STICKING YOUR NECK out How to Venture Forth As A
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STICKING YOUR NECK OUT How to Venture Forth as a Guitar Player (If You Happen to Be Me) ~or~ Deceptive Cadences in an Unresolved Progression Through Odd Times BY TAD LATHROP t’s really all about one question: What does the future hold I when, upon turning 12, after six years as a boy soprano, then alto, in a very active church choir in Greenwich Village singing Bach, Mozart, Palestrina, Thomas Tallis, Bartók, and Fauré, you're suddenly exposed to a new group of singing and guitar-wielding strangers from Liverpool called the Beatles, singing melody-rich songs like “She Loves You,” “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” and “Please Please Me,” and you promptly go head-over-heels nuts, wearing out the grooves on their records and immediately diving into total immersion in '60s pop, rock, and soul, ear pressed to the transistor radio at night soaking up the playlists of Cousin Brucie and Murray the K and Dan Ingram, so excited and inspired that being in one of these guitarry “singing groups” becomes a screaming necessity, even if you don't know how to play guitar, so you have your mother buy one, damn it — she had rented one for you four years earlier but your hands had been too small — and now you learn how to play the top three strings and before you know it you’re in a band called Thee Wild Oats with musical friend Rick playing tunes of the day by the Everly Brothers (“Cathy’s Clown”), the Animals (“Boom Boom”), the Searchers (“Needles and Pins”), Wilson Pickett (“In the Midnight Hour”), and, of course the Beatles (“Rain”), while at home at night you hear your mom playing records by Thelonious Monk, Ornette Coleman, and Charlie Parker, which at the time you don't really like but which lodge somewhere deep in your consciousness, all accumulating into a musical need that explodes one night during high school at a party where you see some classmates switching on Fender amps with cool red lights and holding awesome-looking electric guitars, and then, using the name the Far Reachers, playing rock with a skill that raises your eyebrows and compels renewed pleas to mom to get you a better guitar — which she does, from a pawn shop, acquiring (at your selection) a Japanese-built solid-body slab of wood under the obscure Sorrento label, but no amplifier, requiring you to plug into her fold-out record player and live with the lousy sound, which holds you over, until that fateful day when you receive a call from your friend Rick saying that the Far Reachers have asked him to join as the singer but he told them he’d do it only if they brought you in, too, and the next thing you know, you’re in the basement of a townhouse on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, amid drum prodigy Reggie, top- hatted guitar hotshot Brad, bassist Steve, and friend Rick singing and playing harmonica, and you’re all called the Hand Grenadiers, and for the next year or two you’re playing gigs at school dances all over Manhattan — and getting paid for it! — on a stylistic scattershot of tunes by the Rolling Stones (“Under My Thumb”), the Byrds (“I’ll Feel a Whole Lot Better”), Paul Butterfield Blues Band (“Born in Chicago”), the Yardbirds (“For Your Love”), Otis Redding (“Respect”), and throughout you’re getting doused and versed in the entire range of the era’s best music — broadening rapidly as amazing new bands come into view — Procol Harum, Moby Grape, Jefferson Airplane, the Blues Project — and you take on their songs, too, jamming them, rehearsing them, gigging them — including a date at Hunter College opening for Otis Redding — and then, and then, BANG!, an unexpected turn occurs when one day you hear a record by John Mayall called Bluesbreakers and experience a mind-altering new guitar style and sound, thick, singing, bending, screaming, leading like no other guitar you’d heard before, and it’s being played by a guy named Eric Clapton, and the feeling is akin to that when you first heard the Beatles — knowing instantly that you’ve got to find out how it’s done, so you learn every tune and guitar bit on the record, and you learn it pretty quickly, just as another new guitar innovator, Jimi Hendrix, hits the public airwaves first with “Hey Joe” and then with full-blast guitar bombshells like “Purple Haze” and “Foxy Lady,” adding hyper urgency to the need to Find Out What They’re Doing, exploring sound effects like distortion boosters and wah-wah pedals, working all of one summer just to earn the money to buy a Real Guitar, culminating in a sojourn to