by Julia Crowe
All kinds of weird things happen, too. We had only been together for about a year when someone from the Ministry of Mexican culture visited USC in search of talent to hire for a tour throughout rural areas of Mexico at schools and small towns in Mexico. This was in May or June of 1981. It was going to be forty-eight concerts in six weeks, so we were doing two concerts a day. In the afternoon, we would pile into our little Volkswagen with our guitars and drive into the next town to play in schools, movie theaters and museums. The movie theater was a strange experience because they did not have lighting for the stage. The audience was lit up but our stage was dark and we could not see our music.
When we landed in Mexico City, we unloaded into the hotel, slept for a little and then wanted to look for a place to eat. Anisa Angarola, who was in the group originally, did not like being in hotels because she was worried about theft. She said, “We can’t leave our guitars in our room.” She decided to leave her guitar at the front desk. We figured she might be right so we all did the same.
We went to lunch, walked around the city and had a great time. Then we returned to the hotel. As we were walking up the steps to the hotel, we heard people playing our guitars! We walked in and there were the bellboys and the front desk people — all our guitar cases were wide open and people were playing them, just jamming away.
I find that a lot of students are worried about their future in terms of job security and career. My advice is if you aren’t really sure that you love playing the guitar and making music, you should move on. If you are sure, the best thing to do is just excel. If you have a good teacher and mentor and devote yourself to practicing with intelligence and discipline, you will become a good, or maybe a great, player. And when you’re done with school, even if it looks like you may not be able to make a go of it as a professional, you will have at least developed confidence and a capacity for creative problem-solving that will allow you to excel in other fields.
Scott Tennant
I got my first guitar when I was six after bugging my parents for it. Apparently — and I don’t have much memory of this — but my brother and I were bugging them for a guitar since I was four. To stop us from complaining, they got us both a tiny guitar for Christmas. It was a just a little acoustic steel-string guitar. I was thrilled. I thought I could play it right away so I started strumming it, but they insisted on lessons, which I didn’t like.
My first real guitar was a little three-quarter-sized Sears steel-string. I can’t exactly tell you why I was fascinated by the guitar — a past life maybe? I don’t know. I always knew that I just wanted to be a guitar player. There was no real reason I chose it — it just came out of my deep subconscious somewhere. Throughout the years, though, I have had to study other instruments, like violin, piano.
When you’re six years old, your grand plans, basically, are trying to get through your fifteen-minute practice session. My mom had to sit down beside me for fifteen minutes to make sure I got those fifteen minutes’ practice though it was very painful. My grand plans when I was six were to become a really great guitar player, a famous hockey player and an archeologist. I figured I’d cover my bases.
My family was always supportive. Especially my mother, who had been a musician in her youth — she’d played clarinet. She thought it was great that I was becoming more serious about this instrument. Eventually, she did not have to watch me to make sure I practiced. I actually practiced on my own. Both my parents were very supportive, the whole way. And sometimes they were a little embarrassing about it, too. My mom did the stage mom thing by introducing me to people, writing letters to TV shows and of course, never got any response. I remember seeing once a letter she had written to The Mike Douglas Show and thinking, “Oh, you’re not going to send that. Don’t embarrass me, please.” She would say, “You just never know.”
My father managed a hotel in Detroit, Michigan, the Yorba Hotel. In fact, the White Stripes wrote a song about it, and I guess they lived there for a while. I grew up in that hotel. When I was able to play enough tunes for people, my father started organizing recitals for me. They had a big lounge area with sofas and we’d fill the place up. I was about ten years old, and that was my first real sense of performing. It was a real thrill. I never got nervous, either. That came later on when I had a teacher, a real European maestro type, who noticed I was not nervous. So he announced to the audience, “This child may not be nervous now but he will be later.” It sunk in or something. He shouldn’t have said that!
There is just something about the plucked sound of a guitar. In the beginning I was not even really good at playing, but I enjoyed that sound. Later, of course, I enjoyed the ease that comes with practicing and being able to play a few tunes. That is very rewarding. I’ve never questioned what I was doing playing the guitar. I did, however, have to question whether or not I would be a good hockey player, which I was not. And the archeologist dream? I’d thought, well, no. The idea of digging of Egypt for years on end was not really my cup of tea. So, I never questioned playing the guitar for an instant.
I started out on plectrum guitar, a big old red Gibson electric guitar, which was my second guitar. That’s the guitar I actually started learning to play classical guitar on. The hard part I remember was having a classical piece in my method book, a Tchaikovsky melody or something, and for some reason this seemed a little harder than the usual folk melodies in the book. This just stands out to me, that it was a difficulty in my mind, not an actual difficulty. Somehow, it demanded more attention. That’s what made me want to play classical guitar.
My guitars have gotten lost a couple of times. A couple years ago, I got on a plane in Belgium to come back home to Los Angeles and my guitar did not make the flight for some reason. It was not a full flight, either. Of course, when I reached Los Angeles, I complained to the baggage people. This was before 9/11 when you didn’t get arrested for yelling at flight attendants and baggage people. They said they’d do what could and took my address and everything. They gave me the number to call the baggage handling the next day. They said, “It will go out on the next flight.” I waited. I had to leave again in the next few days for Europe so I waited and called several times a day. No sign of my guitar. Not even in the computer. They said, “As best we know, it got onto a SwissAir flight and it was supposed to come to Los Angeles the next day.”
