My First Guitar

by Julia Crowe

  My other story is that I used to live with my grandmother during the summer in Cape Cod. I had an electric guitar — a white SG with a black pickup, the most ferocious, rocked out guitar I’ve ever owned. I used to practice this thing so loudly that my friends told me they could hear me playing from a mile away as they rode their bikes in. My grandmother never complained. In fact, when my mother asked her how she could possibly stand it, my grandmother’s response was calm and placid: “Well, he has to practice.” Looking back, I honestly don’t know how she put up with me playing the same four licks over and over all day long for weeks on end, making everything rattle in this old house.

  I reluctantly sold that SG guitar when I became interested in jazz. It just wasn’t a hip guitar for playing jazz. Three or four years ago, I stepped into Rudy’s Guitar Stop in New York City and noticed he had a locked up case of vintage guitars, and I saw my old SG in there. I said, “Rudy, you’ve got to let me play it, that’s my guitar!” It was not another SG model but my same exact guitar — it had the dings and marks I’d put on it back when I was fifteen years old! The asking price was $2,000. I went home, told my family this incredible story and my son insisted I should go back there and get it. I was hesitant because $2,000 is a lot of money. I went back to Rudy’s two weeks later, but by then the guitar was gone.

  Benjamin Verdery with a replica of his first guitar, an Emenee. (Courtesy Benjamin Verdery)

  This is the thing about guitars: they’re somewhat human if you play them, and memories of a particular time in your life come flooding right back.

  The guitar is not the easiest instrument to play, but it has always been a joy for me as well as a mystery. I don’t have a particularly analytical mind so my first reaction is just, wow! I see the fretboard as an endless source of possibilities, and I will come up with different left-hand fingerings for the majority of what I play. Different fingerings can create both a subtle difference and a huge difference.

  Just watch a baby or child reach out to pluck a string and see how their eyes light up. You can see how the act of them reaching out to pluck a string has struck something in their heart right away. And the guitar is not so big or intimidating they’ll be afraid of it. It’s really magical.

  The other thing I find incredible is even though there is a standard tuning for the guitar, you don’t have to stick with that. Take slack-key guitar, which relies on other open string chord tunings. The resonance and different voicings it creates is wonderful. There is such universality with the guitar, too. Every country and culture has a guitar piece or some similar instrument, like the ukulele, or the pipa from China. I love the wee folk of the guitar family! Playing the guitar is an endless journey of joy and discovery.

  David Leisner

  Classical guitarist and composer David Leisner won top prizes in the 1975 Toronto and 1981 Geneva International Guitar competitions. Disabled by focal dystonia, a condition that interrupted his career for twelve years until he recovered, devising his own methods of physical therapy. He is co-chair of the guitar department at the Manhattan School of Music.

  I was ten years old when I got my first guitar. I had failed miserably at violin lessons for six months and, after screeching and scraping away at “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” I realized it wasn’t for me. I gravitated toward the guitar, mostly out of practicality, because it was portable and inexpensive. In fact, I rented my first guitar from a local music store. Since that time I’ve thought of so many other instruments I could have played, such as piano or cello. I also could have been a singer or a conductor and would have been pretty good at any one of these things. However, I think I gravitated toward the right instrument, because now I can’t imagine any other instrument being as right for me as the guitar. It was an intuitive decision, a subconscious one.

  I joined a Jewish community center class to learn how to play folk guitar and after that, I found my first real guitar teacher, Mildred Brown. She was very important to me because she instilled in me lots of good, basic ideas about music and life. A lot of the things she taught me are still with me, and we are still in contact. She introduced me to classical guitar when I was thirteen years old, and after six months, she told me, “I’ve given you everything I can teach.” I studied with a flamenco guitarist and then after that, I did not study much at all. Basically, I am a self-taught classical guitarist. I did study with John Duarte for nine months and with David Starobin for six weeks. Violist Karen Tuttle gave me some incredible advice when I played her the Bach chaconne. It turned me around 180 degrees in just one lesson. That’s my style — intense lessons for a short time. I get a tremendous amount out of them and then just run with it.

  My mother was the kind of person who wanted exactly the opposite of whatever it was I was doing. When I traded the violin for the guitar, she’d say she wished I had stayed with the violin. Recently she wished I could have been a singer. But in the end, she was thrilled that I ended up doing this and that I have been successful. My dad was a great music lover and was thrilled as well. Both of my parents were puzzled by my seriousness and accomplishment, since our family was not musical. They did, however, give me the gift of listening. When I was four, I was listening intently to records of Mozart and Beethoven, Count Basie and Duke Ellington. They were astonished and intrigued by the intensity I gave to listening. They didn’t quite know what to make of it and we were not economically privileged, so I had to find my own path.

  I’ve always seen myself as a musician first and a guitarist second. I’ve been a singer in choral groups from the age of thirteen onward, and I knew since then that I was going to be a musician. I didn’t know what form it would take. Guitar or choral music? Between the ages of thirteen and seventeen, I divided my musical interests on guitar with folk, pop and classical with little performances around Los Angeles. I liked to sing international folk songs in many different languages. Joni Mitchell and James Taylor were my idols. Laura Nyro was important to me, too.

