Guitar Chump Chronicles

Part I

I’ve been teaching college writing for more than thirty years, but never has a real guitar hero taken one of my classes. Plenty of talented, even gifted, musicians have, but the genuine name-in-lights, yacht-in-the-slip, private-jet-to-Monaco-for-lunch-with-totally-hot-babes rock star? Not one. My wife has one theory: “It’s called a mega-bucks recording contract. Who’s gonna go to college when he’s got one of those?” Point taken. (Here’s proof: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AcbSXnjJYA&feature=related)

But I have a different theory, which I call the Dirty Rotten Bastard in the Machine (DRBM, for short; see note 1). The theory asserts that for every activity human beings engage in that is fun, embedded in the very structure of the activity is an antagonist—the Dirty Rotten Bastard—whose sole function is to ruin all the fun by telling us that it’s wrong and that we shouldn’t do it. I’m not talking about our conscience, which is troublesome enough, but a real person, whose sole mission seems to be to create as many guilty consciences as possible within a single adult lifetime. Imagine your sixth-grade grammar teacher joining you on a hot date and making you sit through some old army “training” films.

What makes the DRBM descriptively powerful is that it meets two important conditions for theoryhood. First, the activity it denounces must indeed be fun. I call this the Efficacy Condition. We can test for it using something called Aristotle’s Premise Quantifier (abbreviated PQ). The PQ comes from a work of Aristotle’s called Topics, wherein he defines a premise as an assertion that is accepted as true by the majority of the wise. If we recalibrate the PQ to measure the things people do instead of the things they say, it will tell us if some activity is considered fun by the majority of those the culture believes to be wise (see note 2)

Second, there must be someone alive, at the time the activity is at its height of popularity (and of course, for some activities, this might be all the time), who strongly disapproves of the activity, preferably strongly enough to write a whole book about it. This second condition, known formally as the Embodiment Condition, lacks the rigor of the Efficacy Condition, since there is no reliable way for detecting who this someone is until it’s too late. But we can safely assert this: whenever you find yourself in the presence of a DRB in full throat, respond with liberal doses of adult humor: tasteless jokes, bawdy songs, Shakespearean double entendres, that sort of thing. They make effective antidotes. Don’t fret if the DRB misses the punch line.

Now, it so happens that the fun activity I’m speaking of is rock and roll (see note 3). And who’s the Dirty Rotten Bastard ruining all the fun? Many candidates have declared themselves, some more qualified than others, but if writing a book is a desirable qualification, then one obvious candidate is the late Allan Bloom (1930-1992), former professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago, possibly one of the most disgruntled human beings ever to shuffle through the twentieth century, who wrote in his book, The Closing of the American Mind (1987), that pop culture, rock music especially, was ruining the kids.

Would you like to know what he really wrote? “Young people know that rock music has the beat of sexual intercourse.” I kid you not. (In fact, two I kid you nots: yes, young people know that, and, yes, it does. Cf. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvPAurg7dmw&feature=related? ). To which one might be moved to respond: Izzatso? Well, there’s more to Bloom’s head-scratching aperitif than meets the eye. So, it so happens, does Maurice Ravel’s Bolero, which clocks in at just under fifteen minutes, about 5 times longer than the average rock tune. Ditto Igor Stravinsky’s Rites of Spring, which sparked riots in the streets of Paris when it debuted in 1913. Likewise, though in a different medium, Howard Hawks’s film Ball of Fire (1941), wherein an almost dressed Barbara Stanwyck sings and cavorts her way through “Drum Boogie” accompanied by the frenetically orgiastic drumming of Gene Krupa.

It’s entirely beside the point that some Dirty Rotten Bastard blamed yet another collapse of the whole of Western Civilization on rock and roll. The real and more immediate point is that thanks to the whole family of DRBs, going all the way back to Socrates, whose valiant effort to reform an Athenian rock star named Alcibiades went major fail, our modern guitar heroes are avoiding the college classroom like the plague, and I think it’s because they realize that they might be exposed to the very thinking that produces DRBs in the first place, and the consequence of their absence is that I don’t get to meet them in the supportive and nurturing environment that is the bucolic setting of a college campus, where I can teach them how to write and they can teach me to play the guitar.

Which brings me to Todd Duren. Todd plays the guitar, is about to become a college graduate, and has taken upon himself the thankless task of teaching me a few of the basics. It all began rather innocently, at a party at Todd’s and Kat’s. We were sitting around a roaring fire in their backyard in the cool of the evening:

Frank: You play the guitar, don’t you?

Todd: Uh, yeah. Yeah, I do. (He takes a healthy swallow of his beer and begins to look over his shoulder.)

Frank: Could you, um, you know, like teach me to play?

Todd: (I think it was the condensation on his beer bottle that made him almost drop it.) Uh, um, well, um, yeah, sure, I suppose, um, yeah, be glad to.

And so it fell out that one warm and breezy Wednesday afternoon I leaned my bicycle against a tree in their front yard and joined Todd on the porch. Thus commenced my revenge against the Dirty Rotten Bastards. The first lesson was a basic exercise in scales: 1-4, 1-3, 1-3, 1-3, 1-4, 1-4. The numbers refer to the position markers (the little dots) on the neck between the frets. Beginning with the first (i.e., thickest) string, I placed my index finger on the first marker and plucked the string, then my little finger on the fourth marker and plucked the string. I repeated the process for each string, in the sequence noted above, and then in reverse, from the smallest to the largest string. Todd then impressed me with variations: blues, classical, expertly handling the guitar with a grace, even élan, that left me breathless with envy.

I won’t blame arthritis for what happened next. Perhaps it was simply my unfamiliarity with the instrument. But if it is the calling of every good student to make trial of his or her teacher’s patience and resourcefulness, then I am one promising student. Todd returned the guitar to me. I put the strap around me. I positioned my fingers on the position markers. I applied pick to string.

Todd was very understanding. “Happens all the time.” Even as he stood there circling the guitar over his head, tilting it this way and that, peeping into the sound hole (“I hear it, but I can’t see it.” “It’s pretty small, Todd”), shaking like Little Eva until the pick fell onto the porch floor with a soft plop, Kat cackling from behind her laptop (“You guys are idiots”), I was impressed with his steadiness of nerve, and that he returned the guitar and pick to me with a gentle smile.

“You’re not thinking of taking up the violin, are you?”

“No. Why?”

“You’ll poke your eye out.”

Notes

1 Some readers will recognize that I’ve borrowed the name for my theory from Arthur Koestler’s 1967 book, The Ghost in the Machine (which Koestler in turn stole from the British philosopher Gilbert Ryle, who used it some twenty years earlier to trash Descartes’s mind-body split). Koestler argued that the human brain had evolved into a vastly complex system of higher structures, but that it had also retained the primitive structures—the ghost in the machine—that were home to our most violent passions. These primitive structures overpower the higher structures—hate trumps logic--causing us to do self-destructive things. In fact, according to Koestler, writing at the height of the Cold War, the human race was on the verge of blowing itself to bits with nuclear weapons. The ghost in the machine was finally about to annihilate the brain’s inner Scholastic.

2 It is generally agreed that the wise have fun. Doing what is a matter of feverish speculation. Cf: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KTFoMJi3uE.

3 Readers are invited to submit their own entries for “Most Fun Thing To Do as Determined by the Wise.” Use the Comment function.