I WENT to a rock club the other night. When we arrived, a 5-foot-3 college-age guy with an acoustic guitar was onstage. He didn’t look like a rock star. He looked like the kids I once sat next to in AP Calculus, earnest and self-effacing–ingratiating, even. This was a look he gave every evidence of wishing to transcend. He wore a torn-up army jacket and a $300 haircut that brought him up to about 5-foot-6. His signature stage move–putting on a nyanh-nyanh face while miming banging his head against the wall–served only to accentuate his resemblance to Michael Dukakis. He could mimic this rock’n’roll abandon only for two or three bars at a time, because he was at the outermost limits of his virtuosity, and was petrified of breaking his concentration. He played only the blues, the slower the better, and by “blues” I mean dumpty-doody, dumpty-doody, where Dumpty = E, and Doody = E7. My heart went out to him as he pawed grimly through the simplest chord changes. Because, as it happens, E and E7 make up 29 percent of the seven chords I managed to learn in two years of studying classical guitar as a teenage rock-demiurge-in-training.
Why, given that my ambitions were limited to learning the solo on “Bodhisattva,” did I study classical guitar? Because my ability to present worthless projects to my parents as constructive ones–so useful in other contexts–got the better of me. I couldn’t very well procure the necessary Stratocaster by saying, “For an absolute bare minimum of effort, I’d like to have women throw themselves at me and men hail me as ‘The Bard of Our Generation.'” So I said, “Learning the guitar would acquaint me with the fundamentals of music.”
How I would come to rue that throwaway phrase “fundamentals of music”! It led my parents to get me a guitar that would have been just the item if I had felt like playing chamber quintets, but was of little use otherwise. The thing didn’t even rest heavily on my hip like an automatic weapon, the way the guitar of my fantasies did. No–a classical guitar sat on the lap, like a bag of groceries.
It was several weeks before we were able to locate someone in our part of Massachusetts who could teach it. “Bridget” was a 50-year-old spinster whose main qualification for teaching guitar was that she had visited Spain in her youth. Her run-down rented house was a shrine to Spain. It was filled with knick-knacks, most of them ashtrays and most of those full. For the first few lessons we listened to Julian Bream and Andrés Segovia records. I was informed that Salamanca was a beautiful city, and Toledo? !Ay, caramba! Granada? Also beautiful! No slushy winters there. Jamón serrano was excellent, but what passed for ham in our supermarkets . . . well, a Spaniard would be insulted if you served it to him. Occasionally Bridget would sigh up at the wineskins and the watercolors showing the Puerta del Sol as it had looked when she was 20, and talk about the “pride” of these Spanish men. One gathered they had their strong points, even if they were finicky about their ham. One suspected, too, that they had colorful nicknames for women like Bridget.
A guitar was always resting on her thigh, but it made noise only when her rings and bangles dinged against it in the middle of some gesticulation. We didn’t do much guitar-playing. She insisted, with an imperiousness I took to be Iberian, that she would not teach me to read music. It would only trammel your artistic spirit, she warned. When I nonetheless asked if I could learn to play something, she would form an “E,” instructing me to do the same. Then she would strum it and sing, “Eeee . . .”
In like fashion, over the years I learned A (“Ayyy . . .“), A7, E7, Em, F, and G. Yet I began to fear that the girls I was trying to impress would have grandchildren before I learned that solo on “Bodhisattva.” Whenever my demands for instruction grew too importunate, Bridget would play the first 25 notes of the bourrée from the Bach lute suite in E minor, pressing it out with her thumb at one note per second, staring at her left hand with cross-eyed concentration, as if she were stringing beads–the same look I saw on poor Dukakis in the club the other night.
It makes me sad to think about Bridget now. Not at all because I feel ripped off. Handing over money to people for their enthusiasms rather than their skills was a more common practice 25 years ago, at least in small towns. It may produce lousier guitarists, but it probably supports a more interesting society than today’s results-based commerce. I always felt like I owed Bridget something, anyway, for my coming in out of the slushy weather to interrupt her reveries of sunlit Granada as it was in 1952, even if whatever unhappiness she was dragging around with her had nothing to do with America and nothing to do with Spain.
–Christopher Caldwell
