Learning the Guitar - Again

For some keyboard players – me included – the guitar is a very mysterious instrument.  The visual logic of a piano, with its repeating 12-note pattern of black and white keys, each key corresponding to a unique note, is lost when trying to decipher the fretboard of a guitar.  (“What do you mean middle C can be played here…and here…and here…and here?”)

Sure, learning the basic open chords is easy enough.  Back in the late 80s I borrowed my friend Shawn’s acoustic guitar, bought a chord book, and pretty soon I was playing songs like “Driver 8” by R.E.M. and the similar jangly “I’m Looking Through You” by the Beatles, my fingertips pulsing painfully with each passing hour.  I even figured out open E tuning so that I could play Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi.” 

But dang, it got hard after that.  Like, REALLY hard.  As soon as I placed my fingers further up the fretboard, I didn’t know what the hell I was doing.  Over the past thirty years, I’ve made a concerted effort to improve my guitar playing at least a half a dozen times.  I’ve taken lessons.  I’ve watched videos.  I’ve learned songs.  But each time my efforts have fizzled out after a few months.

But not this year.  I recently started to break down the guitar in ways I hadn’t been dedicated enough to do before.  It started with a terrific set of tutorials on YouTube by guitar instructor Mark Zabel.   This guy is terrific, and I like his instruction techniques.  Of particular help to me were his videos on “Playing the right notes” and the CAGED system of instruction.  CAGED may not work for some people, but it helped me to better visualize the fretboard, and I can now work my way up and down the guitar neck (slowly) to play different chord intervals. I also enjoyed this guy’s video:

Despite CAGED being helpful, in a way it overcomplicates things.  There are really only three shapes for major triads:  D, A and E.  C is basically the same as D.  G is basically the same as A.  At least that’s how I’ve looked at it, and it’s been helpful.   It’s similar for minor chords.  I learned the shapes for D minor, A minor and E minor.  G minor is basically the same as E minor.  C minor is basically the same as D minor. 

These videos put me on the right track, but just as important has been my commitment to learn how to shape chords depending on where the tonic is.  If the tonic is on the second string, how do I shape a major chord?  A minor chord?  A dominant 7 chord?  What if the tonic is on the fourth string?  I’ve worked hard at this, and gradually I’ve better grasped the different chord shapes. 

With the above tools, as long as I can follow where the tonic is, I’m able to play whatever triad I want.  (for CAGED 7th chords, I like this guy’s video). I’m gradually figuring out the proper hand position no matter where I am on the fret board, and over time patterns have emerged.  I’ve found it helpful to do the following:

1)      Go from a major chord to its relative minor, and vice versa.
2)      Play a I, IV, V blues patterns.
3)      Play chords over descending roots of the major scale (think the “Piano Man” by Billy Joel, and see my blog about this musical cliché here.)

Now, none of the above is going to make me a great guitar player, or even a good one.  Hell, just a few days ago I tried playing the opening lick to David Bowie’s “Rebel Rebel,” and I could not get my left had to cooperate!  I may never play a lead line that anyone would like to hear.  But my goal for the foreseeable future is to be able to play major, minor, dominant 7, major 7 and minor 7 chords from anywhere on the guitar.  If I can do that confidently by the end of year, that will go a long way towards making me moderately competent at the guitar. 

A good start, anyhow.

Organizing, Records and Discogs

When the pandemic started last March, much of the nation went into house-organizing mode, as people gathered never-worn clothes from bedroom closets and outgrown toys from playrooms, making room for other purchases that will one day need to be discarded.  The pandemic may have facilitated this organizing trend by forcing people to spend countless hours inside their homes, but I think a lot of it came down to control: giving us some semblance of power in a world that increasingly seemed to be careening towards a path of its own demise.  I think that’s what most organizing constitutes: a chance to regain control in an otherwise uncontrollable world.

While others were discarding, I was adding.  Just as the state of Illinois was shutting down last spring, I made regular trips to Home Depot to build three record racks for my growing collection of vinyl, and while the racks achieved their purpose of properly displaying my albums in all their glory, I soon wanted even more control.  I wanted them cataloged.

Enter Discogs.

Websites aimed to catalog aspects of our lives are nothing new.  Letterboxd tracks the movies we’ve seen (or haven’t seen yet), Goodreads does the same for books, Untappd for the beers you’ve sampled.  As someone who has made lists all his life, who when asked what my favorite movies are can immediately rattle off ten titles, I find these websites to be a Godsend, a way to transform scraps of paper or poorly organized spreadsheet files into fun, interactive activities that facilitate sharing content with others who relate to my obsessions.

There are plenty of options for music collector, but Discogs appears to be the site of choice for the folks I know.  It has its quirks and limitations, but after spending a week or so entering data, I’ve managed to inventory all of my records, CDs and concert DVDs nicely in the cloud and I’ve organized them even better on a spreadsheet that I can manipulate however I choose.

