Thursday, October 2, 2008

notes on notes

(Written 27 March 2007, 9:28am)

The most important thing you can remember,” my father said, “is that it’s not what you play.” He paused then, exhaled twin columns of blue smoke from his nostrils. “It’s what you don’t play.” He never moved when he talked that way except to bring his cigarette to and from his mouth, red dot glowing in the dark of the garage from out of swiftly graying beard, and then it’s all lost behind a cloud, blue on black and fuzzed out. He never looked around either, when he did this; he stared straight ahead like he was building the fourth wall, like he was on TV and his only audience was a camera lens. Nobody’s there but everybody’s watching. Like a VH1 special: “Behind the Sophist”. Everything was about life lessons, he use to say, or at least he did through his talking. His words would articulate in shapes out of the smoke and I always wondered how anybody could get that much distance out of a single drag; it was like his lungs were full of dry ice. Iron lungs producing fog, iron brain forging new tools out of melted-down old cliché. Listening to him talk was like a soliloquy entirely built out of quotable one-liners. It’s what you don’t play. Take care of the pennies. Let people think you’re stupid. If you’re warm and comfortable. Look at yourself in the mirror. It’s not what you play.

“One note.” Pause, exhale. “One note, held the right way by the right player, fills a room in a way the Steve Vai’s of the world never could, no matter how many sixteenth-notes they played in a second.” Inhale. Ember lights up eyes boring through east wall. “You can play with anyone if you’re a respectful player because – ” Exhale. I mouth the next words with him, safe because he’s focused on the audience he can’t see. “ – because there will always be people who are better and people who are not as good as you are.” More or less, I think. But I don’t say it. Instead I say, teach me. I imagine he’s smiling wryly at the lens, in the dark, while he mechanically raises and lights another smoke. Zippo flash. He’s looking right at me and he’s not smiling. Lighter flashes out: ember bounces like a laser sight and I hear the chair creak as he leans back.

“I can’t do that.” Says it like I should already know. I don’t, and I tell him so. Exhale, through the teeth this time, like a filter on a coffee pot. “I’m not qualified.” There are always people better. Let them think you’re stupid. But I didn’t get that.

If I could have thought “self-effacing modesty” I would have, but instead I look for the camera, the teleprompter that convinced him this was what I wanted to hear. Good for ratings, but too cerebral for the target audience. And anyway I was thirteen and had never played a bar, not yet, because who wants to listen to halting scales and “Boogie Bass” exercises when there were a million tiny rock stars to choose from, all playing “Texas Flood” almost convincingly enough for me to believe the telephone lines really were down.

“Better you develop your own style,” like he read my mind, “rather than parroting somebody else’s. But it takes time.” How much time? If thirty years isn’t qualification enough. Smile for the people watching at home. One more cliché – to thine own self.

The smoke hung in the air after he went inside to mix a demo tape for the young singer-songwriter who was living with us. It’s what you don’t play, Dad, I said to the east wall, tasting the blue smoke, unfiltered, the whole atmosphere of the tired cliché.

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