I had to go back on tour, so every day I was calling from Europe to check up on my guitar. I was talking to the head of the airline at this point. Still there was no sign of the guitar. By now, they were becoming very apologetic about it. The guitar that was lost was my David Bailey guitar, which was the guitar I was playing most those days. Also, it was in a good luggage case. Luckily I had a substitute guitar to take on the next tour.
I continued to call every day for three weeks, though at this point, I had pretty much written it off. I was about to get a lawyer because I was so mad. On the way back from that tour, I was in the Atlanta airport waiting for my flight and checking my phone messages. There was a message from customs at the LAX airport, telling me they’ve had this guitar-shaped thing sitting here for three weeks and if I didn’t pick it up by tomorrow, it was going to go to government holding. Nobody had notified me about this before. I was absolutely incensed — I called that number right away and told them I was heading to Los Angeles right now and if anything happened to that guitar at all, I was going to just go insane.
When I got to LAX, we went to the warehouse and they went way, way back and used a forklift to lift it down from some shelf. Apparently, it had arrived in Los Angeles that next flight, as promised. But no one ever logged it into the computer. There was a tire track over the case and signs of it having been bumped around for three weeks. A forklift had run over it. It was a good case, luckily. I look back on it now and it’s kind of funny, though it was definitely not funny at the time.
Alex Lifeson
Canadian guitarist Alex Lifeson is best known as the guitarist of the rock band Rush. He and his
bandmates, Neil Peart and Geddy Lee, are the first rock band to be made Officers of the Order of Canada.
I was twelve years old when I received my first guitar from my parents for Christmas in 1965. It was a Kent Classic — a classical guitar that I put steel strings on. It cost $10 and was manufactured in Japan. My first electric guitar, which I received the following Christmas, had been a $59 red Canora, which was also a Japanese-made guitar. It looked like a smaller version of a double-cutaway Gretsch. I actually still have this guitar. My mom had it sitting inside a closet for years and just brought it over a couple weeks ago. This guitar had been stripped down. Geddy and I painted those first guitars of ours the same way Eric Clapton and Jack Bruce had their guitars painted, all psychedelic and groovy-looking in the ’60s. We had painted our own version, so you can imagine what they look like! So this guitar has all its beautiful artwork stripped from the body, but it still has some green fluorescent paint on the neck. There were no machine heads, no hardware or anything. I might try to put it back together at some point.
I’d started playing viola in seventh and eighth grade, but that was the only other instrument I had played besides the guitar. Just about any kind of music inspired me at the time. Before I took up the guitar, anything I listened to, whether it was Serbian folk music or classical music, moved me deeply. When I started listening to rock music, I enjoyed The Beach Boys to mid-’60s pop music — The Who, Jimi Hendrix, Cream and, of course, Led Zeppelin and blues primarily from Britain at that time, like John Mayall and Jeff Beck. Jimmy Page was a huge influence. My parents were rather worried about all this, hoping I might become a plastic surgeon instead or that I would at least enter a profession they did not have to worry about. I, along with Geddy, am so passionate about playing music. I do not think my parents really stopped worrying until we were on a local TV show, and then they realized, “Oh, we get it now. There is hope.”
To this day, after forty-five years of playing, I still get completely lost in the joy of playing the guitar. I am sitting here in my office, surrounded by guitars. I have mostly guitars in my office. I have two Les Paul guitars here, a PRS 12-string guitar, a J-55 Gibson acoustic, a Geddy Lee Fender bass and a cümbüş (a 12-stringed Turkish instrument that looks like a banjo with a pot on the body, but it is a very evocative-sounding instrument).
I have a routine that, often in the evening after my wife and I have dinner, we will maybe watch some TV and eventually I drift into my office, sit down and play for a couple hours because it is so enjoyable simply to play. I’m not practicing or trying to work something out — I’m just playing. It’s an escape and a wonderful place to go.
I do recall in the early days that it seemed as if you never got any better. The plateaus were very far apart. I would come home from school and the first thing I would do is come home and play until dinner. I would have dinner then I would go back to my bedroom and play before I went to bed, and I never did my homework. All I wanted to do was play guitar. I recall playing and playing and playing and working so hard to learn parts but it seemed that it would take forever before you felt as if you’d finally made that next major step in improvement. I found that challenging, in terms of not getting frustrated or losing interest. But once you hit that next step up, boy, it was life changing. I guess it is like this with any pursuit. Sometimes it can be difficult physically, in terms of playing, because I’ve had psoriasis since I was a kid, and it is primarily on my hands. It is a bit more under control these days, but in the early days, I used to endure these very inflammatory cycles where my hands would become very swollen, split and bleed, especially during a sweaty, hot night in some little arena. The salt from the sweat would get into the open cuts, and it was a significant challenge on a few nights, very difficult.
