My First Guitar

by Julia Crowe

  Thirty Minutes Inside a Guitar Shop

  I had thirty minutes to kill on Ventura Boulevard and the only place that seemed like a feasible, air-conditioned escape was the Guitar Center. I made my way to the back of the store and discovered a classical guitar room, empty but for one bored salesman who listened to me as I played a guitar I’d selected from an array displayed upon the wall. He then insisted that I try one of the $10,000 Ramírezes locked up in the case behind me, though I told him I was not in the market to buy anything. This did not seem to discourage him. I warned him that I’d be unlikely to be able to discern the difference between a crap guitar and a nicer one because my hearing had disappeared in one ear after a summer cold. The salesman was still not scared away. “I have to confess my intention is purely selfish,” he said. “I like listening to you play and I would much rather hear you on one of these guitars instead.”

  I exchanged guitars. To my surprise, when I started to play the Ramírez, the difference in tonal quality was distinct, immediate and obvious. I remain forever indebted to this man. I had lost my hearing about two years after graduating from college and perceived the loss as an excuse, just another nail in the coffin burying myself alive from what it was I’d loved most. I bought a factory-made Spanish classical guitar, not a Ramírez, but a guitar I knew would inspire me to spend hours with it for the ease of its left-hand action. The minute I came home, I dug through old moving boxes and found all of my sheet music and music books, many of which bore fastidious and ancient dates written in red ink by Sonia Michelson, whom I felt I had disappointed long ago for quitting, though I had never told her what had happened at home.

  The theater people had attempted to intervene on my behalf back then but they found themselves sandwiched between a raging mother and the police department threatening to shut them down for harboring a minor. I spent the last two years of high school yo-yo-ing between social services and my home, with in-between moments of bunking out in the library and sleeping in front hallways. The evening after I was inducted into the National Honors Society I spent the night propped up against a tombstone in Calvary Cemetery. What I had learned at the theatre is that no situation is so grim nor sacred that you couldn’t pry the humor from it and wring the rest for a story.

  One rooming house tenant, a taxi driver from Peru, told me of the author Isabel Allende, whose books had not yet been published in English at the time. He believed I ought to write, and he purchased a Big Chief writing tablet for me from the pharmacy. I wrote long letters of my adventures and shoved them beneath the theater door. The collected letters became the basis of my application and acceptance into the University of Chicago, where I eventually graduated with a degree in English literature. I had the fortune to study with author Richard Stern, who told stories both of looking after Ezra Pound during his dying days in Venice and visiting Flannery O’Connor on her farm, Andalusia, teeming with her beloved yet nasty peacocks.

  I did many things for a living after graduating, from working long hours at two Chicago newspapers to sewing bridal gowns. I moved to New York and worked on the independent film producer floor of Warner Bros., vetting books for film potential. Life kept coming full circle. I knew that no one had yet purchased rights to Allende’s novel El plan infinito, though a rival film company had just spent a fortune to produce The House of the Spirits (La casa de los espíritus) that the taxi driver roomer had urged me to read long ago. I translated her new novel from its original Editorial Sudamerica edition and, though the film company did not option the title, I later had a chance to meet with Ms. Allende.

  During this time, I had all but amputated music from my life. I had resigned myself to not playing guitar, though it itched like a phantom limb. Playing the guitar had always come easily, to the point where I took my ability for granted, yet I had also been punished severely for it and wanted to forget all of it. The sudden hearing loss felt like one more reason that suggested there was no point in picking up my guitar again.

  I was wrong. I retain what I hear now to a far greater degree. I feel more, absorb more and respond to sound in a way I had never paid much attention to before. I can walk into any room and immediately assess the refraction of acoustics the same way a pool shark intuitively understands the geometry of the table.

