The thing about music is that to get good at it, you have to put in a lot of effort.
But it’s possible to put only a little effort into it and still manage. This is rock and roll’s great advantage. If it’s loud enough and enthusiastic enough, and if it goes by quickly enough, you can be quite awful at playing and nobody will notice all that much. Sometimes people even prefer it that way. But Shinefield’s abhorrent drumming had got me thinking. Truth be told, my guitar playing was rather abhorrent too. Rock and roll depends on a solid, “together” rhythm section, which is a tall order, to be sure. But once you have that, the guitar player can pretty much do whatever he wants, and even sloppiness and ineptitude can sound kind of cool against the competent backdrop. It’s better if you’re good at playing. But it’s not absolutely necessary to be all that good, is what I’m saying.
Much as I love rock and roll, and I do, with everything I’ve got, now that the Teenage Brainwashers were sounding alright—well, it was starting to feel a little bit like cheating, on my part.
There was this guy at Clearview High School lunch period one day who had this fancy nylon-string guitar and was playing this impressive classical music thing, a Bach fugue or something like that. He played it flawlessly, and didn’t seem to be concentrating too hard on it, as he was carrying on a conversation with a couple of other guys about where to score weed all the while. Now, see, you could tell by his conversation that this was a pretty dumb guy, more stoner than normal, though there is certainly such a thing as a normal stoner. It’s so hard to tell these things at Clearview, because, normal or otherwise, this guy was wearing one of the Badgers shirts—that’s right, at Clearview, even the stoners had school spirit. It was nauseating.
But anyway, dumb and quasi-normal as he was, he was light-years better at playing guitar than I could ever be, no matter how hard I tried, especially because, as I hope I’ve explained well enough, I am more or less constitutionally unable to try all that hard, if “constitutionally” means what I think it means. And while tricking your drummer into playing like Phil Rudd certainly has its place, part of me couldn’t help but fantasize about a theoretical world where a guy like me could just pick up a guitar and start playing and it would sound great all on its own, and people would hear it and say “Boy, that kid can really play.” If I just sat down with a guitar, not distorted to cover up the ineptitude, and without a hoodwinked drummer herded by a bespectacled rock and roll mastermind bass player, and played “I Wanna Ramone You” or “Sadistic Masochism,” no one would be impressed. They’d throw tomatoes and cabbages and possibly call the cops. I actually think my lyrics aren’t all that bad, but no one, almost literally no one, cares about that.
Now, playing fugues by Bach wasn’t really my thing, but in my fantasy world where I could actually play guitar, the thing that was my thing, or that I wanted to be my thing, is this kind of music that they used to call ragtime, like, eons and eons ago. It’s played on the piano, mostly, but it can be done on a guitar, and when it is, it’s just mindfuckingly magical. Regular guitar playing like I do in the real world is just: you put your fingers in a chord position and hit the strings with your pick hand as hard as you can and then slide the chord fingers up and down the neck. But with the fantasy-world magical good guitar playing, each finger is, like, playing its own little part, and one guy with one guitar sounds like a whole band.
People back then would gather in a barn and actually dance to one guy playing the guitar standing on a barrel or a wagon. And at the end of the song the girls would bend over and show their underwear, kind of being sassy. So that was legitimately cool, pre–rock and roll music that might as well have been rock and roll, and you didn’t even need to trick a drummer into doing anything. In fact, you could just send him out for burritos, for all it would matter, because your own fingers were the rhythm section.
Back then it was played by cool-looking black guys with bowler hats and, for some reason, hair scrunchies on their arms, and they were playing guitars they had made themselves out of a box and some wire. These days the guys who can play the guitar like that tend to be pudgy white sixties guys with little gray mustaches and maybe a bald-guy ponytail who want you to call them Big Skillet or Rib Eye. “This is an old country blues tune, name of ‘Grandma’s Kitchen,’ ” they’ll say, and then unleash hell on the strings. It’s not the same without the cool black guys and the scrunchies and the wagon and the skinny girls and their underwear, of course, but it’s still impressive.
It occurred to me that maybe Little Big Tom could play the guitar like that. He was from the sixties. And with the “Big” in his name, and the mustache, he was already halfway there.
I had been looking for something to talk to him about that didn’t involve Jesus Proust for some time. The guy needed cheering up.
He didn’t seem to be around at the moment, but it was a safe bet that it wouldn’t be long before he ambled in, and that when he did he’d head straight for the den, where his Mac lives, to put away his shoulder bag and coat and check his email and message boards before beginning his evening rounds. So I took my Melody Maker and practice amp with me and settled down with my back against the den door to wait for him and read the reckless vow book while I waited.
It was a pretty weird book. The people in it all spoke in this formal, stilted way that was basically so elaborate and polite that it was difficult to tell what they were getting at half the time. Everything they said was like a code, and the point of the code was for everyone to hide what they really felt from everyone else. But the main point, underneath it all, was for the girls to figure out which guys had the most money and then try to marry them. It was easy to tell who the best girl was (the smart, witty one) and it was easy to tell who the best guy was (the guy with “ten thousand a year,” which was apparently a lot in those days), so there didn’t seem to be too much suspense as to how it was going to end. It was odd, not quite like a real story, but more like a dramatization of how these weird old English people organized their finances. Girls seem to see this book as this tender, super-romantic love story, but I sure didn’t get that. There was hardly any emotional content in it at all, and the characters weren’t so much people as personified bank accounts.
I had resigned myself to the fact that it probably wasn’t going to have any sexy parts. It was a bit slow going, but not as slow as The Crying of Lot 49. Now, that one’s really in code. I was fortunate not to have made a reckless vow about that.