I am 12, living in an old farmhouse owned by my aunt Gerry and uncle Jack. We have fled here, my mother, brothers, sister and I following our parent’s divorce—my mom chain smoking her way from gas fill-up to cheap motel, pulling a U-Haul with all our earthly possessions along behind, driving three of her four children, a cat and a dog half way across the country from Des Moines, Iowa, to Galway, New York. We will start in a new school. My mom will look for work. My oldest brother will come home from college and live here with us, where he and my other brother and I will play endless games of wiffleball: over the driveway in the air, a double, hit the side of the house, a triple, on the roof, a home run.
It was my next oldest brother, Brad, and I who discovered the attic. The pull down stairs in the back bedroom led up into a dark, mysterious place filled with treasure—a flag with 48 stars, letters from an old, old relative of my mother’s written during the Civil War, a wind-up alarm clock—and most remarkable of all, two old guitars, one steel-stringed, one nylon-stringed, and a pile of guitar books, including Mel Bay’s How to Play Guitar. Soon, we had learned a few chords, could play though most of the folk songs and hymns in other books. He took the steel guitar, the nylon for me. That was the beginning—feeling the ineffable magic of pushing fingers into strings, plucking, strumming, tapping above the sound hole and music erupting into the air.
I write this opening just minutes after I’ve put away my 1983 Yamaha Grand Concert classical guitar I bought new in college, somewhat foolishly trading in a beloved Guild acoustic whose model number I can’t remember (my advice to guitarists: never sell or trade a guitar) to acquire the Yamaha and start to learn classical. The Yamaha’s cedar soundboard wood has mellowed to a lovely orange-ish brown. I’ve been working through Bach’s Lute suites, transcribed for guitar, working hard to master several movements throughout the long, lonely days of the pandemic, when playing guitar became something still more essential to who I am, to what matters. The fugue from what was originally the C Minor Lute Suite, BWV 997, has taken an especially long time to get to a point where, depending on the day and how much sleep I’ve gotten, and my mood, and the barometric pressure…I can almost play through without making a mistake. And there are even days, moments, when I can begin to feel that magic occur when I’m no longer reading notes or just trying to get things right, and I start playing music, communicating—a rich, wash of emotional intensity vibrating out into the air. And there are places in this fugue, say from measures 73-86, where I very nearly can bring myself to tears if I get it right, if those little black marks on the page move in through my eyes on into my brain, through the web of nerve endings there and back out into my fingers making the guitar “say” something that becomes more than just notes, words almost, a haunting chant, a reply, atonal moments resolving into major then minor chords then moving into a diminished mood before touching back down, pressing against your heart. The language of music is inexplicable, yet somehow something we all understand. Playing guitar all these years, though never devoting myself fully enough to it, as the masters have—the Segovias, Kotkes, Nels Clines, Djangos, Doc Watsons, Stevie Rays (the list is far far too long)—has given me a sense of what it is to not only understand the language of music, but to also, from time to time, find a way to speak it.
In those very early days, my brother and I quickly transitioned from our Mel Bay books to learning riffs from favorite songs by ear. Then my mom somehow cajoled us into playing hymns, and we even became regulars at the small, Baptist church we attended, my mom, sister and me harmonizing on “Old Rugged Cross,” “I Come to the Garden Alone,” “Church in the Valley by the Wildwood,” Brad never singing, just playing the chords steady and strong on his old Silvertone, me trying to do some finger style thingees on my no-name classical-style guitar, which had a split in the bracing where the neck attached to the body, so the further down the neck you went the harder you had to press. Pastor Ham always announced us as “The Sabatellos,” unable, for some reason to ever get our last name right.
Chapter 2 of my life in guitars came in college, at St. Lawerence University, when I heard a bluegrass player at a local bar, and I was blown away. I’d never heard anything like the flat picking he was doing, his pick flipping up and down, all those notes jumping out into the smokey air of the bar, his left hand running up and down and all around, landing on strummed chords—playful, exuberant. I had to learn how to do that. I asked him after the show if he gave lessons, and he did, but I’d need a steel-string guitar, and he recommended a Guild from a local store that soon became mine after I spent all of my savings up to then and my oldest brother, Randy, chipped in the rest. It was my first nice guitar. My first “real” guitar. I can still remember the earthy, woody smell of it when I’d open the case and see it shimmering there amidst all that deep green velour, the heft of it in my hands, the way the notes burst forth into my small dorm room when I strummed a chord. And soon I was plucking away at the classics, “Whiskey Before Breakfast,” “Arkansas Traveler,” “Rocky Road.”
But by my junior year, after hearing a classical guitarist and also asking him for lessons, him also telling me I’d need a new guitar, the Yamaha mentioned above—I blindly relinquished my now long lost Guild to start another guitar journey. I would drive my roommates crazy practicing Segovia scales, up and down, first with index and middle finger, then index and third finger, then middle and third finger, and then back again on the next string….I poured myself into it, neglecting school work, and by my senior year, I performed a Vivaldi piece with a whole, local orchestra behind me. I even briefly considered going onto graduate school in guitar, to really taking the plunge (and if I had an extra life to live, it would be worth seeing where that road would have taken me).
And there would be other journeys. In graduate school, I acquired a Guild M-80 electric guitar—twin humbucker pickups, double cutaways, sunburst finish, mother of pearl inlay—a thing of beauty—and an early 70s Fender Twin Reverb Amplifier. I managed this without selling my Yamaha classical, the one I regularly play to this day. I was playing lead guitar soon in a band of other graduate English students pursuing MFAs in poetry and fiction. We wrote our own songs, played every Thursday night in a tool shed out in the back of our drummer’s farmhouse. Our songs were loud, brash, exhilarating to play. The other guitarist, Steve, played more like a percussionist, slamming away at the body and strings of his Gibson so frenetically I referred to him as being full of fury, so we soon called ourselves “The Sound and the Fury,” from Faulkner’s famous novel, the line he took from Macbeth. And while we may well have been “poor players,” “idiots” even, we knew our full-of-fury sound signified something. We were “signifying” a lot, in fact, letting out our frustrations, making music that seemed like the epitome of art to us—out of the classroom, not trying to impress our professors or peers, just banging away on our axes, saying something, becoming vessels of angry, gritty sound, our RAT pedals turned to the max, our eardrums getting permanently scarred. Here I started, finally, to understand the raw power of amplified guitar music, of the effects you can layer onto them with a stomp of a pedal or two, the things they can say that no other instrument can, the ways playing music, playing guitar can transport you and give you back the voice you never knew you owned.
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