When I was about nine years old in Baton Rouge, Louisiana my best friend got a guitar. One look at it and I was in love. The following Christmas it was my turn. That was in was 1966, if I recollect correctly. I was over the moon with happiness. My parents provided me with lessons straight away, which I then attended on Tuesdays with a German man named Gutweiler.
After two lessons, I was exasperated with the curriculum. At that juncture, I could only read the notes for the high E and the C strings. My last homework assignment had been to play Rueben, Rueben I've Been Thinking on those two strings. My friend was playing classical Spanish pieces like a professional by age ten. I still cannot read sheet music today.
I quit the lessons. I was listening to WLCS AM Baton Rouge on my Zenith radio and my father’s Lightnin' Hopkins blues records on our stereo. My guitar was a steel stringed affair and the action was so high it tore the flesh from my fingers. Looking back, it was the perfect platform for learning on. Even then, I knew if I could make that drug-store box sound halfway nice, I could make a good guitar sing.
Rejecting the study of the theory of music completely at that time in my life, I developed a method of figuring out how to play songs that I loved. Happily willing to spend hours and hours practising until I could express them in my own way, using my own repertoire of limited techniques. I supplemented those beginnings with reading about different guitar players and their particular methods.
For many years I had nothing much to show for my efforts. When my family moved to Lynn Valley, British Columbia, I took my guitar to school everyday and met some other players. I had given my guitar a new custom paint job of red, white and blue in tribute to a Merle Haggard album cover I’d once seen. My American and Texas colours weren’t well accepted in the Canada's True North Strong and Free.
That original guitar was finally replaced when I purchased my first Yamaki from meagre wages. One of my Argyle Senior Secondary School mates, who was a cousin of Neil Young, purchased a Martin guitar from the same little music shop on Lonsdale Ave. on that very same afternoon. I sure wanted a dreadnought like his, when I had the money and figured I was worthy of the instrument.
My beloved little Yamaki accompanied me everywhere. It was a desk, a pillow, a table, a friend, a passport, a partner in crime and an all around excellent companion. I dragged it across Canada, the USA and Mexico. I wrote all the songs I have ever written to date on that spruce-topped six-string. I plastered the brown leather case with decals and stickers from everywhere I travelled. That was something I had seen on a Hank Snow album cover as a boy.
Once, I was in Portland, Oregon on my way back to Canada from a run down to the City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco with a friend. I was sitting in a public park and had just applied the last possible sticker to the last bare spot on my august guitar case. It was a depiction of the celebrated Red Rose of Portland. A man walked across the green with his dog to listen to me play. I played Old Man by Neil Young and as I played, the man swayed and tapped his foot on the grass. His dog however, took issue with my third song, cocked its leg and relieved its bladder square onto the Rose of Portland.
That guitar met its destiny one sad day after my second wife had used it to emphasize her point in an argument. Before I could prevent it, the instrument’s body was descending in an arc above my head and I instinctively blocked with my elbow. That action easily cracked the fragrant mahogany back. I knew immediately that there was an immediate and important choice to be made.
I had grown more emotionally attached to that instrument than to any other personal possession in my life. For my hot tempered wife to treat it in such a manner was the greatest insult and emotional hurt that could have been done to me at that time in my life. I was as angry as Ragnar the Viking before he was forced to jump into the English King’s pit of starving wolves. Thus, I correctly reasoned that my passionate rage could in no way be taken out on a woman. It could, on the other hand, be vented and quelled on that guitar. Such was my past experience of abuse that my choice at the time, seemed to be limited to that self-wounding possibility.
I left the apartment with my guitar and went into the back yard. I smashed and crushed my beloved instrument into pieces no bigger than walnuts. It was akin to the old stage show of The Who. A man next door heard the horrible commotion and watched me sheepishly from his own balcony. Our eyes met briefly like two strange dogs passing on the street.
“Good day for smashing up a nice guitar all to shit, I figure,” he said.
“Yep.”
I never replaced that guitar nor played any other one for more than a decade after that incident. When I got married to my third, last and proper wife, I went to a little old music shop in New Westminster, British Columbia and discovered a Yamaki guitar, very similar to the one I had destroyed. I bought it and sat it in the back of my closet while I raised my family. I was blessed with two children over the ensuing years and they saw me play guitar only once or twice while they were growing up.
My elder son learned to play the Chinese erhu and my youngest son took up both the harmonica and the guitar. He is left-handed and taught himself to play guitar right-handed. He formed a couple of bands and began to walk a musical road. He convinced me to have my Yamaki refurbished by a wonderful Ukrainian luthier he knew in Vancouver. I followed his advice and my instrument rang like a well seasoned Martin. I put it back in the closet when I got home.
When I was young, footloose, single and playing guitar on a daily basis, my biggest fan was my grandmother in Beaumont, Texas. She always sat me down on a kitchen chair and made me play for her whatever I'd written, while she cooked us up some delicious food. She always told me that I could make it onto the radio if I tried. She would call her friends over to her house to drink beer and sing along.
One day, in the Summer of 2012, I was minding my own business on my couch after a shift as a Vancouver letter-carrier for Canada Post. I became aware of a presence and felt a very strong urge to get up and to do something. I soon identified the presence of my deceased Texas grandmother and her message for me was to go get a microphone and record the songs I had written decades ago, before I lost them.
I jumped up and bought a cheap microphone, raced home and plugged it into my computer. I got the newly strung guitar out of my closet. I sat down and started to see if I could remember anything. The first thing I discovered was that I couldn't use a flat-pick anymore. In the past I had always used one unless I was finger picking. To my surprise, I now found that I could only use my bare hands even when I was not finger-picking.
I sat and let the songs roll out one by one. I played my best and I could feel my grandmother's spirit sitting there with me. It was like a concert for the other side of the curtain. I had to work a Friday shift the next morning and when I returned home, I didn't stop until my project was complete, many hours later. My wife brought me pineapple juice and when I discovered what it did to my voice, I requested some honey. I ate globs of honey and washed them down with the pineapple juice. Together they made my voice just possible to listen to.
After an all-nighter, I was finished and I had seventeen tracks. Nine were my own compositions and eight were some of my favourites by other song-writers. I took a picture of my guitar in the early morning sun on my wife's Celtic patterned shawl, tweaked the colours on my computer, named the whole project Chicory and burned about a hundred copies onto CDs.
I sent copies to my scattered friends and acquaintances all over the world. Some of whom I had played with and some I had played for. I am not likely to ever do another recording that would resemble those songs on Chicory. Some of those tunes are over forty years old and were the musical and poetic expressions of the young man I was at that time.
No guitarist really knows what they sound like while they're playing. When passively listening to a recording afterwards, they may hear all kinds of little nuances and accents that they weren't previously aware of. When I sat back to listen to Chicory a few days later, I heard red-wing blackbirds, freight trains, cicadas, my grandfather’s Swedish-Texan lilt-twang, Louisiana rain, Lynn Creek gurgling over rocks, Gulf of Mexico breezes and North wind blowing through pine trees. My intent was to preserve and to share my creation. My desire is that someone somewhere gets a warm clap on the shoulder from one of my old songs when they need it the most.
If you want to hear some of my tunes from Chicory and some of my son’s early compositions, please go here - http://radiolillooet.ca/s/bobcat-logic/posts/1156/
fin