A few details.  If you’re a vinyl collector for whom its important to properly identify the specific pressing of each record you own – and there are reasons why this might be important – the endeavor of cataloging your collection is going to cost you loads of time.  For me, I was happy just to note that I owned a particular album and not that it was a particular reissue of a particular year.  This posed a problem, however, because Discogs attempts to estimate the monetary value of your collection – a nice feature – and to have this estimate somewhat accurate, it’s important for me to at least note that my 1974 Genesis release isn’t a first pressing, but a reissue.  And, truth be told, this is a pain to do on Discogs for several reasons:

1)     When searching for a basic record – say, Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours – 538 versions of the album pop up, and even after filtering for country (U.S.) and format (vinyl) you’re left with over 90 options to choose from.  Which one do you choose without wanting to spend a great deal of time?  If you’re like me, knowing that I didn’t have a highly-valued first pressing – I chose the first reissue I could find.  But this leads to another problem…

2)     I want to be able to track my records based on the year they were released.  My mental timeline is part of what helps me navigate my world, and knowing that The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway came out in 1974 is one of those facts that anchors my historical timeline.  Unfortunately, if I want to properly recognize that I don’t own a valuable first pressing but rather an inexpensive reissue, it’s the year of the pressing that pops up when I chronologically order my collection, NOT the year the album was released.  I hate this.  Others hate it too, as a quick Google search confirmed, but while there are many likeminded people out there, there’s apparently only one solution to the problem:  download your collection, load it onto a spreadsheet, and physically change the dates to their original year of release.  That’s what I did.  Not ideal.

3)     Unless I’m missing something, I can’t set filtering defaults like searching only for vinyl releases in the U.S.  I have to tell Discogs to search only for “vinyl” and for “U.S. releases” every time search for a new record.  EVERY fricking time!  If I’m missing something, shame on me.  But this made entering data much more laborious.  And using the website is no better than the android app, as it takes a long time to even load the filtering page.  To date, there isn’t a Discogs app for PCs.  You have to go to the website if you want to make changes via your computer.  (I tried using “Disko for Discogs” which is supposed to be a way to use Discogs via an app, but this failed to even link up to my account).

These issues aside, Discogs is still a useful way to inventory of your collection, and if you own more recent CDs and albums, it’s easier still, as you can simply scan the barcode rather than typing in information (I entered my entire CD collection in less than a day).  Now that I’ve got everything entered and up to date, going forward when I purchase a new record, I’ll enter it separately onto Discogs and then onto the spreadsheet I’ve made to my preferred specifications.  Luckily for me, I only purchase 30 or 40 records a year, so this isn’t such a big deal.  If you’re a big collector with a lot of changes in inventory, this could be a major headache.   In addition to editing “year released” on my spreadsheet, I also manually edited the format of my items into basic categories (LPs, CDs and DVDs) and added a genre column (rock/pop, jazz, classical, spoken, humor).  This way I can sort my collection in any way I choose. (A question might be raised as to why I would feel compelled to sort my collection in multiple ways.  Again, it’s all about the illusion of control.)  The spreadsheet also serves as a way to enter albums that Disccogs can’t find – limited releases or self-released CDs that friends of mine have given to me over the years, for example. 

With everything entered, I’ve got upwards of 900 vinyl records and 500 CDs.  That’s a lot for sure, but each item is neatly arranged in the racks I built last spring, and as a result my mild obsession doesn’t seem like such a crazy endeavor.  When my records were stacked in boxes sprawled out on the basement floor, then I wondered if my collecting was getting out of hand.  Now if I ever feel this way, I need only look to a collecting friend of mine who’s amassed more than 5000 records.  Compared to him, my hobby seems downright sane.

Ode to my Departing Refrigerator

My son says it’s been like a pet,
except it’s lasted longer.
Come and gone are two cats, one dog,
two hamsters and half a dozen goldfish.
Gone too is the mouse we caught and whom we named Jim
and placed in Tupperware upon our aging appliance
before he unwisely escaped,
apparently forgetting that our two cats at that time
were alive and well.
Poor Jim.

But our Whirlpool,
this beast of refrigeration,
has been steadfast and true,
its cooling coils
coming to my emotional rescue
after a long day,
awaiting my arrival when I would
enter its cavern and retrieve a bottle of frosty goodness
or a slice of last night’s pizza.

