyday life.

Carrying all that cultural baggage makes the belief in innate advantage a fairly effective strategy for handling information that subtly contradicts our cultural expectations.  “I can’t imagine being that good a guitar player given the life choices I have made.  The musician in front of me is very good and obviously a member of my community, so he or she must have some gift from God that allows such skill to come more easily than it would for me.”

The advent of mass media in the late 1920’s, started this ball rolling.  Prior to radio networks, most entertainment was regional and the regions were small.  Indeed, one of the more popular ways to spend leisure time between about 1890 and the 1920 was to be a member of a local brass band, choir, or mandolin orchestra.

By the 1930s the Benny Goodman Orchestra could be heard on Saturday nights from coast to coast and all you had to do to “be there” was turn on your radio. On one hand this new development was a good thing: musicians exposed to players more skilled than themselves gained an opportunity to improve their skills based on that exposure.  On the other hand people who played music for their own entertainment –local band, choir, and orchestra members– began to prefer to listen and dance rather than play.

The growth and development of radio arrived as the technology for capturing live musical performances and broadcasting them met the law of supply and demand.  Radios that captured broadcasts were produced in ever increasing numbers, driving the price low enough to make ownership of a radio possible for most American households.  These developments continued to drive people away from making music and toward merely consuming it.

The upshot is that prior to 1930 most people actively made music –playing an instrument of some kind– and shared their musical endeavors with neighbors, friends, and family.  After that most people simply consumed music.

Thus the concept of talent arises out of a disbelief in one’s own ability to reach the same skill level as a person who demonstrates a high level of skill in music or a related creative endeavor.  Which means the term, “talent,” is short hand.  People who appear talented are the ones who shake off the cultural cues pointing us in the direction of ever more expensive, detailed, and passive entertainment experiences.  The talented among us spend their disposable income and leisure time learning new things, going after still unattained skills, rather than turning on the television.

In the ancient Greek region of Attica (Athens and its environs) the definition of “talent” was the amount of silver a skilled artisan or laborer could earn in nine years.  This throws a little light on how and why we use the word to denote something that appears God-given.

If you spent years learning a craft and then got paid for nine years to continue to work that craft, you would master it.  Your mastery would be demonstrable in your work; you could make it look effortless. People who were unfamiliar with the amount time you put in to your work would witness your apparent effortlessness and call it “talent.”

I prefer this older definition.  I know how many years of unpaid purposeful effort it has taken me to hone the connection between my ears, my mind, and my hands (30).  But many friends and acquaintances do not know how long I have been working at being a musician.  My apparent effortlessness seems to make these folks think that such skill is beyond them.

Here, then, is the reason I wanted to address this topic.  I want to tell them, and you dear reader, that a high degree of musical skill is not granted by inherited trait.  It is obtained through thousands of hours of effort.  But this is good news: being a good musician is not beyond your capability. All you have to do make a commitment and stick to it.

The rise of the personal computer is often cited as a significant factor in the decline of western civilization.  There is one way in which I think I might agree.  Computer graphics have made toy representations of musical instruments possible, and processing power has made faux musicianship possible as well.  In short, it is a lot easier now than it used to be to pretend to play music.

These days you can go to a local drug store and purchase a pantomime guitar made of plastic or cardboard.  And you can buy more than one computer game system that will allow you to pretend to play guitar with a very guitar-like game controller.  The problem with these developments (as I see it) is that kids use much less imagination than their parents did, and they are ever more dependent on visual cues to both manipulate and understand the world.

But for me, in 1978, both imagination and intent listening were deeply important to my enjoyment of music.  I did not have the ability to buy a toy guitar at the drug store, and computer games systems were limited to “Pong.”  So in order to pretend to be in a rock band I had to find a suitable guitar-like object with which to play along with my favorite albums.

The process of selecting a guitar-like object was both important and detailed.  My “axe” needed to be roughly the shape of a guitar.  It needed to be proportional in its dimensions, and it needed to be light enough to allow me to fly around my bedroom.  Lack of sharp edges would also be an important factor.  So I scoured the house for a suitable instrument.  Closets, cabinets, and storage spaces could hold no secrets from me.  Tools, cleaning supplies, and sports equipment seemed the best sources of guitar-like shapes.

Long handled garden tools have the right basic shape but they are poorly balanced and a bit too long to be suitable stand-ins for guitar.  Take the shovel as an example.  The length alone forces you to strum somewhere north of the “body” of the guitar.  You end up waving your clenched hand over the spot where the metal meets the wood rather than over the blade of the thing.  The act of strumming the “neck” ruins the illusion.  Plus, I could imagine knocking over a lamp in the middle of a screaming guitar solo and blowing a fuse.  The shovel stayed in the shed.

I left the hoe and the rake alone.  I had the wisdom at 14 to know that guitars should not have blades or tines on them.  I was prepared to bleed for my art, but only figuratively.

So I went into the house to investigate the cleaning supply closet.  The broom is a definite improvement on the garden tools.  It weighs less than the shovel, lacks a blade, and the bristles are much softer than tines.  But the length is still wrong and the proportions are off.  The neck of the guitar would be impossibly long and skinny.   (Broken lamps returned to my imagination.)

Plus, it would be just my luck that someone would come home in the middle of my (OK Jimmy Page’s) solo on “Whole Lotta Love” and need to sweep.  Utter embarrassment and deep frustration at the imposition of reality would have been compounded by a parental order to use the broom for its intended.  I could hear my mother saying, “If you’re going to keep the broom in your room, you’ll have to do all the sweeping.”  The broom stayed in the closet.

Mops, both dust and damp, stayed in the closet too.  In the first place I’m allergic to dust.  I did not want runny eyes to interfere with my macho posturing, and sneezing ruins all but the strongest comedic moods.  In the second place… Eww.  No.

Moving into the coat closet where the sports equipment lurked, begging for the light of day, I found a golf club and a baseball bat.  The club lacked enough body to serve well as a guitar, even though it was a wood.  But the bat was much closer to the right length than any of my previous guitar-like objects had been.  I was getting warm.

The baseball bat got a full 3-song try out.  By the end of the third song, “Toys in the Attic” by Aerosmith, my left hand was tired from holding the bat at a guitar-like angle.   Further, I had realized that it was too rounded to work well.  A guitar has a finger board that is flatter than the back of the neck, a bat is round all the way around.  Nope.  Back to the coat closet.

Down behind decades old army surplus sleeping bags, hanging out next to a pair of rubber overshoes that I had not worn since I had learned to squirm long enough to make my mother throw her hands up in frustration and fear that I would die of a soggy-foot induced bout of pneumonia, I found a tennis racquet.

It was shorter than the bat, but it was light and well balanced.  It was also proportioned decently when viewed as a guitar.  I tried a couple of poses there in the front hall: success!

The tennis racquet passed the audition easily.  Size, proportion, balance, and weight all made this the perfect guitar-like object.  But it had an added dimension of being strung.  I found the strings made the tennis racquet and the guitar conceptually sympathetic.  The final advantage was that my parents’ tennis playing days were long over so no one would interrupt and embarrass me by looking for the missing racquet.

Tennis racquet in hand, I was prepared for the next few years to return home from school and blow off steam by rocking out with my favorite rock bands in my bedroom.