Alex Lifeson with his first guitar, a Canora. (Courtesy Melanija Zivojinovich)
My first performance was in the basement of a church drop-in center called The Coffin on September 18, 1968. We were paid $10. We knew seven or eight songs that we just played over and over. We really did not have any equipment. We used Geddy’s amp with both of us plugged into it. John [Rutsey, the band’s original drummer] had his drums and we had a floor lamp stand we taped a mic to, and that was our first gig.
I have an ES-335 that I adore that I’ve had for years. We were playing a gig with Blue Öyster Cult in the late ’70s at the Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum out on Long Island. On the side of the stage, I had that guitar and my double-necked Gibson, an EDS-1275, I believe it was, just sitting in place on their guitar stands. Someone in the crew had not tied down the horns on the PA, so this horn vibrated and fell off the back of the PA stack. Fortunately, the stack was on the side of the stage and not out over the house. It fell back and then fell over and landed on both guitars, taking a big gouge out of the 335’s neck. I retired that guitar after that happened. The 12-string fared worse — it broke the headstock, and I had to replace that guitar entirely. Not a happy guitar story, I know, but I still have that 335 and it is a joy to play. It survived a couple new little scars on it — to go with all the hundreds of other scars on it! As far as the 12-string went, what had happened gave me the perfect excuse not to play it for a while — it weighed a ton.
Steve Lukather
Grammy-winner Steve Lukather is the guitarist for the band Toto, which formed in Los Angeles in 1977, when Lukather was nineteen years old. He is also renowned as a songwriter, composer, arranger and producer as well as for his efficient and prolific session work. He played the rhythm guitar and bass on “Beat It,” “Human Nature” and the duet with Paul McCartney “The Girl is Mine” on Michael Jackson’s Thriller album, one of the bestselling records of all time. Jeff Beck and Carlos Santana number among the many artists he has toured with.
My first guitar was a Kay acoustic and I still have it. It is now a lamp at my dad’s house. We thought it would be a cool thing to do with it, because it was just sitting there at his house anyway. I was seven years old and wanted a guitar after seeing The Beatles on TV in 1964, so we bought the Kay from the Thrifty drugstore. We bought my first electric guitar, an Astro Tone with four pickups, from that drugstore as well. A friend of mine accidentally broke the neck on it and my dad was so mad he made me play it broken for the next four years.
I never played any other instrument. To me, the sound of the guitar goes deep inside — it’s a powerful sound. When I heard George Harrison and Paul McCartney playing, my first thought was “I want to be that guy.” The funny thing is, during the course of my career, I actually did get the chance to play with my two guitar heroes. I met George Harrison while playing at a Jeff Porcaro tribute concert in Los Angeles, and we hit it off. He was a really sweet guy. I met Paul McCartney while working on Michael Jackson’s Thriller album, and he asked me to be a part of his movie Give My Regards to Broad Street.
Later, I got a fake Les Paul, a Vox Les Paul. Then when my dad saw how serious I was about the guitar, he took me to the original Guitar Center in Hollywood. At first, he was planning to buy a car, but he wound up getting me a Les Paul Deluxe — a ’71 or ’72 sunburst, when I was about fourteen years old. I practically made love to this guitar. I was so happy to have it that I’d fall asleep in bed with it.
Jimmy Wyble was my first teacher. He was also the teacher to the Porcaro brothers, Steve and Mike. I learned how to read music from him. He used to yell at me for relying on my ears too much.
My family was very supportive about my playing. My mother and sister can’t sing “Happy Birthday” if they tried, but my mother was patient and dedicated about driving me to rehearsals and gigs. One time when my dad picked me up after a rehearsal, he saw a trumpet standing in a corner and surprised the hell out of me by picking it up and playing bebop on it. I never knew this about him but he was modest about it and said, “Ah, well, I used to play a little.” But I was like, “Damn, my old man can play!”
I’ve never really thought about anything else other than playing guitar. The guitar has been it. Whe
n I was eleven years old, I played my first gig in grammar school on a Jazzmaster Bosstone that I’d borrowed from my teacher, Mark, and the girls were just screaming, when we played “Foxy Lady” and “Back in the ussr” I got a taste of that and thought that was it. Basically, I went overnight from being the guy who had his underwear pulled up his butt crack to being a cool guy. Soon afterward, I was playing in Battle of the Bands with kids twice my age.
Another great local player Mike Landau and I played in about one hundred bands together and we kept each other honest in our playing. Jeff Porcaro and I like to think outside of the box of rock by listening to everything, and that includes players like Larry Carlton, the Mahavishnu Orchestra and Dr. Albert Harris, to name a few. Of course, we were still digging The Beatles. Jeff and I put in hours of doing studio sessions, and when I was nineteen, I got hired to play with Boz Scaggs.
I’ve been pretty careful with my guitars except for what has gotten stolen from storage, and that’s always tough to track down because you never know exactly when it happened. I had a ’51 Esquire and ’51 Burst stolen, along with old boogie amps, C12 mics and a handmade guitar with guts strings. One really great guitar that I have I’d picked up with drummer Paul Jackson in ’79 from a pawnshop in Arizona. It is a ’59 Les Paul sunburst that I paid about $6,000 for.