This relic of the 90s
is older than my 18 year-old son,
older than my 23 year-old daughters.
It’s seen the eastern hills of Pennsylvania
and witnessed the plains along the highways
of Ohio and Indiana,
at last dropping its weight upon a hardwood floor in suburban Chicago.
It’s outlasted dishwashers, washers and dryers, stoves and ovens.
Hell, aside from their parents,
my children’s most consistent companion
has been our refrigerator,
whose plastic veneer tolerated their smudgy fingerprints,
held annual holiday cards and calendars,
retro magnets with funny sayings,
(my favorite, “You use a wine stopper?  That’s adorable!”),
and the coolest marble maze toy you’ve ever seen.

Its surface has lacked luster for some time now,
and I’m ashamed to admit that I started researching
a replacement over two years ago.
“Surely, it can’t last much longer,” I said to my wife.
And I’m certain that our Whirlpool overheard this slight,
kicked its coils into overdrive,
and thought, “I’ll show you who can’t last much longer!”

But now it freezes lettuce in the crisper drawer
and leaves puddles of water on its top shelf,
an incontinent aging edifice.
It knows.  It knows its time has come to make way
for a young strapping Whirlpool
who’s supposed to save me up to $200 a year in energy costs,
but who will likely only live to be 10-15 years old,
this according to the saleswoman who took $100 off the asking price.
Ten to fifteen years!  What a joke.
Why, these young up-and-comers don’t know the first thing
about loyalty and stamina.
They’re not fit to chill my Whirlpool’s lunchmeat.

But even if I live to buy another five refrigerators
I will remember.
I will remember this cooling companion
who kept our vegetables fresh,
our leftovers tasty,
and our ice cream delicious,
taking off the edges of trying days,
cooling over 25,000 meals in its lifetime.

Thank you, old friend.

Mank, Women and Context

After viewing the new David Fincher film Mank last weekend, I texted this to my buddy:

“The thing that bothered me was the drastic age differential between the men and the women.  I didn’t believe for one second that Mank was in his forties or even in his thirties in the flashbacks.  And his wife looked like she was about 22 years old, so when she talked about them having been married for 20 years, I almost chuckled.”

I may have almost chuckled, but it’s no laughing matter, as highlighted in the Andrea Towers article for The Wrap.  To take nothing away from the fine acting performances of Tuppence Middleton, Lily Collins or Amanda Seyfried, there is a legitimate complaint against Hollywood casting younger women in roles that would be more appropriately acted by older women.  Gary Oldman is thirty years older than Middleton, despite their characters having been the same age in real life.  Why not have Sara Mankowitz played by a 40-something actress?  It harkens back to 1950s Hollywood, when Audrey Hepburn was cast as a love interest alongside actors like Cary Cooper and Humphrey Bogart (ew!), what I imagine was the result of older male casting directors projecting their own desires.  Hollywood may have taken a few steps toward a more egalitarian industry, but it still has a long way to go.

Mank also inspired a discussion with my adult children, and we took opposite sides of the argument.  I argued that while I enjoyed Mank, it was the very helpful to have the context of having seen Citizen Kane and knowing some of the background of the players involved.  My son argued that if you need context to enjoy and understand a movie, then it’s not a good movie; that it fails in its essential role of being a stand-alone piece of art.  Yes, context may enhance a film’s enjoyment and understanding, but it shouldn’t be required.

But I wonder about this.  After all, could one really understand a Civil War drama like Glory without having some knowledge of American history and the role that slavery has played in shaping it?  Or more recently, I wonder how Once Upon a Time in Hollywood played to young people who knew nothing of the Manson murders.  They must have been moderately baffled when the film focused so long on Margot Robbie’s Sharon Tate, only to have it lead absolutely nowhere.  For me, knowing the real life tragedy had my stomach knotting up at the film’s climax.  For others, it must have seemed like a trifle, a comic thriller.  This perhaps strengthens my son’s argument, because context may have helped the film, but it wasn’t required.  But I have to believe that Tarantino made the film fully expecting his audience to be informed about the Manson murders.

Even non-historical movies benefit from some measure of context, and it’s why cross-dressing comedies like Tootsie or Some Like it Hot might not play as well today as they did at the time.  Or why today John Wayne’s character in The Searchers seems outrageously cruel, though at the time his treatment of an American Indian woman was treated as comedy.  Or circling back to women and how they’ve been portrayed in Hollywood, many comedies of yesterday fall flat today unless you have some acceptance of the more subservient role women played in decades past.

As for Mank, it gets off on its name-dropping moments, and I think without some knowledge of the past the film must be a rather laborious affair. Some of the name-drops are offered more as a wink to a knowing audience than as necessary ingredients to the film’s storytelling, but they tend to unnecessarily muddy the waters. This is in contract to, say, the way music references enhance character in High Fidelity rather than bogging the film down.  Mank falls short for this reason.  It’s a good film.  It is not a great film.

