Sultans of swing lesson12/7/2022 ![]() ![]() ![]() It’s the guitar players named Jimmy or Joe you’ve known long enough to play their licks, to know what they sound like and then stray from them. What’s available to you as a novelist early on, then, is really just what you’ve read in novels before. Joe wanted me to unlearn everything I’d ever learned. I’d played violin and viola since I was four, and I could read music. Joe’s lessons consisted of an amalgam of far too loose and far too rigid advice in a combination that spun me around in circles, and set me back between three and eternity years from ever becoming a passable electric guitar player. The shirts also smelled of mildew and Parliament Lights. He wore exclusively Pink Floyd and Dire Straits concert t-shirts, and at that time that meant he wore the same “Division Bell” and “Sultans of Swing” Ts to every lesson. His name was Joe, and he started me and each of my friends off by teaching us the main lick to Jimi Hendrix’s “Hey Joe,” though he clearly had never made the connection. The guitar teacher appeared to be both young and old, with hair both long and short depending on which part of his head you were looking at. Lessons took place in the back, in a small room that smelled of mildew and Parliament Lights. ![]() When I was fourteen I started taking electric guitar lessons at a music shop in a strip mall in suburban Baltimore. ![]()
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