My First Guitar

by Julia Crowe

  Odair Assad: Our challenge with the guitar was to have pleasure with playing. I always seem to have pleasure playing because we are doing new things. From the beginning, Sergio was always striving and reaching and thinking in new ways, first to have a second guitar and now he is composing. We are always doing different projects and have done so many already and will be doing more. I tell my students not to follow this classical guitar path. Nowadays it is so difficult because there are so many incredible players — so where is there to go? When we started playing, there was no other guitar duo. Now there are many guitar duos.

  Sergio Assad: We have been so faithful to our guitar maker Thomas Humphrey, and we still play his guitars today as when we first did, twenty-five years ago. When we first met him here in New York in 1979, he showed us his guitars at the time but we did not like them. They were nothing special. But then we started talking — and he was a good talker. He had this new idea for an elevated fretboard on his guitar. I said to him, when you make it, I want to try it. It was his Millennium model guitar, which everyone is now copying.

  It is just amazing to me how many people have copied and are copying his guitar all over the world. When I first saw the Millenium, I asked him, “What do I do with that?” We bought it immediately. I think we have the second set from the first thirty guitars he made of this model. People tried to play down what he created. So many methods had been tried from the eighteenth through nineteenth century, many innovations. It is true that there is someone who did make an elevated fretboard, but why did no one else do this? Humphrey was criticized for creating this guitar with the elevated fretboard because he was the first to do it, and then everyone else jumped on the idea later and copied it without giving credit to him.

  Odair Assad: I was especially happy with this guitar model for my role in the duo because I play all the high notes and they are much easier to reach on this guitar. Nowadays there are so many incredible guitar makers.

  Wings on My Fingers

  Room #19 never turned up again, yet the blaze he’d kindled in me with the guitar continued to intensify. I played because it put wings on my fingers and freed my mind. I probably played too many pieces dashed with rasgueados in the minor key, but when I did, whatever troubled me spilled out into the air and dissipated into a sweeter sound.

  I entered a city-wide musician’s competition at age 14, playing against a coat-tailed pianist who could make the keyboard sound like rolling thunder and a man who could make a bent saw wail like a storm of ghosts. I had no idea that such an ugly, brutal-toothed piece of hardware was capable of producing such a shimmering and ethereal howl. I was not convinced that the century-old piece by Tárrega that I’d prepared could even compare.

  Each park district held its own competition to winnow down the talent pool to its first round. One lady pianist, dressed in a bright, floral prairie-style dress with a lacy doily collar, was rumored to be a cheating carpetbagger who was trying to sneak in a second shot after losing in her own district days earlier. I didn’t think I stood half a chance against anyone, as I could barely croak out the name of the two pieces I was going to play, “Lágrima” and “Romanza.” It didn’t help that I was following a hyper middle-school kid who sang a hoarse, frenzied version of “My Sharona.” The audience, sitting on folding chairs inside the Indian Boundary Park Field House, squirmed uncomfortably when his pubescent voice cracked out the racy lyrics.

  Staring into the dimly lit front row of folding chairs, I noticed one of the judges smiling at me, and I forgot about the overwhelming sea of faces in the room and played for him. As soon as it was all over with, I scrambled back to my safely anonymous seat beside my mom.

  “You’re not going to win,” she snapped.

  I know she said it out of her own anxiety, but it left me stung and surprised. I swallowed my hurt and returned my attention to the stage. All this just reaffirmed my own certainty that all the glory would go to the man with the saw. It took me a minute to register the judges were calling my name to present me with the gold medal.

  Both DePaul University and Roosevelt College sent letters offering music scholarships though I was only a freshman in high school. I performed at the Daley Center and Grant Park, where the cooler-by-the-lake winds detuned my guitar and swallowed up its sound. At guitar society gatherings, where men twice my age labored through elaborate fingerings, I played the same compositions with slouchy nonchalance. I did not know what to say to these much older, muy macho men who painstakingly Krazy-Glued sliced-up ping-pong balls onto their broken fingernails and made everything out to be ten times more difficult and mysterious than it really needed to be. I half-listened to their tales of note-hitting prowess; obsessions over details and technicalities seemed to be more vital to them than just losing themselves to the joy of the music. It felt weird to me because we loved the same thing, the guitar, yet I felt troubled by their extreme possessiveness and strange need to dictate hierarchies, pecking orders, rankings — who was the best player, the fastest player, what was the most difficult piece, the most beautiful piece. And, most importantly, who was better than whom. Music in discussions like these felt dominated by ego rather than spirit.

