One
of my friends is in a band, which means whenever she plays a gig I get
to assume the role of ardent fanboy. Mostly this entails sitting
in a noisy bar and shooting her encouraging looks while I sip the suds
of a paint-peeling microbrew. Which is fine by me. I get to watch
up-close as she makes real, honest-to-goodness music come out of her
guitar, which is a brand of magic that still thrills
and mystifies me. Of course I’m easily impressed. There’s that.
Being
a music lover is part of the appeal of these live shows, yet there’s
also something else at play: an appreciation of music as an actual
language, every bit as complicated as Mandarin Chinese but way easier
to tap your toes to. Most people who become musicians, even on a small,
barroom-sized scale, learned the language of music at a young age. I
wish I’d developed my passion earlier, or I’d
be pounding drums with Megadeth and reading fan mail on a private jet
bound for Amsterdam.
This
friend -- let’s call her “Shreddy,” because she shreds -- was destined
to be onstage. She played various instruments from an early age,
honing her fluency in the musical language by rockin’ the flute and
numerous percussion instruments in her school band. That’s key.
Linguistics experts say it’s much easier to learn a second language if
you start while you’re young, and this extends to music
as well. If Shreddy had just now decided to start noodling with her
guitar, her playing would sound like mine: A key being scratched against
the rusty exterior of a beat-up Ford Pinto.
I
look back on my lack of musical training as a missed opportunity. Music
has always had a profound effect on me. Many was the night I would
lie in bed with a pair of headphones and cruise on Eric Clapton blues
licks or the soaring crescendos of a movie’s orchestral score -- but by
the time I got my first electric guitar I was too old, my interests too
scattered, to summon the necessary attention
span to learn. Strumming an E chord made a dirty, urgent scream erupt
from my speaker, the kind that made my arms break out in gooseflesh. Yet
after five minutes of aimless strumming I didn’t hear anything that
sounded like Van Halen and the guitar was left
to its place in the corner, next to my Game Boy and a rolled-up pair of
Superman socks.
Stupidly,
I’d spend the afternoon playing “Mario Kart” on the Super Nintendo
console instead of teasing out rock riffs on my Fender knockoff.
In an alternate universe I stuck with the instrument and can now play
the searing solo at the end of “Free Bird’ with no more effort that it
takes to make an omelette. That does me little good, because I don’t
live in that alternate universe. I live in this
one, and in this one, being incredible at “Mario Kart” doesn’t do much
for your fame or reputation. People don’t pack Madison Square Garden to
see you beat your previous lap time on Luigi Raceway.
Luck
has it that it’s never too late, for music or for anything else.
Shreddy has two siblings who decided to pick up instruments later in
life, and now they jam together -- her brother on bass, her sister on
piano. I’ve yet to attend one of these casual jam sessions, but from
what I’ve heard they sound marginally better than rodents trying to
escape from a flaming elevator shaft.
Being
a fan of virtually all rock instruments and wishing I could play them
all, when I learned of this sibling power-trio I naturally noticed
there was a void waiting to be filled. Sure, they can play the
skeletons of some Motley Crue and Pat Benatar tunes, but where’s the
impact, the wallop, without a limb-flailing skinsman attacking a drum
kit? As a thirtysomething I’d long figured my skillset
was more or less cemented: I can write, sort of, and I can do
impressions, sort of, and if I really concentrate I can refrain from
slapping people when they say “CYOO-pon” instead of “coupon.” Having not
made inroads on any new skills in years, I suspected
that was pretty much it for me.
Now
I long to learn the drums, but there are problems with this potentially
half-baked dream. One is space. I don’t have any. Cramming a drum
kit into my abode would be like trying to stuff a giraffe into a
Sucrets tin. The laws of physics aren’t exactly on my side, here.
The
second problem is noise. If I lived in a farmhouse out in the country,
then hey, no sweat. Unfortunately for my musical aspirations, I
live in an apartment building in a city, and I imagine my neighbors
would be quick to protest if it was 8 o’clock at night and I was pounding out the beats to “Caught in a Mosh” by Anthrax. Quicker if I was doing it badly.
There
are options, though. Electronic drum kits are small and don’t make a
lot of noise -- you wear headphones and have the sound piped directly
into your cranium. That may be worth looking into, and not just because
it’s valuable to be fluent in the language of music. Most people, in
most corners of the world, respond to this language in some form, and
while it would be amazing to tap into this universal
electricity, that’s not the only factor driving me here.
Simply
put, I don’t want to become stagnant. Some people, as they age, become
calcified in their thoughts, opinions and motivations, and they
stop reaching for new things -- “expanding” is what the new-age types
call it. When you stop pushing against the boundaries of who you are,
those boundaries begin to shrink, until one day all the possible yous
have been reduced to one definitive you, a static
image in a dynamic world. Picking up drum sticks is a small way of
fighting back against that. It’s a way of saying, “I swim or I die,” and
then swimming as hard as I can.
No comments:
Post a Comment