  My teacher Mildred ended up giving me her Goya guitar, which is a Swedish, factory-made guitar. It was made of spruce and had a fairly wide body. Later, when I visited New York for the first time, I went to the Wolf guitar store where Beverly Maher (now of the famed Greenwich Village Guitar Salon) worked as an assistant, and I bought a 1970 Ramírez with the initials MT inside (for maker Manuel Torres). It had a cedar lining to it that gave it a great sound but also shortened its effective playing life. I played this guitar for ten years before I sold it.

  David Leisner with guitar, ten years old. Los Angeles, California. (Courtesy David Leisner)

  I’d have to say there is just something about the plucked sound of the guitar that moves me. When I was a teenager living in Los Angeles, I used to listen every week to a classical guitar show on the radio and the sound was very pure and calming. This is my earliest memory of being fascinated by it. Also, physically, I felt very natural with the instrument. Maybe this has to do with the old troubadour tradition of singing and playing at the same time.

  When I was twenty-nine, I came down with a condition known as focal dystonia. What happens is the fingers start to curl inward toward the palm without control or pain. This completely stopped my career. I have learned in the meantime that there are hundreds, if not thousands of people, who develop this condition, and yet it is still a mystery as to why it develops and how to cure it. I visited many specialists over a period of years, and no one was able to help me. In the end I stopped seeing the specialists and followed my own intuition. In the process, I did some pioneering work on the use of the large muscles, which ultimately cured me. It was twelve years from the beginning of this condition to its end, but I now play better than I ever did before. Also, I am helping to cure people around the world who have this disorder.

  One interesting guitar experience I had was when I entered the 1981 guitar competition in Geneva, Switzerland, where we were all required to prepare an unbelievably demanding program of the Ginastera Sonata, Britten’s Nocturnal, two Villa-Lobos
études, Giuliani’s “Sonata Eroica,” the Villa-Lobos concerto and a Giuliani concerto. We had three months to prepare, and out of sixty applicants, only fourteen of them showed up. The Ginastera, which was hot off the press at the time, probably scared everyone off. I was one of the three finalists, but I didn’t play my best and received the silver medal, while Marco de Santi won the top prize. The finalists were all pissed off when we found out that they gave us our choice of concerto rather than choosing for us, so we could have learned one less concerto!

  Afterward, I got the chance to meet with the composer Alberto Ginastera. He lived in Geneva and invited me to his house for a coaching on his sonata. The piece has a passage that opens with a triple forte, and he was trying to get me to play it louder. I was playing as loudly as I could, practically starting to sweat, when he finally said to me, in a raspy voice, “Brrrreaaaak the guitaaaaarr!” I’ll never forget him saying that. “Brrrreaaaak the guitaaaaarr!” Ginastera unfortunately passed away two years later, in 1983. He was sixty-seven years old.

  Tom Morello

  Tom Morello is a Harvard graduate and Grammy-winning guitarist from the rock bands Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave. He also plays solo acoustic as The Nightwatchman and his newest group is the Street Sweeper Social Club.

  I was thirteen years old when I got my first guitar, a Kay guitar, which was basically a red copy of a Les Paul SG, for $50. It met my criteria as being the cheapest guitar with the most knobs. I’d started off playing the French horn, but I was so bad at it that it nearly made me swear off music forever — I was the fourth chair out of four chairs in third grade, when I attempted this.

  I loved listening to heavy metal like KISS, Led Zeppelin, Aerosmith and Alice Cooper. I had two guitar lessons at thirteen, which had been so discouraging that I put the guitar down for four years. The reason is the guy showed me how to tune the guitar and then he taught me the C Major scale. BORING! I wanted to play “Black Dog” by Led Zeppelin and “Detroit Rock City” by KISS, so I felt frustrated.

  Punk music like The Sex Pistols is what got me to rock. With punk rock, anything’s possible. You don’t have to have any technical expertise. You just have to have the desire to do it. Within forty-eight hours of this revelation, I put together a band with some of my friends. My mom was supportive and allowed this horrendously noisy band to practice at our house.

  What first drew me to the guitar was, in part, that it really was a replacement for social interaction. Before I played guitar, I saw myself as an artist, writer and political activist. But with the guitar, I sort of sunk into it like a compulsion that borders on a disorder and poured myself into it to avoid the discomfort I felt with social relationships. Plus the guitar is predictable — it won’t suddenly want to break up with you. Fate is in your own hands with the guitar.

  Initially, I practiced the guitar for an hour a day. Then later, I practiced up to eight hours a day. Playing the guitar provided a kind of magical experience and expression that I didn’t have anywhere else. I am pretty articulate and I did well in school, yet the guitar is visceral. The guitar allows me to tap into a world where intellect and academics don’t matter. I started playing late, at age seventeen. None of my guitar heroes started out playing late, so I felt way behind and just practiced for hours on end. Every inch of my ability is something that I’ve fought for, and I can say that ten years later, I finally broke the wall down and was able to enter a world where I could express myself on the instrument and find a unique artistic voice, which was in Rage Against the Machine.