  My teacher, Sonia, sent me traveling to competitions in remote and wealthy suburbs, where I wound up winning, but it always somehow felt stolen or tainted by someone else’s disappointment. One competition left me feeling like a toy poodle at the Westminster Dog Show. After the announcement I had won, a teacher of a competitor approached Sonia and said to her, “Nice left hand.” It took me a few minutes to realize he was referring to my left hand, ignoring me despite the fact I was standing right there. The guitar was my one sanctuary where I knew I could be myself, but my distaste for the culture of competitions made me feel like a Woolworth’s dime-store parakeet escaped from its cage, flapping wildly out of control without a clue as to where I was going to land.

  When I play, it feels, for a brief moment, like I am immersed in a different time, a different language, a different sensation, a different part of the world — anywhere but here. Time hangs and my fingers seem to have their own memory that allows every emotion inside of me to resonate through a Villa-Lobos prelude. My right hand flies while the left glides as I let loose all that I would like to say and feel but cannot or should not.

  My bedroom curio shelf filled quickly with a series of fluted plastic trophies topped with golden lyres. My mother complained to my grandmother that she had created a monster. People advised her that I should audition for Juilliard but my mother, with her Master’s Degree in Art Education, remained convinced that pursuing anything that smelled of art could only lead to a schmucky day job that eventually turned into your full-time, schmucky career. Both my mother and grandmother agreed on this much — playing a guitar did not make money. Playing a guitar would not get you anywhere.

  It was their usual crabbing, I figured, a sort of faint but permeating scent that I’d grown used to, like the smell of bleach and Murphy Oil flax soap part of the rooming house routine, where someone was always making a mess to clean up, paying the rent late or finding another unexpectedly devious way to break the rules.

  When I first started lessons, they demanded I practice at least thirty minutes a day because their hard-earned money was on the line. But I never practiced. I assured other aspiring students that I had, in fact, never practiced. When all their little faces brightened at the notion of being liberated from the daily drudgery of having to sit alone in a room with their guitar, I told them that rather than practicing, I played. I could play all day. It drove my mother and grandmother nuts, playing and replaying the same pieces over and over to the point where my grandmother finally laid down an ultimatum that I had to stop because she couldn’t think straight and her scarlet-fever sensitized ears were ringing and I might cause her to lose her hearing altogether along with the remaining tenants in the house.

  Not long after the fire, I had stumbled across a treasure trove of record albums stashed on a narrow bookshe
lf behind the door that lead from the small den off the living room into the piano roll corridor: there was Shirley MacLaine in fishnets as Irma La Douce, a ruby-lipped Connie Francis, Dave Brubeck in a sky blue suit and skinny tie, Sammy Davis Jr., whose photo I scrutinized for a sign of his glass eye, and the exotic Yma Sumac, the five-octave Voice of Xtabay. I found albums by Cannonball Adderly, Johnny Mathis, Sam Cooke and Chubby Checker interspersed with orchestral recordings of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker. I became mesmerized by an album photo of my grandmother’s Peggy Lee, where she looked like a pudgy Midwestern version of Botticelli’s Venus, dressed in a snug spangled white sheath under a solitary spotlight.

  Julia Crowe, age thirteen, performing at Indian Boundary Park, Chicago, Illinois. (Courtesy Julia Crowe)

  Each album contained a paper sleeve covered with liner notes written lovingly by experts, critics and producers. They all spoke of slinky smoky legendary jazz clubs attended by gods of music who performed their most memorable concerts long before I was born. The other side of the paper sleeve offered miniature previews of artwork for at least a dozen other forthcoming albums, which in almost all cases, we did not have. The jaunty lettering and garish, fading colors of these cardboard album covers suggested an intoxicating blend of fun, sophistication and glamour that did not exist in my household. Finding this music was like stumbling over a secret time capsule that promised to spirit me back to another time of this house, a life that once revolved on a record turntable.

