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by Charlie Morris
Perpend
When I was a kid, I wanted to play guitar, because the guys who played guitar had long hair and cool threads, and looked like they didn't do what their moms told them to. So my mom took me to a music teacher for lessons. He was older and bald, smelled like powder, and played an old-looking guitar. His first move was to hand me a book with some little dots and lines, and a couple of silly acronyms to memorize (All Cows Eat Grass, I believe). It all sounded suspiciously like school.
September 17, 1998
Down the street lived a cool dude with long hair and beads. His guitar was bright pink and had a whammy bar! When I showed him my little workbook, I was surprised to learn that he didn't know any more about it than I did! When I read in a magazine that none of the Beatles could read music either, it was all over. I sat through the old bald guy's lessons for a few weeks, until my mom cut off the tap. Meanwhile me and the cool dude would jam far into the night.
Some famous guy I read about in a magazine said that you know, learning to read music would like stifle your creativity probably, so I quickly realized that Reading Music was something to avoid at all costs. My cool dude proudly read not a note, and he was showing me all sorts of cool licks. Of course, in order to practice these licks, I needed to write them down, so we used a system of the cool dude's own devising. Really simple and straightforward of course, nothing like Reading Music.
The cool dude's system was really easy: a line for each string, and a number to show you which fret to play. Later I learned that he hadn't really made it up - it was called tablature, and in fact there were even books you could buy that had the latest rock and roll songs in tablature. These books had color photos of my guitar heroes, and large type. They were easy to read and digestible, not like the thick books of small type and no pictures and totally square Standard Musical Notation (Ha!) in the "serious music" section of the store.
Well, one thing led to another. I practiced constantly, and became pretty good on the guitar. I started jamming with some older guys who were serious players. Some of them even played Gigs, and got paid Money! One day the classic showbiz story came true for me. A guitar player in a club band got sick, and the guys asked me to fill in! "You can do it man!" said the bandleader, "Of course, we have to play a couple of standards. Square stuff, but the rich cats at the club like 'em."
"Standards?" said I, "Sure! You mean, like, 'Smoke on the Water', or 'Louie, Louie?'"
"No, no," he laughed, "I mean standards. But it's cool. Here's some charts. Look 'em over before the gig and fake it!"
"Oh, uh…Don't you have them in tablature?"
"In what?"
"You know, tablature. The easy system that everybody uses!"
"I've never heard of that. It must be some guitar thing. Listen, you don't have to be a great reader to play this gig, but you gotta have at least a clue how to read charts!"
I stared at these awful, oppressive, tantalizingly labyrinthine charts, and as the enormity of my folly sunk in, the little golf clubs seemed to dance on their fence, taunting me, mocking me...I had thought I was so cool, I had thought I could ignore the accumulated wisdom of musical man that had been created over the centuries, the language of Bach, of Beethoven, of Wagner...nay, that I could reject the whole creative tradition of Western man...Me, a pimply teenager, egged on by smooth-tongued music-store salesman (wannabe musicians all), had presumed to set at naught the sublime knowledge that these masters could have handed to me...O my God, how could I have been such a fool?
Well, to make a long story short, I lost that gig. But I wised up, bought myself a basic music reading book, and guess what? I found out it wasn't really that hard to learn. What's more, once I began to understand it, I realized that it was a hundred times more sophisticated than tablature, capable of much more expression, and once you learned it, much easier to use. Best of all, I found that I now had access to the universal language, and could freely browse among a fascinating world of written music, from Classical to Broadway to Jazz.
Of course I didn't make my living playing guitar. Oh no, I got a job in an office and hauled down my nice weekly paycheck while playing a gig here and there on the weekends. As the years went by, computers became more and more a part of the work scene.
At a certain point, it became apparent that our company needed to get involved in the World Wide Web, and since I was "into" computers, I was asked to set up a simple Web page for the company. The computer people I asked said that this meant learning something called HTML.
Well, one look at this HTML stuff was enough to put me off. It was nothing but text, with little <> and & thingies. This was nothing like the convenient drag-and-drop windows that I was used to using to get my work done. It looked like a programming language! It looked like...like FORTRAN or something! The guys at the software store said it was really hard to learn. The guys who were into it all seemed to be young and pimply, and had nose rings.
But then, a certain cool dude at the office, who had a little goatee and bushy eyebrows, said to me, "Oh no, publishing for the Web isn't so hard. Try this neat tool called FrontPage!""
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