  I started work on relearning several favorite pieces and discovered that Sonia had relocated from Chicago to her hometown of Los Angeles, nine miles from my house. I arranged for a lesson that happened to fall on the same December date I had taken my very first lesson with her when I was eleven years old. She listened to me play some Villa-Lobos études and a small snippet of Britten’s Nocturne as she arranged the dozen pink roses I had brought for her. She was not certain that she actually had much to teach me. I told her that I was considering graduate school but felt worried about my hearing loss. I had altered my approach to music — sound now came through my bones. It came through touch and varying frequencies. Before, I used to be lazy, skimming and floating along the surface like a lost afternoon spent aboard an inflatable pool raft, playing for the sheer enjoyment of listening to the sounds I could make. Now my music required actual focus so that what I played came from the inside and projected outward. Music had never left me, plus I still have all my hearing in one ear — I simply had to adjust from what I knew and cultivate a new relationship with how I now heard sound.

  Sonia and I both agreed that if I was performing at this level, then my hearing loss was nobody’s business. She offered to help me prepare for graduate school auditions by building my repertoire, and I worked on putting together concert programs for performances around Los Angeles. Yet I had to contend with one more bump in the road. Weeks before I was to perform for an assembly of inner-city public school students, I learned I would be blind in both eyes if I did not undergo surgery immediately for retinal detachment. The doctor’s words had been, “Have surgery now or be blind by Monday.” Great.

  The news couldn’t have been any more stupefying. That a busy eye surgeon in Santa Monica would push aside his other patients to see me immediately is never a sign of good things to come. I had come this far, conquering all these hurdles, for this?

  I called the school where I was scheduled to perform and spoke with the teacher. She offered her best wishes and assumed that I wanted to cancel. I told her that I preferred to wait and just see how the recovery went. I’d already had the repertoire memorized. It was not a paid gig, but it meant a lot to me.

  I underwent the surgery and spent a week at home in bed. With my eyes wrapped in bandages, I played my guitar when I felt well enough to sit upright and listened to Tom Stoppard radio plays when I was not. It is amazing how easy it is to play without the habitual crutch of looking at the keyboard. In fact, it was liberating. I knew I could do this concert whatever the final diagnosis turned out to be. Being unable to see while playing was not the end of the world at all, but a new one.

  After a week in bed, I sat in my eye surgeon’s examining room chair, listening to him rustle about in preparation to remove the bandages. When he asked, “What kind of guitar do you play?” I told him it was classical.

  “I’m not really much of a fan of classical guitar, to tell you the truth.”

  I found this hard to believe. Who wouldn’t like classical guitar?

  “I find it, for the lack of a better word, boring,” he told me. “Sorry. Not my cup of tea.”

  I grew more anxious as he unwrapped the bandages, fearful of what I would or would not see. I was also fuming at him inwardly, wondering what kind of cretin had operated on me. He peeled my eyelids back with what sounded like a Velcro-like rip, followed by a viciously bright penlight. It’s strange how we can retreat and recede inside the body when faced with pain, even when it comes to our eyes, through which we normally takes in the world. He applied some drops and told me to sit up.

  I heard him plop into his squeaky desk chair and click his pen to scribble out a prescription. “Let me tell you how lucky you are. I’ve been pe
rforming these kinds of surgeries for thirty years. Less than one percent of people who go through what you did ever have their vision fully restored. We do not catch it most the time. People do not register anything wrong until they start having problems reading, which means detachment has already hit the macular area. By then it’s too late to fix, and you are left with some form of tunnel vision. You will see again in both eyes with a full range of periphery.”

  Had he not told me so with such unflinching bluntness a moment ago of his distaste for classical guitar, I probably would not have believed him. At this point, the world around me was a canvas of light and shadow colored with hope. He said it would take three months for my vision to stabilize.

  “I like jazz guitar,” he told me on the way out the door. “Jazz is where it’s at.”

  I called the public school again to confirm the concert. I felt certain I could play. The teacher and I agreed that it was not necessary to have to explain anything other than the pieces I was going to perform —Asturias (Leyenda), Tárrega’s Gran Jota and Recuerdos de la Alhambra.

