Reggie reached for my guitar, a look of pity on his face. “Here, you’ve got the strap tangled,” he said, fiddling with the adjuster until the guitar hung down just below my belt. “You don’t want it choked up too tight, Brett, makes you look like a Beatle.”
“That’s a bad thing?”
“They’re a great band,” he said. “But you don’t actually want to look like one. You’re playing rock n’ roll. You’ve got to be more casual. Let it all hang out. Take out the hair tie and let your freak flag fly.”
“The hair gets in my eyes,” I said.
He smiled. “That’s the point. Here, get your hands on the neck and show me what you’ve got.”
I tried the grip but found it difficult to reach the upper strings. The whole instrument felt heavy and awkward in a way it didn’t when I had been sitting down. Noticing my discomfort, Reggie gestured for the metal stool.
“Okay, you been practicing the pentatonics?”
I nodded, running through a few bluesy riffs before losing my place and sagging into another key. I could see Reggie start to tap the heel of his foot against the blue carpet, unconsciously, as I struggled for a consistent beat.
“Not bad,” he said. “Not bad at all. You’ve been practicing. Okay, so you’ve got your electric guitar now, what can you tell me about it?”
I thought for a moment. I knew Mom had pawned a violin to buy it. I knew the guitar felt full of possibilities in a way nothing else did. If I had to put it into words, it felt and sounded like the future: cool and dangerous, exotic and unwritten. I didn’t say this to Reggie. What I said was, “My mom said it’s a Mexican-made Fender, which I guess isn’t the same thing as American-made.”
“Still perfectly fine,” Reggie reassured me. “I have a couple myself. Honestly, unless I think a scout’s going to be at a show, I only ever bring a MIM-Strat. Let’s have a look at it.”
I nodded and carefully lifted the strap from my shoulder, handing it over like a piece of china. Reggie was not as careful. He grabbed its butt and neck, flipped it around, and slapped out a few riffs, listening with one cocked ear to the way the unamplified strings rattled against the frets.
“Yeah,” he said. “Not bad. Action’s a bit high but Tony gave you one of the better ones. You see the finish?”
He pointed to the grain of the wood visible through the Strat’s semi-transculent ivory varnish. “Typically Fender’s Mexican factory glue three or so pieces of hardwood together when they assemble the body. This one I think has only two. That’s probably why they went with the this finish, to show off the grain but I’d have to take off the back to be sure. You brought your amp, right?”
I thumped the top of the small black case to my right. He held out his hand for the cable and put the jack into the input. Reggie ran through some arpeggios, then a few familiar sounding chords.
“What’s that?” I asked. Reggie had never played a band started before the 80s and it surprised me to hear a familiar song.
“That’s that Stoned Temple whatever band. I had to learn the riff for our next show.”
“You played it in a different way,” I observed. “Sounds more country.”
He smiled. “That’s because it is country. All of those alternative bands use the Mixolydian mode and pile on the distortion. Pearl Jam, REM, all of them.”
I folded my hands in my lap, annoyed at the comparison. “What about Nirvana? They didn’t sound like country.”
He considered that a moment. “No, no they didn’t. Kurt had some other influences going on, though. Take ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit.’”
He fiddled with the gain knob on the amp and struck up with the intro, four simple chords broken up with a staccato rattle of dead notes. The sound was a little cleaner than on the record, but still unmistakable.
“That’s really good,” I said. “I want to play that.”
“It’s not too tough,” Reggie said. “It’s basically ‘More Than a Feeling,’ with different accents.”
“What?”
“You have heard of Boston?”
I shook my head.
“Take my word for it, Nirvana stole all their best riffs from the 70s. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. All the greats steal.”
I had a sense that Reggie would happily go on for the rest of the lesson about music history. In some ways he was worse than my French horn teacher. He, however, at least noticed my restlessness.
“So, you remember how to form a F chord?”
I bunched my clumsy fingers together and gave an experimental strum.
“Nice! Now the B flat and then the G and then…okay, let me show you,” he took up his own guitar, a shiny blue telecaster with a mother of pearl pick-guard, and showed me the proper configuration. The G was tough, my fingers not wanting to stay in the required Vulcan salute.
“Almost, but listen to the rhythm,” he said, giving another demonstration. “It’s the ghost notes between the changes that really sell it. Kurt was a lot of things but he wasn’t a clean guitarist. You got to keep it sloppy. Try this,” and he tapped out a stuttering sort of beat on his guitar, the reverb in his amp picking it up as an echoing snare drum. “One and, two and-”
I tried, but I just couldn’t make the change fast enough.
“Okay, so we’re just about at the end of the lesson,” Reg said, still upbeat. “And that’s your last one before college, right?”
I nodded.
“Yeah, that’s awesome. Just keep practicing, and dude, find people that want to play the sort of stuff you like, and you’ll get better.”