Music Geek-Out Moments

Goodness gracious, it’s been a heck of a long time since my last entry.  The longest in fact since I started this nonsense over a decade ago.  I keep mentally writing the beginnings of blogs, but for reasons that probably have something to do with the exhaustion of living through a pandemic and an election simultaneously, I haven’t been able to pull the trigger.  That ends today.  I’ve got a bunch of things to write about, but since it’s been a while I’ve decided to ease back in with a bit of music-nerd nostalgia.

If you’re really into music you can probably identify a few times in your life when you connected with a fellow music lover on a visceral or intellectual level.  You met someone who “gets you” or “gets it.”  In my museum of recollection, I could probably find dozens of worthy events to exhibit, but allow me to share just two with you today.  They’re nothing earth-shattering, but they’ve stayed with me all these years and I get a kick out of them.

Alpine Valley Music Center parking lot (i.e., a big grass field), East Troy, Wisconsin, probably in 1989 or thereabouts. 

I walked with my friends from the field packed with cars where people had spent the previous hour tailgating to the gate entrance to see Elvis Costello or Rush or Billy Joel.  (Or maybe Jimmy Buffet?  I didn’t have many Alpine Valley concerts left in me – my last time there was in 1991.)  For some reason I was explaining to my friend that although I was excited to see whomever we were there to see, that I would love, just LOVE, to see Yes on stage and have them announce, “Ladies and gentlemen, ’The Gates of Delirium.’”  Well, you would  have thought I’d just announced that Jon Anderson himself was walking behind me, because some nutjob (as in, fellow music-nerd nutjob) in cutoff jeans and a t-shirt turned toward me and shouted “Oh my God!  Yes!”  He ran toward me and literally – I’m not making this up – knelt down in front of me and prostrated himself in mock adulation.  “I bow to the altar of Yes.”  When he righted himself, his right knee was badly bloodied – he’d knelt down on broken glass!  A little remnant from someone’s tailgating a little too hard with glass bottles.  The bloodied fan looked down to examine his knee and said, “Ah well, Yes is worth it.”  We spent the next five minutes or so avoiding going to our seats and instead exchanging our thoughts on Yes, who at the time were either on hiatus or completely defunct.  I shared my opinion of the non-Jon Anderson album Drama, and we both agreed that it was good but that it shouldn’t have been called Yes.  (I’ve since changed my mind about that.  I believe that not only is it Yes, but it’s among the band’s best six albums).  We wished each other a good evening, but I’m sure we also wished that we were seeing a different band, like being stuck on a date when the woman you really want is on the dance floor with another guy. 

Fortunately, I got to see Yes five more times after this interaction, and they played “Gates of Delirium” at two of those concerts.  They even brought out “Machine Messiah” and “Tempus Fugit” from Drama on one of those tours.  I imagine that my bloody-kneed Yes friend was at some of these shows front and center.

A gas station in western Wisconsin off of Highway 94, en route from Milwaukee to Minneapolis, probably in 1992 or 1993. 

Minnesota may border Wisconsin, but going back and forth between Milwaukee, where my family lived, and the University of Minnesota, where I was in grad school, was getting mighty old.   I found that I’d regularly have to pull over at a rest stop north of Wisconsin Dells and take a 20-minute snooze just to stay awake.  It didn’t help that I couldn’t make it all the way on one tank of gas in my Toyota Tercel, so more time was wasted having to fill up along the journey.  On one such stop, I filled up my tank and walked in to pay the cashier (automated pumps weren’t a thing yet, or at least not at this station), a young guy with dark, long curly hair and a black t-shirt.  While I was waiting for the transaction to be completed, I noticed a song playing on the radio playing next to him, and the music bounced around in my brain for a bit, jump-starting old synapses in need of a good lube job.  I titled my head, nonplussed, certain that I was about to make a fool of myself, but I tentatively proceeded.  “That isn’t…is that Michael Schenker?”  The cashier froze, looked at me in eye with no emotion whatsoever, and then in one fluid motion, opened the till, took out a bill and slapped it down on the counter in front of me, as if he were jubilantly showing his winning straight-flush over an opponent’s full house.  “That, my friend, deserves a dollar!”

I’d gotten it right.  I wasn’t a fan of Michael Schenker.  I wasn’t even aware of him, really, but I remembered a song that had gotten a bit of radio play on WQFM back in 1981, and since my older brother had purchased it (the vinyl record is now in my possession), the album cover and name were somehow stamped on my brain.  Why I was able to remember this, and not, say, the name of a woman seconds after introducing herself to me, was a question better left to that great DJ up in the sky.

But damn, I was proud of that one.

So there you are.  Two geek-out moments.  I hope there are many, many more, but of course these types of interactions that make life richer aren’t possible in 2020.  Here’s hoping in 2021.  In the meantime, I’m going to get cracking at writing another blog entry.  Stay well out there!