  I arrived at the school early. The teacher had drawn the blinds to cut some of the direct light. My vision consisted of a pair of black and blotchy full moons in each eye that still obliterated the field of view. I set up my chair and footstool and waited in place with my guitar as I heard the students clamoring in the hallway before they lined up and entered the classroom. Chairs clattered, backpacks thudded against the floor, gym shoes squeaked. Chattering and fidgeting filled the room, which ceased the minute the teacher commanded attention with a series of hand movements, which represented musical notes in a system called solfège. The children responded immediately by singing the notes back to her and they came to order. She introduced them to me and allowed me to speak a little of the music that I was about to play.

  I do not think I ever played better in my life. The students were attentive and enthralled, wanting to see afterward how I had made those sounds in the Gran Jota by drumming crossed bass strings and creating harmonics. Several students were thrilled to learn that the words used for many techniques were in the same language they spoke at home. One student thanked me later for playing the Gran Jota because it was one of the longest pieces of music he had ever heard, so long, in fact, that it got him out of part of math class. Someone else said that they had a guitar at home that they were going to go pick up tonight. When the room emptied out, I folded up my footstool and spoke to the teacher about my plans to return to New York.

  Her attention was diverted by a small shadow lingering anxiously in the doorway. “Excuse me one moment,” she said to me. “What is it, Matthew? Did you forget something?”

  “I just wanted to thank Miss Crowe,” he said. “I never heard the guitar sound like that before.”

  Melissa Etheridge

  Melissa Etheridge is a Grammy-winning rock singer-songwriter from Leavenworth, Kansas, with two platinum-selling albums.

  I was eight years old when I got my first guitar, and it was a steel-string acoustic Stella, made by Harmony. I was just insane about music, starting from the age of three. Before I had a guitar, I used to jump up and down, strumming my badminton rackets.

  I’d started playing clarinet in school. My first choice had been the drums, but I was told girls couldn’t play drums. My second choice was the trumpet, but I was told girls couldn’t play the trumpet, either. So that left the guitar.

  I used to tell this one story about how I got my first guitar — mainly, that I was jumping around so much with my badminton rackets that my dad finally brought home a guitar. But then my mother reminded me that’s not exactly how it happened. My dad had brought the guitar home for my sister, who was twelve years old at the time, and I just begged and begged to play it but her teacher said my hands were too small. Finally, my sister gave it up and the guitar became mine.

  I listened to a lot of folk music at the time — this was in Kansas, 1969. My parents had a great collection of music, like Simon & Garfunkel, and my mother had a few Neil Diamond records. My sister had The Beatles and some early, early Led Zeppelin. And of course, on the radio, I heard bubblegum stuff like the Jackson Five. I loved Motown.

  My teacher at the time was a jazz guitarist named Don Raymond, and he’d had several of his fingers cut off at one time in a terrible accident. For this reason, he was very intimidating to me as an eight year old. Just look at his hands — and, oh my god! He was also very stern. Music was serious business to him. If I didn’t practice, he’d let me know how disappointed he was. There was a little fear involved here but I really wanted to learn. I remember he used to tap his foot on a stool and say to me, “I don’t care if you play the wrong note, just never lose the beat.” Ask my drummer today and he’ll tell you I keep the best time in my songs!

  The guitar is an extension of me. It’s the tool I use to express my soul. It is truly a part of my soul. If I’ve had any challenge with the guitar, it’s that I have very small hands. I am about five feet, three inches tall, and when I went to Berklee to study guitar, I couldn’t do many of the jazz chords with those stretches between the fourth finger and pinkie. I had to come up with different fingerings and eventually, with my own style.

  My first gig was at a shopping mall in Leavenworth, Kansas. I was eleven years old and played a folksy song that I had written with my girlfriends in sixth grade.

  One story I have is about a guitar I had from when I was about fourteen years old. It was a round-backed ovation, which is really a great guitar for women because the necks are smaller and it fits the body well. This guitar was a 12-string, and I had it until I was about twenty-one. It was stolen from me and it was my fault. I’d parked outside of a friend’s house in Venice Beach, California, with the guitar in the back of my pickup and had left it there. (Hey, I’m from Kansas.) Someone must have grabbed it from my truck. I’ve learned since to stop becoming emotionally attached to my guitars. I have a whole bunch of them now so if I lose one, I’ll play another.

