Mars Needs Guitars

I've always had an on-again, off-again relationship with the guitar. Not in terms of listening to guitar-based music...I haven't wavered on my affection for guitar rock since 1980. But playing the guitar has been another story. I first took a guitar class when I was in high school in Richland, WA, in 1982; my parents  bought me an acoustic. The class was very basic and I can barely remember anything that happened in it, other than the day there was a big rally IN FAVOR of the local nuke plant (you have to remember that many of the inhabitants of this area moved there to work at the Hanford plant). I just remember we got out of school early one day and a kid I know offered me a hit off his joint. I refused and we walked down to watch the rally.

After we moved to New Hampshire, my mom signed me up for guitar lessons from a woman who lived in our town. She was fairly young (I'm guessing late 20s/early 30s) and was pretty cool. I went for several months and was pretty good about practicing, but the classes stopped after a horrific drunk driving accident near our house in which the woman's husband was killed. In the meantime, my mom went to Daddy's Junky Music in Saugus and got me a used Gibson L6-S that dated back to the '70s. Turns out Gibson recently reissued the model. Anyway, it was a nice guitar and I had a small backstage Peavey amp to go with it.

I was listening to a lot of hard rock and metal and subscribed to Guitar World and Guitar for the Practicing Musician; by the mid-'80s, I had developed an appreciation for speed guitarists like Eddie VH, Yngwie Malmsteen, Steve Vai and Joe Satriani. Granted, I still couldn't play for shit, let alone like those cats, but I liked listening to solos played at the speed of light. I briefly joined a band for a week, learning the riff to the Scorpions' "Rock You Like a Hurricane" but nothing came out of it. Part of the problem was we lived out in the outskirts of town; I had friends at school, but never hung out with anybody except a couple of guys. Maybe if I was jamming with buddies who had guitars things would have been different. But eventually the guitars started collecting dust and by the time I got to college, I wasn't playing at all. After freshman year, I left them at home, and then after my dad lost his job and the family was hurting for cash, I let my mom sell my acoustic and my amp.

Thankfully I held on to the Gibson and in the mid-90s when I got my own apartment, I decided to get serious about playing again. I picked up an amp and got some rock books and would practice. But it would go in fits and starts. Pretty much every year around this time, I start thinking about New Year's resolutions and one of them is always to play guitar again. And I'll go through stretches where I play in front of the TV and learn chords and riffs and then at some point lose interest. A couple of years ago, I bought a new acoustic and last year, my buddy Jay let me "have" a BC Rich Warlock that he'd been holding for another friend of his. I've practiced a fair amount with it, although I've yet to plug in and really test it out. It's a ridiculous looking metal guitar, but kinda fun to play.

So there I was on Christmas night, on my third or fourth beer after the girls had all gone to bed, watching the DVD of Led Zeppelin's Celebration Day and marveling at how awesome Jimmy Page still sounded. And pretty much every time I watch a great guitarist play, whether it's live or on TV, I think of how I should be playing. But this time, probably encouraged by the alcohol, I started Googling guitar lessons on my smartphone. And found a music school in Beverly that I had read about in the past, and then sent them an email inquiring about lessons. An instructor called me back yesterday and we set up an appointment for next week. I figure I haven't been able to sustain any kind of discipline about playing, but maybe with a structure in place I'll actually do what I've been trying half-assedly to do for the last 30 years, which is learn to play. I don't have any grand ambitions about it, but I'd love to just be able to play a song from memory instead of having to sit down with a book in front of me. We'll see how it goes, but I'm kind of psyched that I finally went ahead and did it. With any luck, my world tour will start in January 2014.