Strings attached

Larry Schwartz tries to rediscover his personal Stairway to Heaven.
IT’S BEEN such a long, long time since I made the happy discovery that I was as good as the Beatles. I was 11 or 12 at the time. The fellow who gave me guitar lessons had stopped coming. Maybe there wasn’t a whole lot more to learn.
I knew a few chords and could strum. It occurred to me then that I was doing pretty much what John, the rhythm guitarist, did. Of course I couldn’t play lead like George, but Paul? He played bass guitar – and that was just four strings. And Ringo? The whacker? No contest.
So what was I doing more than 40 years later, lugging an old nylon-stringed instrument to the doorstep of one of Australia’s foremost guitarists? Nick Charles, who lives in my neck of the woods, kindly offered a lesson after I had mentioned that I was one of those bumbling occasional players.
There are ”millions and millions” of us, he told me, who know riffs and lead breaks but rarely can play a song.
Particularly since the release of his late 1990s solo debut, My Place, Charles has had a strong following. Early in his career he taught guitar at the Centre for Advanced Education.
”There were 12 to 14 people a night, mostly middle-aged people like yourself, coming back to the instrument or who had always played it a bit,” he said. ”Maybe they played a lot when they were teenagers and then they had kids, mortgages and nine-to-five jobs. They turned 50 and they suddenly wanted to get better at it.”
His students might pick Stairway to Heaven, say, or the lead break from Sunshine of Your Love. Few could play Waltzing Matilda all the way through.
”I’d tell them exactly what they were doing; get them to strum in time; get them to pick in time; get them to understand basic chords and then just try to finish songs.
”I’d get them to sing the four verses of Key to the Highway, from beginning to end no matter what. Then let’s move to the next. Not, ‘I can do the introduction to this song, the other bit from that’.”
Guitar playing, he said, had ”always been a noodling thing but the trouble is our generation has never approached it like the last generation approached the piano”.
He advised me to learn some theory. Otherwise, he said, playing could be like reading a book without understanding the language. Guitar magazines had invaluable lessons and transcriptions. ”Never discount the fact that you should be using your ear as well,” he added, ”because that is the ultimate tool. You have to be able to play according to what you’re hearing and what you think sounds good.”
My first guitar was a classical instrument. The action (space between the strings and fretboard) was considerable even before I foolishly restrung it with steel and found that it had bowed even further because the neck wasn’t reinforced for that kind of strain.
I kept at it, though, and learnt from a few teachers, tablature books with blues detailing positions on the guitar by the American Stefan Grossman, or worked at unfamiliar tunings to play transcriptions of work by the British virtuosos Bert Jansch, Davy Graham and John Renbourn. Then I’d forget it all.
I once had the pleasure of Monday morning lessons with Fred, who had married a young woman who once babysat my sons and migrated here from France. Most lessons he would have prepared detailed notes on theory. Fred had devised a system of learning using colours. I was his ”guinea pig”. He was a great teacher and wonderful player. He’d try to show me how to improvise but I stumbled along. Maybe some day.
Nick Charles’ approach on the day of my visit reminded me of the way I’d started out learning: the emphasis was on songs. Somewhere I still have a school exercise book with 12 songs I wrote in my teens. I thought 12 was enough for the first album I planned to release. I wrote a great melody once but someone else had done it before me. I still have one good lyric but I’m still searching for the melody.
Charles gave me sheets with alternating bass exercises and the picking for the standard, Aura Lee. It seemed so simple I was embarrassed at how poorly I played. He showed me the picking for Bob Dylan’s Don’t Think Twice.
”Playing melody with finger-picking,” he explained. ”That’s the jump that most people don’t make. It takes a little bit extra work. It helps you to improvise as well.”
I once played for a pizza and a few dollars in a restaurant. I had a 12-string guitar and a mouth harp on a rack.
”Some people have got it,” a waiter told me afterwards. ”Some people haven’t.” Meaning me. No encores for the boy who once thought he was at least as good as the Beatles.
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The Sunday Age, 11-Jul-2010