the guitar store at 500 LaGuardia Place run by Dan Armstrong, who alerts you to a 1958 brown Les Paul Special (“previously owned by the Hollies and Eric Clapton!”), which you buy for 500 bucks, unconcerned about the fact that the neck had once broken off and been reattached with glue (by Dan), and you spend the next block of time wallowing in the feel and tone of it, wishing you had been playing it the previous year when in another band with friend Rick, drummer Reggie, bassist Steve, and a new guitarist, Kevin, who managed to get that thick distorted tone as you and the band played bluesy music exclusively, recording it at the high-end A&R Studios in midtown and performing it live, opening for the famed Chambers Brothers (“Time”!), and carrying on until Kevin pulled out to focus on college . and now, a year later, your own high school years begin coming to an end, ejecting you to southwestern Ohio and a “progressive” college named Antioch and a mood of regret upon finding that music players there are few and far between compared to the hotbed in New York; but nonetheless, as a freshman, you poke around to see who’s doing what and soon enough discover that another guitarist, a New York country blues player named Nick Katzman, is present at Antioch, as are a few other pickers, like Ray Seifert, whose early departure from the Antioch Experience you later recall as he (renamed Ray Benson) forms a group called Asleep at the Wheel, but you stay, you stay, thinking of transferring to Berklee College of Music but talked out of it by a music professor who warns that “it’s for studio musicians” as if that’s a negative, so you stay, you stay, and become a music major (while quite appropriately minoring in psychology), forming music friendships, studying music theory and history and literature and composition, and noting the arrival on campus of jazz pianist Cecil Taylor, a boost to your newfound inclination toward jazz, planted by your mom’s early record collection and energized by later exposure to Kenny Burrell (Midnight Blue), Freddie Hubbard (Red Clay), and Chick Corea (Now He Sings, Now He Sobs) and jazzy rock fueled by the likes of Spirit, Blood Sweat and Tears, and the Electric Flag, and you also find yourself suddenly attracted to the sound of acoustic guitar and songs that wield it, and the folk/country feel invading rock in songs by Neil Young, Buffalo Springfield, the Byrds (still active!), and the new group Crosby, Stills and Nash, and then, somehow, you stumble on a record, 6- and 12-String Guitar, by a fella named Leo Kottke, and you’re blown away by the fullness and power and jangle he achieves — all alone on a guitar — to the extent that you had to Find Out What He’s Doing, and you buy a Guild F-30, get tipped on to a fingerpicking technique called Travis picking (named after Merle) that involves the thumb keeping the beat on bass strings while other fingers pick melodies and chordal syncopations and — WOW — you pretty quickly learn how to do it, amazing yourself with the wide and sparkling sound, and inspiring you to write songs that employ it, which some Antioch students hear through the dormitory walls, and one of whom spreads the news to another guy on campus, a guy named Don Giller, who is doing similar things with a Martin D-35, and who contacts you to get together, leading you to find that the only thing that sounds cooler than an intricately fingerpicked guitar is TWO intricately fingerpicked guitars — especially when both the guitarists write and sing — making for an instant connection and mutual agreement to collaborate, spawning a partnership that will last at least 35 years but initially centers on writing a repertoire, playing around Antioch, then spending time in New York to incorporate the bass playing of one-time Hand Grenadiers cohort (and now close friend) Steve, auditioning in Manhattan clubs (on one occasion crossing paths at the Bitter End with a pre-fame Bruce Springsteen, himself auditioning solo on acoustic guitar and striking you at the time as similar to Bob Dylan), playing the occasional gig, and then living in San Francisco for more auditions, songwriting, and forming a kind of fusion Latin-rock electric band, all of which is interspersed with your own ventures into other kinds of music — jazz and soul-band gigs around S.F. with a sax player named Jonathan, hippie rock in an S.F. quartet called Blackfoot Sun, and New York recordings in a Chappell Music-backed outfit called Blue Angel — all occurring while you complete your music degree at Antioch and graduate in 1974, followed by — what? what could possibly be next? .