About: Beginnings (New and Old)

My first guitar came in the form of an “Airline” acoustic.  My grandma was visiting a place where people go to die and play chicken with hurricanes (I guess inanimate objects end up there as well) and decided that this hunk of wood would be something I might enjoy. 

I first was introduced to the musical world at the tender age of four (sidebar:  tender age?  Still pliable…able to be shaped and nurtured?  Juicy and delicious?  Just can’t quite wrap my head around this one).  My mom and dad decided to enroll me in piano lessons, because the incessant whining of a four year old boy echoing through the vast expanse of a 950 square foot house wasn’t nearly enough white noise for their liking.  I’m guessing here…I was only four, give me a break.  Apparently, I took to it right away, and went on to play constantly for the next 10 years.  For all you sports fans out there, I was the Allen Iverson of piano players (the disdain of practice thing, not the 6’0”, 165lb African American point guard thing).  I hated practice.  I hated learning the ins and outs of the “theory” as they call it…the structure of music.  I hated it with a passion.  I remember one year I went through a standardized musical test of some sort at San Diego State University and ended up passing the theory portion by one point…but knocking the judges socks off in the performance part (to be fair, when you played “Pop Goes the Weasel” like I did…it was hard for the suits not to take notice).  All this to say, I could play…I could feel the music.  I could take the music off the page, and make it what I thought it should be, structure be damned. 

Well, fast forward to the end of that 10 year period and you have a 14 year old young man tired of the whole thing.  I never allowed piano to really lead me anywhere.  I played recitals, I played for church, I played for school, but I just played because I was the piano guy, not because my heart was in it.  So I quit (in retrospect perhaps an all too recurring theme in my life).  But thanks to my grandma, my musical void would be filled ASAP.

I ended up teaching myself how to play the guitar (with the help of a chord book, time, Alice in Chains, Gregory Page, Live and Dave Matthews Band).  I would lock myself in my room for hours on end learning this chord and that chord, and eventually putting those chords together to sound like something familiar.  I never did learn how to read guitar sheet music or anything like that…but I did learn how to hear what was right, and what was not.  I owe that to the 10 years of piano for sure.  Guitar took me more places than piano ever did…but those are stories for another day. 

Looking back, the purpose of this post is just to introduce the reason I started this blog in the first place.  I’m a hopeless right-brained hack with a terminal case of “quit” who never really gave 100% of myself to anything…and I don’t want that to be on my tombstone.  I’m going to seek out friends to add posts of their own too…their memories…their stories…their honesty.  I would like this to become a place that people can go to either lose themselves in the ridiculousness of others, or maybe even learn something about themselves. 

This kind of got away from me at the end, but I’ll do better next time.  Please join me.  If you have any stories to share about anything at all (I love funny, I love dark, I love real), hit me up on the comments section, or at trad77@aol.com.  Let’s start something cool, for no other reason than it’s cool.  We can build a community of creative people searching for an outlet for that creativity.  We can share knowledge, we can share smiles, we can share tears…we can even share needles (for those that are into that whole sewing subculture)! 

Let’s do this.