How I Came To Have Guitarrhoea Part 1

In The Beginning
As a primary school kid, I liked recordings. LPs, 45s, and compact cassettes; whatever was lying around the house was fair game. I just liked these things that made noise. My favorite object in the house was perhaps the cassette tape recorder. It was a mono device designed more for recording dictation than recording music, but hours of fun were had, just recording funny voices and playing them back. I really wanted to make something that sounded like the pre-packaged media objects. In short I wanted to make a record that sounded like a real record.

What kind of record did I want to make? I think I wanted to play trumpet like the gleaming golden trumpet on the cover of the Fiesta Brass 'Viva Tijuana' album (man I wish I could find a good link to this one, but I can't). My parents took me to the music shop and basically the salesman talked my parents out of letting me start on the trumpet. The guy argued to my parents that I was most likely to lose interest, so I should be given a cheaper instrument. Like a ukulele. And so I was given a ukulele; which seemed to me, totally unrelated to the sorts of sounds I was hearing on the 'Viva Tijuana' record. That was my first disappointment as a young musician.

For years I tinkered with the ukulele, not really understanding the logic of it. I still don't. I think a ukulele is a dinky toy, even when I've seen extraordinary virtuosos on the instrument. It's just not rock'n'roll. I'd listen to the radio, and I had pretty broad tastes - It helps not to know anything. My favorite radio show was 'Sunday morning Baroque" where I'd hear harpsichords and flugelhorns, but not ukulele. I liked Louis Armstrong. I loved Thelonious Monk, but I didn't know it was him until many years later (that's another story). I liked Sammy Davis junior but I don't know why. I even liked minor Vegas singers like *gulp* Vikki Carr. Does anybody even remember Vikki Carr? We had a LP record of hers at home for reasons I can't fathom. Liked the Beatles, but who didn't?

During primary school, I sucked at music. I was good at maths, history, art and language but I was abysmal at music. This was partly due to the fact that I wasn't getting extra-curricular teaching in piano like all the kids who excelled at music. I was out playing 'ball instead.
The 'music problem' was triple-fold:
1) I hated my music teacher and she hated kids who couldn't play piano. She had no interest in teaching us ordinary kids; she just wanted to teach the better kids. Today, I can understand her sentiment, but it still left me in the cold when it came to music.
2) They were teaching really boring bits of music. There's really no remedy to this. To teach music you have to start with the simple stuff; the simple stuff is often boring. Pretty soon, you're wondering, "why this tune, and not, say, I Am The Walrus? At that point you loe respect for the teacher who already doesn't have any respect for you.
3) The instruments they mandated for primary school kids literally sucked. I'm still not interested in blowing and sucking instruments like the recorder and the harmonica. I was made to realise that even the dinky little ukulele had more appeal than these things.

So what turned me around? It was the sight of my classmate 'TM' playing guitar, singing 'Hey Jude'. Now, I have to explain something about TM. TM was not a very bright guy. He was slow, unimaginative, un-athletic and bad at every school subject including and most importantly, music. He defined the notion of dumb. He was the walking testament to the power of stupidity to continue being stupid. Scientists defined the stupidity constant, measured from his head. And here was this guy playing guitar - his one talent that saved him from true hopelessness. In any case he was just knocking out chords, but he was playing 'Hey Jude'. I thought, "there you go. If that sub-mongoloid like TM can play guitar, then the possibilities for music are indeed close to infinite." - I think about the conceit inherent in that last statement and it makes me cringe with embarrassment, but there you go, I was twelve. That's how I decided guitar was 'it'.

In retrospect, it seems quite fortuitous that I had such a low opinion of somebody who then turned out to have one talent. If it had been the other way around (as in super-talented guy having trouble playing anything on guitar) I might have thought, "pass, too hard". Yet, here he was, TM, the paragon of all that is not very intelligent, hammering out the chords to 'Hey Jude'. I mean, what the heck? Suddenly, music got a lot closer than I thought of Bach and Beethoven and Louis Armstrong and the Monk guy and *gulp* Vikki Carr! Music was so close, an imbecile was participating. TM had somehow cracked the code to breaking in to the world of music itself, through guitar.

So today, I thank TM from the bottom of my heart for letting me take the first steps towards having guitarrhoea. Had it not been for him, I might never have chosen guitar. I might still be stewing in my musical frustration. As it turned out, I would stew in other kinds of musical frustrations that I never imagined existed.