  This curiosity about nightclubs and theaters inspired a girlfriend and me to sneak into the Apollo Theater on Lincoln Avenue to prowl and root around for a potential souvenir. We were caught within minutes by the stage manager. To throw him off guard, we broke into a song by Tom Lehrer, a snippet of “The Masochism Tango,” which charmed him into suggesting that before we leave we take home some flyers from other shows around town. We complied, mostly out of relief not to be in any real trouble.

  When I cleaned out my backpack, I discovered that one of these flyers showed a 1940s-style comic book rendering of a haggard man in a loosened necktie, office papers slipping from his hands, looking as if he had utterly given up on the world. The Practical Theatre logo was same stencil script you’d find stamped on munitions box. Art Is Good, it read, along the bottom. The theater address, 703 Howard Street, was less than three blocks away from my house.

  Across the street, past the am/pm minimarket; past the Smiles! Dental Services, past the medical prosthetics store with its walkers, canes and portable potties; past the blue-and-white trim of The Cottage diner and a new storefront travel agency with its special one-time airfares to Kingston, Port-au-Prince and Mexico City — I cupped my hands over the plate glass storefront window of 703 Howard Street and saw a blown-up black-and-white photograph of John Lennon in an army jacket. Along the bottom of the photo someone had scrawled, “The John Lennon Auditorium.” Wanting a closer look, I pushed through the red wooden door and stepped inside. A wastebasket sat pushed up against the wall with a brass plaque above it that read, “The Official Practical Theatre Wastebasket, Stolen from Wisdom Bridge.”

  Wisdom Bridge was a more respectable theater farther down the block on the other side of the Howard Street elevated station. They were one of those edgy venues, putting on shows like Kabuki Macbeth and an adaptation of the murderer Jack Henry Abbott’s In the Belly of the Beast. Really edgy, but without a spot for their trash. I was starting to like Practical Theatre.

  I quickly ingratiated myself by offering to help build sets, and once the theater crew discovered I played guitar, they asked me to perform during intermission. With several actors whisked off to New York as new cast members of Saturday Night Live, the theater became a hive of activity and, as a result, I had met all kinds of artists, cartoonists, actors, musicians, film stars, playwrights and authors. William Burroughs eventually warmed up in his crepuscular way, once he knew me as the kid who could recite the complete lyrics to “Mairzy Doats,” which I had memorized from the printed lyrics unfurled like hieroglyphics on one of my grandmother’s piano rolls. He was also impressed that I’d read his novel Naked Lunch in Spanish as a way of slipping it past the nuns’ radar at my Benedictine high school. Allen Ginsberg once returned my call from Barbara’s Bookstore and informed me that yes, Bill was in Tangiers, and that no, I should be reading Dostoyevsky and Blake, all while my grandmother kept screaming at me to use the white rotary phone in the front room instead of hogging up the 2988-extension where the calls from potential roomers came in. Meeting these people made an indelible impression on me because, as with composers, I had always assumed the first requirement of any real artist was to be dead.

  My mother was at her wit’s end that I was associating with older people, with questionable theater people, with artists. I found it all absurd, as I was already living with needle junkies, schizophrenics and the sporadically suicidal. The literate junkies I met had at least advised me to read works of classic literature and encouraged me to attend college.

  My mother persisted. As far as she was concerned, my obsession with the guitar would be my ruin. It was hard to figure how much worse it could be than what already staggered up and down the back staircase outside my bedroom door and woke me in the night with a jolt to discover an inebriated roomer ferociously rattling the doorknob until I screamed through the keyhole for them to leave me alone.

  So at age fifteen, I had to make a choice between home and the guitar. This was the profound contradiction — the instrument was everything that resonated joy in me. It gave my fingers a bold voice that I could not yet muster any other way. How was it possible that something so beautiful could also incite so much fear in my mother? Given that this was Chicago, Home of the Blues, I already knew that life was never intended to be easy. I knew that the ideal place for me would be with my guitar, outside this house.

