My Impromptus column today has a range of subjects, from dress codes to politics to music. (Well, dress codes include some politics too. So does music.) I end with some shots of Milwaukee. Not at Milwaukee, mind you. I am talking about pictures.
After writing my column, I thought of something — something sartorial. Tip O’Neill would never attend the annual Gridiron dinner. Why? Because attendees were required to wear a tux (at least the men among them). This, Tip would not do. He thought it would look bad to his working-class constituents in Boston.
Anyway, an interesting subject.
In my column, I quote John Kelly on Donald Trump. Kelly was one of Trump’s chiefs of staff. I admire General Kelly. Trump does not. Sometime after my column was “put to bed,” Trump responded to Kelly, as follows:
Will this man, Trump, be for a third time the Republican Party’s nominee for president? Will he be, once more, the president? I would not bet against it. He is the People’s Choice (or at least the choice of some of them).
Now for some mail — and not just any mail but a rich and absorbing letter from Russ Fitzgerald. He is responding to a discussion we had (here, for example) of instruments. How do you choose your instrument? Or does your instrument choose you?
Says Russ,
I grew up in a musical family, with a music professor / concert clarinetist for a father and a church organist for a mother. My brothers were both classically trained musicians, one becoming a professional trumpeter/singer with Virginia beach-music legends Fat Ammons and Bill Deal & the Rhondels, the other remaining perhaps the most gifted intuitive guitarist I have ever encountered. I am, alas, the musical black sheep of the family, having twice learned and twice forgotten how to read sheet music (first for clarinet, then for classical guitar).
I decided instead to focus on poetry, and wrote lots of it, mostly bad and sophomoric as should be expected from a middle- and high-school student. When we moved to Macon, Ga., and I changed schools, I met a new classmate who actually was writing and recording songs. For the fancy “Studies in Mankind” gifted classes we shared, he would record song cycles and turn them in for his grades, while I was writing small booklets of illustrated verse. Inevitably I started writing lyrics for my friend, who would set them to music, which convinced me that if I was going to write songs I should learn how to play them, which led to a $20 nylon-string guitar and many years of learning to play it.
As a guy who finds things easier to relate to than other people, I got drawn into the great vintage-guitar catch-and-release program and played in those waters for decades until the money got too silly.
How one finds one’s instrument is one thing — but how one finds a specific individual instrument is another. By 2007 I had played or owned literally hundreds of guitars from bare-bones basic cheapies to extremely expensive inlaid masterpieces. I’d collected and then sold off guitars built during the glory pre-war years, including serious vintage archtop jazz boxes, galvanized steel National Reso-Phonics, more solid-body Fenders than the law should allow, and some desirable acoustic instruments. I can think of about six that, had I retained them, I could have purchased a house with.
I found myself in a Guitar Center of all places, the first time I’d ever set foot in one. I was actually looking for something completely different when I spotted a Gibson J-45 acoustic on the wall, one built under the current company in Bozeman, Mont. I remember saying to my wife, “I used to have one like this from 1949 or so that I gave to my brother,” and then my right hand went onto the neck to lift it off the hook. It was the most amazing moment, this little explosion in my head, combining thoughts like, “I’m home” and “Why is my guitar hanging on this shop wall?” (Not the guitar I gave to my brother, but one that simply felt like mine, immediately.)
I’ve handled lots of vintage one-owner guitars that had some sort of aura to them, where you touched it and knew it would be stunning before playing a single note. I still treasure the memory of handling a one-owner 1949 D’Angelico that had that in spades. But this was a new (if slightly shopworn) guitar. It took me a month of dithering, but I bought it, and play it to this day. All the other guitars are gone, because why would I play anything else?
I still marvel at it. I used to have a very eclectic style that included all sorts of genres and playing methods, and I used to bounce back and forth between flatpicks and genteel classically inspired fingerstyle. Now I play with a bare right hand encapsulating British folk-baroque, Piedmont blues, Wes Montgomery’s thumb, and a more fluid use of every surface of my hand, rolling it all together into a unified whole. The whole time that process was happening, I could sense this one guitar pulling me that way.
I had an acoustic blues mentor in Macon in the late ’80s and early ’90s, and I realize now that I am probably his last disciple, as he was probably the last disciple of the late, great Rev. Pearly Brown, a legendary blind street singer. I feel like I am Belew’s musical child who has gone on to embrace a wider range of genres — and this one instrument has accompanied me on that quest.
To hear Russ Fitzgerald play, go here. And thank you, one and all.