“I’m hoping I can join a band or something.”
“You’ve got two chords,” he smiled. “Learn another one and you’ll be all set.”
“That’s it?” I tried to keep the disappointment out of my voice. “I really want to get better.”
“Okay, here’s one thing. I saw you struggling with the chords, and I think I see the basic problem.”
I leaned in, suddenly aware that my entire career as a rocker could depend on this moment. “What’s that?”
After checking behind him, suspicious my mom or Tony was there, he lowered his voice. “You know what rock is all about, right?”
“I don’t know, freedom? Breaking the rules?”
“Sex,” he said like this was the only possible answer. “Getting with a girl. Knocking boots and getting busy. Not to get too personal here, but I guessing you haven’t made that happen yet.”
I stared at him and then slowly shook my head, embarrassed and discouraged. I thought of Jacy and that weekend her parents had left her to house-sit. We talked about it the entire weekend but decided not to ruin our friendship with the long-distance thing. It made me sad now, the vanished moment of that night.
“That’s fine, it’ll happen. But the point is, that’s the rhythm of rock right there. Getting it on,” and he began tapping out this other beat on his guitar, something that swaggered and lunged. “That’s what you’re aiming for. Copy that rhythm!”
Leaving the practice room, it occurred to me that Reggie’s big advice for playing guitar was to get laid. Why did he think I was learning to play guitar? I trudged around piles of instruments and racks of music to where my mom was still talking with Tony. Behind them hung dozens of guitars, suspended from their necks like trophies from a safari. Tony pointed at old black and white photos, pictures of Padua in the fifties and Mom nodded. Reggie came out, made a check-writing gesture and received an “it’s-all-settled” okay from Tony. My guitar teacher wished me luck, one last time, before ushering in the next skinny kid.
“You sounded really good in there,” Mom said.
I nodded.
“Although you kept playing that one piece over and over.”
I grimaced. “Just a song I like.”
“On the radio?” Mom said. “No wonder I didn’t recognize it. Too many parallel fifths on the radio.”
I looked at her blankly.
“It’s like Copeland,” she said. “Moving the fifth interval up and down the scale. It’s a very soulless sound.”
“It’s called a power chord,” I said.
“Power chord?” She blinked. “It doesn’t sound powerful.”
I knew where this was going. She listed examples of genuine power, leading to her platonic ideal of classical music – Brahms.
“He ripped off Beethoven, of course,” she said. “But the First will help you understand how to generate a powerful sound through dynamic chord progressions. Not something you can create on a guitar but you’ll get the idea.”
I pushed the door open with the nose of my guitar. “I’m through playing the French Horn, mom, stop bugging me about it.”
She opened the back of the minivan. “Never say never, Brett. You might find in a few years you really want to play it again. That’s why you should bring it with you to Franklin, to keep up your embouchure.”
I sought a gap to stow my case and amp between crates of classical paraphernalia. Mom conducted a small community orchestra and while they looked for a new place to practice, she wound up storing all the music. There seemed to be more room now, apparently she had used my lesson to do some rearranging. I shut the hatch to the minivan while she got the engine going. A veritable Christmas tree of warnings appeared behind the steering wheel, some of them vanished as we left the parking lot, others remained when we arrived back home.
As I pulled my guitar from the hatch, my brother’s head popped up in the living room window. Mom detested darkness and gloom, refused to get blinds for any window in the house. The trees surrounding the yard were large and shaggy, the siding grubby with dust. Our little road served as a shortcut between Padua and Corinth and people raced down its macadam at 50 and 60 miles per hour. Mom forbid us from crossing it and the only time I’d ever been on the other side was the day Dad told me about the separation. We walked over there, all the way to the northern edges of the pasture. From the summit the entire countryside spread out like a wrinkled old tablecloth, creased here and there with deep valleys, the long narrow lakes sparkling in the dying sun. I hadn’t been back since.
“Now, before you stomp off to your room,” Mom said. “We need to talk about something.”
I turned around, the amp cramping my fingers with its weight.
“You’ve got two weeks before you leave and I want you to get together what you’re bringing. Your room is a mess and I’m not stumbling over your clutter for the next four years.”
“Clean my room, got it.”
“Then, what you’re not bringing goes out back. Don’t try to stuff it in the trash barrel. Also, I’m going to start dinner in a little bit. Do you want to join us downstairs?”
“I’m not sure.”
She nodded, as though this was what she expected. “Decide soon, otherwise you’re going to have to heat up your own pot pie.”
