The next flash came when I saw 10000 Maniacs perform on television. They eclipsed so much of what I had been listening to. Natalie Merchant’s voice and Robert Buck’s guitar style took me someplace brand new. Hair bands still occupied the attention of the masses at this time. Those androgynous harlequins with their teased, bleached hair, pointy guitars, and vacuous songs went to extremes that probably left Bowie and even hard-line drag queens shaking their heads. 10000 Maniacs were the antithesis. The band was smartly dressed (the men would have been at home in an Irish pub or a bookstore) and let the quality of the songs hold the listener’s attention; no laser light show, no troupe of dancers, no cannon onstage, no guitar smashing. Natalie stood before the microphone in a lavender dress or a floral skirt instead of leather and stiletto heels. This was no Madonna who had to sell her product through excesses of flesh and flash. Her natural skin, full mouth, expressive eyes, and brunette flip became my idea of attractive. The fact that she was a magnificent vocalist and writer put her over the top and she became a mild obsession (I’ve never gone overboard obsessing!). Jamestown, New York gave birth to something wholly unique and it captivated me. Music could be engaging and intelligent.
A fortuitous and unlikely thing happened. Through some clerical error in the workings of the universe, a song appeared on AOR and Top 40 radio so unlike anything that had come before. I distinctly recall the first time I heard it –because my father turned it off midway through. Driving in the family’s maroon Chrysler (how I loathe that color on a car), the song came on the stereo. Silvery, shimmering acoustic guitars which sounded as remote and lonely as radio tower lights came over the speakers, foreign and familiar at the same time. The voice, intimate and inaccessible began, almost speaking:
‘Sometimes when this places gets kind of empty
The sound of the breath fades with the light
I think about the loveless fascination
Under the Milky Way tonight’
The connectivity was instant and I felt an icy thrill. Surefooted electric guitars rang in the chorus with restrained power and a sense of cool majesty. Dad switched it off during the E-bow / bagpipe chorus but I soon discovered the artist and album from whence the song came. I purchased the album and immersed myself in it and so began a great period of discovery. The group was the Church, a loose-limbed bunch of continent-hopping (mostly Australian) hipsters; the album simply entitled Starfish. Beautiful tones, adroit musicianship, sweeping arrangements, and lyrics which piqued the imagination and touched upon the human experience in ways I’d not heard before were the immediate hallmarks of this group. Songs such as ‘Lost’ gave form to the (self-imposed?) teenage solitude I was experiencing; it was catharsis.
Far more than a wake-up call, this music opened up a whole new world of possibility.
My town has long had a voracious appetite for small businesses. They are soon devoured and never heard from again. My senior year of high school two such businesses made a go of it; one a record shop, the other an instrument shop. A great deal of my money was poured directly into my ears. Looking back, it is a terrible shame that cassette tapes had such a finite life-span, cos I amassed a superb collection of music. Still I had not crossed over to learning an instrument and it was with mute admiration that I watched others perform.
Years before, my grandmother had taught me a few songs on the piano. She showed me how to play ‘Good King Wenceslas’ and some 1940s boogie-woogie rolls. As many of you may know, I was in a new school almost annually. We moved in the middle of my sixth grade year and I ended up in a rural public school. The music teacher asked me if I could play anything; so I sheepishly made my way to the piano and managed to play my grandmother’s jazz bit perfectly. It was a strange thrill to play (probably less than 2 minutes) and even stranger to see the faces of the other students.
High school and army basic training behind me, I entered the workforce for less-than princely wages. I pored over the racks in the record shops of Lexington and soon made my last important discoveries before I picked up the guitar. Reading, England’s Sundays were a perfect fit. Harriet’s voice remains one of the most pleasing I have ever beheld. But it was her (now) husband’s brilliant guitar style which hooked me. His lush acoustic strumming and crystal clear arppegios were striking to me. When I listened to their breakthrough song, ‘Here’s Where the Story Ends’, lost snatches of my childhood surfaced in my mind. The guitar reminded me of driving through a very yellow early autumn Ohio, watching the telephone poles race by my window and of trips to Seibaugh Park, stopping afterwards to pick raspberries by the roadside. Harriet’s lyrics not only brought England to me, but I could relate to her song’s subject matter and empathize with the emotional content. Johnny Marr, it seemed was behind a great many of the songs I enjoyed but it was his post-Smiths work which spoke to me in those days. His epic guitar work on The The’s Mindbomb opened my ears to new sounds, but it was acoustic guitar solo on Electronic’s ‘Getting Away With It’ which insisted I learn more about this man and his quiet influence.
