On our walk the other day, Marcia and I were talking about teaching and I was put in mind of the one guitar lesson I had in my life.
I took up the guitar in 1970 at the age of twenty-one when I found myself itinerant and on foot and unable to bring a piano with me. I bought a nylon-string guitar with a very fat neck for seven dollars in a mercado in Guadalajara and carried this guitar around America and Canada for a couple years, teaching myself to play.
Returning to California in 1972 I got a room in Santa Cruz in a former motel retrofitted to be a boarding house and continued my self-directed guitar playing, though in my travels I’d met other guitarists and tried their guitars and was painfully aware that my guitar was not a good one and the monstrous neck, among other things, was an impediment to my playing well.
I dreamed of one day accruing enough cash to get a better guitar. In the meantime, I went to visit my folks in the Bay Area and accompanied them to a gathering at the house of their friends who had a troubled sixteen-year-old son known to be an excellent guitarist. When he made a brief appearance to get some food, I told him I was teaching myself to play the guitar and he invited me to come play guitars with him in the bedroom he shared with a half-dozen excellent guitars.
He handed me a beautiful slender-necked guitar and asked me to play something. I played a simple song I’d composed and he played along on another of his guitars and made the song sound marvelous. Then he played a gorgeous jazzy song he’d composed made of dozens of chords I’d never dreamed of making, and I raved about the song and his playing.
Pleased by my praise he said, “Here’s a chord that will change your life.”
He played the chord and held his fingers in that position for me to imitate.
When I had successfully played the chord, he said, “You can use this same fingering anywhere on the neck and make wonderful chords.”
I tried the fingering up and down and all around the neck, and he was right; wonderful chords abounded.
When I returned to Santa Cruz, my guitar playing improved by leaps and bounds and I wrote dozens of new songs.
A few months later I bought a slender-necked steel string Ovation for fifty bucks, started a trio, and ere long we were the weekend band at Positively Front Street, a pub near the municipal wharf.
Which is all to say, a good teacher can change your life.
The Guru a short movie starring Todd’s hands