My room was on the second floor and I didn’t really see what Mom meant at first. The space was small, bare really, except for a single REM poster taped up to cover a hole in the wall. My bed lay beneath it, a futon I had slept on since 10. My feet now stuck out a foot from the bottom, but its surface perfectly conformed to my body, lying back on it was liking slipping into an old shoe. I opened one of the three windows but the space was still incredibly hot after being in the sun all day. I took a second look. I had books in every corner, stacks of college brochures lying everywhere, and my final SAT score pinned next to the acceptance letter from Franklin. Horn music overflowed out of a big white cardboard box, spilling out over the floor, mixing with my old middle school clothes. I sighed. Part of me wanted to throw everything out.
I pitched the horn books and the clothes into a few trash bags and hauled them downstairs. My brother glared at me when one bag knocked the back of his chair. “Watch it,” he said.
Then I made a few trips to the backyard, past the ruins of our old barn towards the low hill with a cherry tree. On my last trip, I had a bit of a race going, between me and the cheap of the trash bag. The material stretched away from my fingers, gray streaks about to bust open. When I reached the rise the tears reached the critical threshold. But I spent a moment considering all the other faded trash bags, the soggy magazines, the rusted bed frames and old washing machines. I held the bag over the pit, the material giving way in front of my eyes before I let it drop. I wanted it to explode on impact and scatter Sousa from one end of the county to the other but it didn’t.
“Is that everything?” she asked. “I might want to put some of the orchestra’s music in the room so I really need the space.”
“You’ll have plenty of space,” I gritted my teeth. “I’m going to eat upstairs so I can keep working on it.”
I went upstairs, plugged in my amp and started going through some scales. Then I arranged the “Nevermind” tablature on a stack of books, flipped to ‘Polly,’ a song simple enough to play on my acoustic. I ran through the chord changes, whispering the lyrics. It sounded wrong on the Strat, overblown even when the volume was turned way down. I rested my fingers on the strings as my brother’s footsteps tromped up the stairs.
“Brett! Stop playing the guitar! I’m trying to watch my show!”
“I’m practicing!” I shouted back.
“You don’t have to play it at full volume!”
I lowered the amp another notch. “Better?”
“The whole fucking house is shaking!” my brother screamed. “I can’t hear my show!”
I flipped it off. “Happy?”
“I’ll be happy when you’re watching your show and I’m playing the cello,” said my brother as he stomped back down the stairs.
I tried to find the rhythm Reggie had used for ‘Smells Like.’ The tab in the book didn’t quite match his fingerings but I gave it a try. Even allowing for the lack of amplification, I just couldn’t get it right. The rhythm sounded broken, disjointed. So I adjusted the strap and stood up. Now I had trouble keeping my fingers in the curl of the power chords but somehow it was easier to hear it right. I couldn’t be careful and precise, had to content myself with the close-enough. Sweat gathered at the collar of my t-shirt and slid down the curve of my back so I took it off. I imagined myself as Kurt, funneling all of the angry buzzing fury in my head into hitting those four simple chords. That vague murmur I kept missing. Sweat ran down my forehead, made my fingers slippery.
F chord. B Flat. G chord. C.
I hammered at each chord, and then choked off the changes.
F chord, dead notes. F chord, dead notes.
Something tugged at the edge of my hearing as I kept focused on that one chord, that one tricky change. Why couldn’t I hit it? The sound of it, the hollow clack of the strings, eluded me.
I swiped at my forehead, perspiration coating my arms and chest. I caught my reflection in one of the windows and paused. I was skinny, pale, with long frizzy hair. I looked like one of the extras from ‘Hair,’ but I couldn’t tell if I looked like an actor or an actress. I struck the strings one last time and let them rattle away.
Then the noise, which had been building for a full minute as a car barreled out of the dark, kicking up dust and gravel, roared onto the stretch of road in front of the house. I saw the two riders and they saw me. I stood exposed on my stage, the guitar cradled in my arms, a half-naked, fuzz-haired hermaphrodite. The car screeched to a stop and backed up.
All the strength left my legs as I dropped to the floor. I mashed my fingers beneath the Strat, chipping the finish on the bottom.
The car idled outside the window for a full minute. It didn’t matter if they knew me or not. They had seen me and wanted more of the show.
I could feel my heart in my chest, felt it thudding like a little drum inside the cage of my ribs.
I listened to it, really heard it.
When I was sure they had gone, I resumed my perch on my tiny amp. It wasn’t the rhythm Reggie had in mind, but I suddenly found something to play. It wasn’t ‘Teen Spirit,’ or Nirvana, or even really rock n’ roll. It was a sound, something that came from within me. I played it long after dinner, the same simple little chord change, the same fearful thud-thud, watching the dark hill on the other side of the road. There were no stars and no moon, only the terrifying murk and the notes like whispers haunting a very small room.
# # #
Morgan Crooks grew up in a hamlet in Upstate New York and now teaches ancient history in Massachusetts. Links to his stories are available on the Ancient Logic website (www.ancientlogic.blogspot.com). He lives with his wife, Lauren, near Boston.
Photo: Cornelia Schneider-Frank