Johnny Clegg and Savuka (so this is what Paul Simon was going for!) brought South Africa into my vernacular. I’m still drawn to that clean, dry guitar style.
Scotland’s Trashcan Sinatras and Lloyd Cole caught my attention –and became lifelong fixtures.
From my freshman year of high school and up through the nineties, I was very close with the mother of a friend and following our graduation, she and I became good friends. She was no Mrs. Robinson, as some suggested at the time, but rather a lonely woman with room for one more in her family. When her husband was sent to Iraq to fight in the Gulf War, she was left with control of the checkbook and I was thus taken to a music shop a guitar and amp. It was 1991.
My first guitar was a black Stratocaster copy and my first amplifier was a dreadful little solid state affair which had two sounds: brassy and distorted. After a week of terrible noise, I bought a little analog tuner. An old dictionary had a chord diagram marked G (though I soon discovered this to be a G7). And so, with a belated start, I began teaching myself to play the guitar. Bloodying my fingertips and knuckles, I worked at it every with every free moment. Each new chord sequence was a revelation to me. For months I used only my ears. When I stumbled upon the A –Amaj7 –A7 progression, I began to feel I was actually making music. Never seeking lessons, I purchased a few of those dreadful ‘piano, vocal, guitar’ songbooks to help guide me along. It didn’t take me long to discern how appallingly inaccurate they can be –but at least I learned some new chords. It was here that my ignorance reared its foolish head. Many of the songs I was learning had stock progressions and it struck me that if I used them in my own songs, I would be guilty of plagiarism and all sorts of copyright infringements. So I never played straight G – C –D or A –B –E progressions. Without knowing the theory or the proper terms, I began embellishing my chord shapes with extra notes (slash chords) and utilizing moveable shapes and open strings.
Soon I traded my electric guitar for an acoustic (a Martin clone made by Kay), knowing in my heart that the Strat copy was junk. Now my guitar was mobile and I took it with me everywhere. I had a job working three 12 hour shifts overnight, leaving me with four sleepless nights each week –which I spent with a tape recorder, notepad, and my guitar, wood-shedding and writing until the sun rose.
I could be found busking a bit and even made my way to a stage, peforming a version of ‘Verdi Cries’ with someone**. Thoughts of performing and electric guitars took hold of me and there was one word on my lips: Rickenbacker.
With precious little knowledge of these venerable guitars, I took out a high finance loan, marched into Willcutt Guitar Shoppe and said, “I want to order a Rickenbacker.”
The store owner laughed, and said, “We’re going to need a downpayment.” In the weeks to follow I discovered that a great many of the artists whose music inspired me also played the same guitar –with its sweeping crescent cutaways, deco appointments, and German carve’ relief; Marty Willson-Piper, George Harrison, Johnny Marr, Peter Buck, Pete Townshend, Paul Atkinson, Jim Mogine, Hilton Valentine, etc.
Some months later my guitar arrived (a Jetglo 360V64 in a silver Tolex case). It was early 1995.
Since then I have fathered children, married and divorced, gotten a proper job (no more high finance loans!), played for hundreds of people, written and recorded scores of songs, and owned numerous instruments. My passion for music has never faltered and I hope I’m only at the beginning of my journey.
A few nights ago I was walking out of work; ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ was playing. During George’s solo a man I’ve never met before made eye contact with me; a black man in his fifties, sitting on a forklift. He looked at me, brought his hands up as if holding a guitar,
feigned picking a few notes, and smiled.
He knew.
* this would later figure in a very important chapter
** a long story, that
My journey pt. 2
My journey pt. 2
Shaking the floor of Heaven
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sloop_john_b
- Rick-a-holic
- Posts: 13836
- Joined: Tue Jan 25, 2005 6:00 am
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lyle_from_minneapolis
- Advanced Member
- Posts: 2530
- Joined: Sun Nov 19, 2006 7:13 pm
I enjoyed that read too, Noel, nice writing. Maybe I missed it, but what amp do you use with that Rickenbacker? And if you don't need loans these days, I suggest you try to get Jingle Jangle to build you a Rickenbacker-approved acoustic. Makes me wanna cry to think what they must sound like.
Here is where I hide my music:
http://www.soundclick.com/MarkKaufman
http://www.soundclick.com/MarkKaufman
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melibreits
- Senior Member
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- Joined: Wed Mar 12, 2003 6:00 am
- Contact:
