Art Guilt, Part I

The poor bastards who brought me up meant well, I suppose, and in a halfway normal family might have learned from their mistakes, sparing me this grief. But for whatever reason, I was fated to receive the full treatment, perhaps just so I could sit here a few days before my 64th birthday and remember things that still gum up the works.

The thing is, there’s this crack in space/time, a parting of the quantum soup, and all of a sudden I’m rehearsing tomorrow with a band. If all goes well, I’ll get to sit in with them on three successive gigs in the next few days: Saturday at a party, Sunday at a house concert, and Wednesday at a benefit downtown. Obviously I’m pretty wound up and trying to focus, but earlier today there was something cold and wet slowing me down. This evening over drinks I was telling my wife a seemingly unrelated story (much too long to recount here) about my experience in the Student Conservation Corps in Olympic National Park in Washington in 1962, when out of the blue came a long-suppressed memory of the first time I caught hell for buying a musical instrument. You don’t suppose any of this is related, do you?

My family lived on Long Island at the time. To get to Olympic National Park, I’d taken a Greyhound bus from New York City to Seattle, four days on the same Scenicruiser! During my time out there, I’d gotten to play a borrowed ukelele and wanted my own version. When it was all over, I had a day in Seattle before the trip back, and I bought a baritone uke in a pawn shop. It probably cost all of $20 or $30, but that was all I had for food and train fare from Manhattan to Massapequa after I got off the bus. I had almost no money to buy food on the trip home, and when I landed in New York, I had to call my father for a ride. I don’t know what I expected, but he was pissed that he had to drive into the city to pick me up, and spending my money on a ukelele was no excuse.

I don’t know why I bought a ukelele, probably because that was all I could afford. My father actually had a ukelele of his own, a small Hawaiian one, that he used to play at cocktail parties when we lived in Germany. A cheap guitar, too, which I seldom ever heard. But by 1962, both of those were in the closet. I tried to play the folk songs of the day on the baritone ukelele and eventually moved on to his guitar, but nowhere in this process did anyone really encourage me. I always had the feeling that playing a guitar or similar instrument was something I wasn’t really supposed to do, and of course I never had real lessons, although my father may have showed me a chord or two early on. It was always so strange with him, though, as if he were showing me something he shouldn’t have, like something embarrassed him about it all.

Between my freshman and sophomore years of college, I went out to Washington State again, this time to work for the Green Giant Company and make a lot of money to pay for school. It didn’t turn out that way, of course. I missed a lot of days from being sick, and there wasn’t much money to be made in any case. There was just enough to get me into trouble (see?), however, and before I came home, I bought my first real guitar, a Kay I think, with metal strings. It meant a lot to me, even though it was cheap — I didn’t even have a case. My parents were angry with me again, too: not only had I not made much money, but what I had, I’d spent on a guitar. The punishment for this transgression was telling me three days before the semester started that I couldn’t go back to SMU because it “cost too much.,” after which they summarily and literally dumped me in Austin. This turned out to be a blessing in disguise, so I can’t hate anybody for that (and don’t), but the association between guitar and guilt was strengthened.

I can’t have that in the way of what’s at stake right NOW, however, so it’s good that this has bubbled up from the deep. And wouldn’t you know it: after remembering that first baritone uke, or more importantly, the way my father treated me when I came home with it — something I hadn’t recalled for almost 50 years (!) — I turned in my best solo practice session yet this evening.

Wow. Even if nothing else happens, wow.

(See how this works? )

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