  My first gig was in high school with my band, The Electric Sheep (with bassist Adam Jones who plays now with the band Tool). I went to Libertyville High School in Illinois and was part of the Drama Club. At the end of the school year, they had an award ceremony and with little talent but lots of vivid imagination, we had our band rush out onto the stage and break through a banner that had our Electric Sheep moniker on it. We played abysmally, choking on every note. We were absolutely terrified. But the seed was planted.

  Six months after our first gig, we were asked to play Steppenwolf ’s “Born to Be Wild.” Up to this point, we had to write all our own music because we didn’t have the ability to play cover songs. So we lied to the director and said, “Oh, no problem! We can play ‘Born to be Wild.’” We did our best in front of a crowd of about 800 people. All I remember was this roar coming from the crowd. We felt like a real rock band. They were cheering.

  I was standing on a little platform and jumped off, thinking, “Awright, rock ’n’ roll!” The place just went crazy. So, I figured as far as this line of work goes, I had some potential.

  An older friend of my mom’s helped me pick out my first guitar. I had $50 to spend, and the Kay guitar I’d chosen had very poor action, especially in the upper register of the fretboard. I recall the salesman telling my friend, “If this is the guitar he wants, I guess he can’t play very extensive leads, then, ha!”

  I remember this really got to me. It pissed me off, like “What exactly do you mean? How dare you say that? I’ll show you, you S.O.B.!”

  That Kay guitar is sitting in the closet now at my mom’s, surrounded by some of my platinum records.

  Daron Malakian

  Daron Vartan Malakian is the guitarist and songwriter for the metal band System of a Down as well as the lead vocalist, lead guitarist and songwriter of the alt-rock band Scars on Broadway.

  I was twelve years old when I received my first guitar as a birthday gift from my parents, though I had always dreamed of being a drummer. We had lived in a very small apartment and, when my parents finally saved up to be able to buy a house, at last I had my own bedroom and we also had a garage. I asked for a drum set. But my parents decided that, in spite of all this new space, drum sets cannot be “turned off,” so they bought me a guitar instead — a black Arbor.

  The only other person I knew who played an Arbor, though it was not the reason I received one, was the bass player of Slaughter. He might have played an Arbor bass. My Arbor guitar looked like a black Strat, but it did not have Strat headstock. If I remember correctly, it might have had more of a pointy headstock. I did not have this guitar for a very long time. Before speaking with you, I’d called home and learned only two minutes ago the real story of what happened to this guitar. I’d had the Arbor for a couple of years and learned to play some on it before I bought a Carvin guitar with winnings from a horse track bet. At that time, Carvins were considered a step up from an Arbor. I gave the Arbor guitar to my cousin, who lived in Northern California, and I never saw that guitar again.

  For years, after System of a Down landed a record deal and I became a professional musician, I kept asking my cousin whatever happened to that guitar? He would always seem guilty because he would say to me, “Bro, I think it got lost when we moved.” These things will happen. I was not even tripping on it but he always struck me as having a big time guilt trip about it. I called him right before this interview and told him that I was about to talk about my first guitar and I said, “You might come up.” I don’t think he liked that very much. He said, “Let me tell you what really happened then.” He told me he was screwed up as a teenager and sold it for about $80 or $90 to go party with his friends. I’m not angry or upset about it at all because I know that he is truly sorry.

  I played the drums in addition to the guitar and, to be honest, I am more of a natural drummer than I am a guitarist. When I first started playing the guitar, I had to actually learn the instrument. However, the first time I ever sat at a drum set, I immediately could keep a beat. I was flying and found it easy to keep up. I always felt like percussion and vocals were my main musical interests when I was young.

  I started a record collection when I was five years old and much of it was KISS and music that had been popular during the late ’70s and mid-’80s. I used to drag my mom to records stores and she would buy me all the Mötley Crüe, Twisted Sister, Judas Priest — whatever was really popular at that time. This evolved
into heavier stuff as I grew older. Nobody ever pushed music with me, and in a way I kind of wish they had. It’s weird because both of my parents are artists — my mom has an art degree and my dad was a dance choreographer. He’s done the album art for System of a Down records like Hypnotize and Mesmerize. But my parents never pushed me into art. I always wanted music, but our apartment was so small that I think they were afraid of making noise. I never had music lessons, nor did I want music lessons. Music is just something I had wanted so much that I do not think anyone had to push it. Music was something I gravitated toward at a young age, and I always knew it was what I wanted to do when I became older, even before I had learned to play an instrument.

  I practiced my guitar because I wanted to practice. I’d easily spend eleven hours a day in my room just playing, and my cousins who would come over and just sit in the living room, often not seeing me at all, just hearing me. The hours would go by like nothing and I would not even notice. That’s how I was as a teenager. I never had a practice regimen, I never had a lesson and I never had a teacher standing over me and saying, “You need to learn this or that.” I learned by watching other guys play and I picked up music by ear. I do not think music or anything should ever be something that is a struggle. If you struggle with something, then maybe it is not coming naturally to you. I’ve never been the kind of guy who has tried to play fastest or do something to try to impress another musician. I’ve always tried to play for a song.