I spent a little time yesterday figuring out the theme song to “I Dream of Jeannie” on my guitar –
From there, I moved on to “The Munsters” –
All in all, it wasn’t a long exercise – it took me about 10 minutes each song to figure and match the horn and guitar parts. Of course, the horn parts were actually a lot more fun to play.
It was nice to be laying hands on a guitar. I haven’t done that in a while.
Playing TV theme songs took me back quite a ways – I used to have a small collection of TV Theme tapes. As a child, I wasn’t interested in “guitar” music per se – as the 80’s lollygagged around with synthesizers and electronic drums, the guitar was relegated to 70’s fuzz rock. Speaking of which, back in the 90’s, my mother told me that she was “scared” of the Stray Cats. Seriously? Scared? The upshot of this is that I was not exposed to very many guitar based kinds of music in my youth. As I have previously blogged, my first record albums (you know, the large black plastic disks) were Meet The Beatles and Beach Boys.
As I’ve been unemployed a while, and I always said, “If I had more time, I’d be practicing guitar a meeelion hours a day!”. Of course, that didn’t happen. Neither did working out, but I digress. So in following flickr and several Facebook accounts, I find myself relatively irritated when I see pictures of teenagers in bands.
I think to myself, “Why didn’t I ever do that?”. As I meditated on writing this entry, I think I stumbled onto the reason….well, kind of.
When I started playing guitar, I lived in New Zealand. As many teen bands have in common, “not much else” was going on in the area. This left them plenty of time to practice their craft. As such, I spent many hours playing along with the radio there (80’s – true), E-A-D, etc, etc. BUT, shortly after I started those lessons, I moved back to the US.
As my guitar teacher would say (ask him! I’m still friends with him after 20 years….) I never applied myself. BUT, I still had a great ear. And I also had a multitude of things to distract me from practicing my guitar. Because of my good ear, in one of my early lessons, I tabbed out a Jimi Hendrix solo (Wind Cries Mary?) by ear, but couldn’t play it. My guitar teacher was like, “Whaaaa?”. What a waste of my talent.
Here’s a picture of a guitar that I somehow convinced my mother to purchase early in my playing career ($599?) – an Ovation Celebrity. With a locking nut, floyd rose, and reverse tuners, I was WAYYYY out of my league in terms of even knowing what to do with it. I barely touched it.
So my later teen years I spent countless hours in poolhalls. Not so much that I won any money hustling pool, but it was a good distraction. I beat myself up for a few years, wondering ‘what if I had spent less time in the poolhalls, and more practicing guitar?’. Having all this time off recently told me all I needed to know – that I’m too distracted for my own good. Even if I hadn’t been playing pool, I wouldn’t have been hustling on the guitar.
While I can regret not having ever really put myself out there (beyond a few open mics), I can rest easy that had I the chance as a teen, I still wouldn’t have done it right. Seclusion (New Zealand) would have been the answer.
To my relief though, I can still write, I can record, and I can somewhat play.
And I’ve still got a good ear.