  Carlos Santana

  Carlos Santana is legendary for his forty-year career of fusing rock, salsa and jazz, melding blues with Latin and African rhythms into a distinctive style that has won him ten Grammy awards and three Latin Grammys.

  I started playing the violin in ’55, when I was eight years old. My father moved to San Francisco for about a year and I was not practicing violin anymore. My mother did not want me to stop playing music, so she took me to a park in Tijuana to listen to a festival of musicians playing, and I heard someone play electric guitar there for the first time. I definitely knew I was hearing someone play the electric guitar the way B.B. King plays it because that gentleman who had been playing, Javier Bátiz, was into B.B. King, Little Richard and Ray Charles — that is all he would do.

  But for me, hearing someone play electric guitar for the first time, with the sound of the guitar bouncing against the trees and the cars and the church and the park because it was an outdoor festival, was mesmerizing. It felt like I was watching my first ufo, and my mom saw my eyes and she immediately sent a letter to my dad, telling him, “Carlos does not really want to quit music, but he does not like the violin. He likes the guitar!” So my dad was gracious enough to send me a guitar. I had a big fat electric guitar, a Gibson, kind of like Wes Montgomery’s. It was a dark-colored guitar with a little bit of brown and yellow in it. My mom knew that music would keep me out of trouble and keep me from hanging around the wrong people in gangs or anything like that because I would just stay in my room and practice.

  The guitar is shaped like the body of a beautiful woman and you get to play with the neck, too, and pull the strings and bend them. So the whole experience is very sensual and spiritual. Being a teenager, those are the two things that make the most sense in terms of where to invest my energy and concentration. My father was my main teacher when he came back. He would teach me chords. But I also learned a lot simply by listening to records, like most people, and going to concerts and watching how performers stand and get a tone out of their guitar. Most people do not realize that you do not get tone from the pedals but from your physical body, how
you stand. For example, when you look at Segovia, there is a certain posture that he has and if that posture is not correct, then he would not sound like Segovia. What’s beautiful about the guitar is it allows each individual to imprint his or her own fingerprints on the sound. You know how to breathe and how to think with intensity because your thoughts are the first notes before you put them on the guitar. You have to invest intensity into the notes.

  I think the only challenge for me on the guitar has been playing odd meters, like 7/11, 19ths — and after a while, there are very few people, like Ravi Shankar or John McLaughlin, who can play odd time signatures and make them sound like breathing, as natural as taking a deep breath. For me, I always gravitate toward just playing music from the point of a beautiful melody that gives you a full-on hug. I was never really that attracted to speed or showing off how fast or how clever or how many chords I knew. I just want to, and please excuse the expression, “penetrate” inside that note and give myself chills so that I can give you chills. If I don’t feel it, you’re not going to feel it. The first rule of music, from Manitas de Plata to Wes Montgomery or everyone — the first rule of music is if you do not feel it, your audience is not going to feel it. So you have to learn how to access the center of your heart so when you play a note, you see people laugh, cry and dance at the same time — like when a woman has a baby — that’s when music is music, when people cry and they do not even know why and when they are laughing and crying. And if you can put it like that as a musician, then I believe you. Otherwise, I do not believe you.

  My first official performance was at a competition in the park in Tijuana. Again, I was playing violin and my sister was singing. Out of about fifty people, we were the last ones standing, and I remember I won over her. She was a little sad, but I won and they gave me a trophy, a big Pepsi-Cola bottle and $20, which was a LOT of money back then. With guitar, I think the first time I had my validation with it was when I was a hippie. I had just left my mom’s house and I was playing down at the panhandle, the same place Jimi Hendrix had played in the park. I closed my eyes and when I opened them, there was Michael Bloomfield and Jerry Garcia smiling. And I was like, “Oh my god! I am onstage and I just got out of high school.” So it did not feel like it was going to be a challenge to be onstage with Eric Clapton or John McLaughlin. All of a sudden, it felt, excuse the expression, like I “belonged” there with them.