  Muriel Anderson

  Award-winning fingerstyle and harp guitarist Muriel Anderson is the founder Muriel Anderson’s All Star Guitar Night and the Music For Life Alliance, a charity that aids the efforts of individuals and organizations that foster music learning. Her music can be heard in the soundtrack for Woody Allen’s film Vicky Cristina Barcelona.

  A friend of my parents, Adele Knight, was throwing away a guitar, a half-size, possibly three-quarter-sized Decca nylon-string guitar. I picked the garbage out of the sound hole and tuned up the three strings that were remaining on it. When Adele saw this, she said, “Why don’t you keep it?” So I took it into the backseat of the car with me on the way home and started figuring out melodies and making up tunes. My parents realized I had an affinity for it right away. I remember at that time, it seemed really big. I was eight years old. I eventually gave this guitar to my niece.

  What I think really appealed to me is the way the guitar vibrates against you when it’s played. When you touch the strings, you have direct contact with the sound coming out. As I found later, in studying classical guitar, you have direct control over what kind of sound and exactly what nuances come out and this is something you just don’t have with piano. With piano, you are separated from the instrument by a hammer that comes up and hits the strings for you — you don’t have direct contact with the strings. So I think that intimacy with the string and the instrument is part of my attraction with the guitar.

  My parents asked my first guitar teacher, Anne Jones, what to get me for Christmas, so she recommended the album Doc Watson in Nashville. When I opened the present, my first thought was “What are my parents giving me an album for?” I put it on my record player to listen and it never left the turntable. I would run home from school to learn every song on that album and try to figure out what it was he was doing. In my lessons, I had started out learning folk guitar so it was mostly chords, accompanying songs and playing with other people. It was a release, a joy and a way to relate to other pe
ople.

  The first time I ever played in class was in the third grade. I played “Blues My Naughty Sweetie Gives to Me” and “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out.” I hadn’t a clue this was kind of unusual material for a third-grader. Just not a clue. The class laughed. They thought it was really funny. Both songs had very adult lyrics, like, “There are blues you get from women when you see ’em goin’ swimmin’ and you haven’t got a bathing suit yourself.” And, “There are blues you get much quicker when you’re drinking lots of liquor and somebody goes and takes it off the shelf.” This is what I was singing. I don’t recall what my teacher said. I don’t think she even knew what to make of it.

  My first professional gig was at the Two Way Street coffeehouse in Downers Grove, Illinois, and I return there every year, about the time of my annual concert, to do a workshop at that same venue. I was playing with a banjo player, Kim Koskella, and fiddle-player Cathy Jones, who was the daughter of my guitar teacher. That was our first gig where we actually got paid money. We were so excited. We got $20 to split three ways among us for the evening. We were so excited that someone would care enough to actually pay us for playing music.

  In college, I realized the only way to study guitar was to study classical. I had no intention of staying with it. My thought was “I guess I have to do this now in order to keep studying guitar.” After my first nylon-string guitar, my first good guitar was a three-quarter-size steel-string Guild. After that I played bluegrass on an old Martin D-35 and some jazz on an ES-335 Gibson semi-hollow body. So in returning to a nylon-string guitar for playing classical, I equated a nylon-string guitar with my beginner guitar — the one with no tone and the strings kind of flapped. I traded my Guild steel-string for a nylon-string guitar when I was in Spain for a summer. I came back to the States and, for the first time, heard the music of Christopher Parkening. I thought to myself, “Wow, how can anything be so beautiful?” It was Capriccio Arabe. I’d heard it on the radio and was just spellbound. Then I started listening to other pieces and Segovia. In college, I discovered the richness of the classical guitar and learned just how much you can shape the emotion, tone and phrasing. It was a new and exciting world for me.