The Loneliest Liberal: I fret not

By James Knudsen

It occurred to me recently that my longing to master the guitar has endured.
    As a teenager I had a subscription to Hot Rod magazine. Cars had long held my interest and, as the hormones kicked in, I delved into the world of V-8s, long-duration camshafts, and tunnel-ram manifolds.

    Around the same time, I got my first guitar – actually a bass guitar. I haven’t read a car magazine in months, but I pick up a guitar daily.
    Slightly before I realized that my longing for guitar mastery endures, I learned that the guitar is in my genes. I had known for years that my maternal great-grandfather played the viola. What I didn’t know until a few months ago was that to islanders of the Azores, a viola is not the larger, not-so-popular alto, the best friend of the violin, but rather a guitaresque instrument of twelve or fifteen steel strings producing a sound that makes one think of the gypsy lady in Lon Chaney’s The Wolf Man.

    Gypsy music wasn’t heard much during the late seventies and early eighties of my youth. Punk had emerged recently, but it was too...punk for the Central Valley scene, and the closest thing we heard on the local radio was the more mainstream New Wave. This new genre appealed to me, as a bass player, because it meant playing the same note over and over...and over. This proved too much of a challenge and so my friends and I formed a band and wrote our own, simpler compositions.

That first bass…it was a piece of crap. I believe that, coupled with the music of interest at the time, the fact that I had had no lessons and my discovery of the “power chord” played a huge roll in my becoming the decidedly mediocre guitarist I am today.
    For those unfamiliar with the power chord, it is one of the simplest musical structures. It is so simple, even I can play it. It’s played on two strings, usually the low E, A, D, and G. My preferred chords are played on the A and D strings, and the two notes are a fifth apart. But the magic occurs when the sound is sent through an overdriven amp. This crunchy sound has formed the basis of rock n roll songs for decades. It also became a sort of plateau in my musical development – a plateau that stretches out like the Great Plains, endlessly.

And yet, I persist. A couple of years ago I discovered one of the hindrances to my playing. I am a brute with the guitar. One day I was playing guitar and my left hand began to fatigue. I realized that I was pressing on the strings much harder than they needed. Why? Some of this can be traced back to that first instrument, which required considerable effort to make the strings cooperate. The rest is just me and my belief that playing rock guitar is a contact sport.
    I’ve seen enough truly gifted musicians to know that a deft touch is what denotes greatness. But signs of progress do appear, occasionally. A while back I learned my first fifties style guitar riff. True, it’s only a few notes long, but it’s a lead riff that might bring a smile to Stevie Ray Vaughn’s face, were he still alive.

    And there are other ways to be involved with the guitar. Two days before Christmas, I received word that a young lady wished to play guitar. Within the hour I showed her three chords. Everything since she has learned from YouTube, and eight months later she’s a much better guitarist than I’ll ever be. More recently I introduced her to the joys of the solid-body electric guitar, P-90 pickups, and amplification. She has yet to ask about the power chord.
    The bass in this picture (a Les Paul copy that belongs to the young lady) is very similar to my first bass. It was instrumental in getting me to other bases. It’s the next generation’s guitar. And the Portuguese viola.

Copyright © 2017 by James Knudsen