Guitar Hero

One day last month it was the third snow day in a row and we were stuck in the house with nothing to do. I’d done a million Italian exercises on Duolingo and baked tons of cookies and read tons of books and cruised Facebook and Twitter til I was about to have a heart attack like the character in "The Nix" whose body shuts down from too much screen-time, and I realized what we lacked: musical instruments.  So I got in the car and drove a few blocks to Yenney Music and bought a guitar.

I hadn't played guitar in years. Like, over twenty. But a long, long time ago I knew how. I learned in the stairwell at the dorms at UCLA, a school I only attended for about a minute and a half, so obviously I didn’t learn much. The person who taught me and lent me the guitar was the older brother of my dorm boyfriend, and of course it goes without saying that we’d go in the stairwell to play guitar and then end up making out. It’s weird to think of it now, but that’s the kind of person I was at UCLA: the kind who secretly  made out with her boyfriend’s brother - and, even more horrifyingly, the kind of person who let him teach me how to play the opening to "Stairway to Heaven" without stating my deep conviction that it was the stupidest song of all time; and maybe even saying I liked it. (There’s a column in the Stranger right now called “Bands I Pretended To Like For Boys” which, boy o boy, don’t even get me started.)  Anyway, what I remember best is that the guitar sounded great in the stairwell - that, and how to play A, D and G, which meant pretty much every song by Buddy Holly, plus “I Fought The Law.”  

I didn’t really play much guitar after that, though later I bought one at some point, a Kay guitar, like my roommate Barbara had. I goofed around on it a little bit, but it resided in the living room and was always used alot more by people other than me. For a period in the late 1980s I lived in a house where literally everyone who walked through the door played guitar. Most Monday nights - the night that indie bands played the I-Beam -- we had bands sleeping on the floor and people were always just, like, grabbing a guitar and strumming it, or having a singalong, or even writing a song right in front of me. One time I recall the Bats playing a whole concert in our living room on our array of spare guitars, and I cannot tell you how much I love the Bats. That seems like a memory worth having.

The Kay guitar came with me to all my subsequent homes but it pretty much only got played by my boyfriend. I left it with him when I moved out, because he always really enjoyed playing it way more than I did. And he was also a lot better at it.

Anyway. In my old world of indie rock bands and shared housing, guitars were only procured very cheaply at used guitar shops, Goodwill, or from other people, so it was weird to be looking at one in a real music store, but I had no choice. In fact, I walked into that store and said, “Quick, I need a guitar, it’s an emergency,” and I walked out five minutes later with an emergency guitar kit: guitar, guitar strap, pick, strings, book, and tuner, all for $169. And the funny thing is, it’s the best guitar I’ve ever played, WAY better than the groovy Kay guitar. It's so good it actually sounds like I’m in the stairwell at UCLA, even though I am very much not.

It also turns out I must have learned some other chords other than A, D and G, because for some reason, I can now easily play chords I never used to be able to play, like C, B and F…and I think it’s because of the guitar, not me. Have guitars, like computers, gotten better over the years? I don’t know, but I know that learning guitar has gotten easier, thanks to the internet. Back in the stairwell at Hedrick Hall I would painstakingly pick out, by ear, the chords to the things I wanted to play, and it had to be super easy or forget it. Plus I’d have to write out all the lyrics and tape them up in front of me. But today, all you have to do is google any song you want to with the words guitar-tab after it and the whole tab will come up, with the lyrics and everything, and if you don’t like the key you can just put in a different one. You can prop your ipad up anywhere and just follow along, as if it were Guitar Hero.

Of course none of this makes you a better guitar player, it just makes playing guitar badly more fun. Now, instead of being stuck with Buddy Holly, I can play songs by the Go Betweens and the Verlaines and of course the Velvet Underground with perfect ease (though anything by Paul Westerberg will always elude me due to his obsession with C sharp, a chord I will never master in a million years). It also makes the endless bad weather here a lot more tolerable.

I'll never really be a guitar hero, nor do I want to be, but the point is, it’s just better to have musical instruments around the house than not. After I started banging away on the guitar, Caitlin started to as well, though she is finding it really difficult to learn. When she got frustrated, I had to remind her what she said about learning to drive, which she also finds really hard: after our first lesson, she said, “The only thing that keeps me going is knowing that even the very stupidest people I know are able to do it.”

As a person who once had to interview members of Ratt, Jett, and Quiet Riot, I can assure her that the same thing can be said of guitar. To be honest, playing guitar totally feels really hard and unnatural, but given that the Ramones existed on this planet, how hard could it really be? Plus, there's a reason so many people are willing to plug away at it, despite the cramped hands and callouses and just awful sounds it sometimes makes (if you're me): There are just days - and I know you've all had them - when all you want to do is go into your room and sing rock songs really loudly with a super fake British accent.

Unlike so many other pleasures of this world, it's cheap, doable and totally private. I can't recommend it more highly.