The Blonde Seagull


As soon as I got this guitar home I knew I'd made a mistake. I bought her for looks. Light solid spruce top bound in white with a solid flamed maple back and sides. High end L.R. Baggs electronics, and this classic seagull at the 12th Fret, gold tuners ... she looked so beautiful there at the guitar bar. She let me put my hands all over her. Now that she was home with me, she took on a haughty tone ...

"Oh no," I thought, "she's one of those brassy blondes."

I consoled myself with the thought that I could sell her and get my money back. The tone of the guitar was so different from my Santa Fe, so bright and pronounced, with none of that soft woody muttering that hangs around behind the soundhole. (Imagine Freud hearing that one!) "You MUST come back next week!"

But there was also the part that won't stop with "It was a mistake." It reminds you that it is only the tip of an iceberg of mistakes on which you are stranded, watching the approach of your creator. "Frankenstein! What are you doing in the arctic? Go home man!"

And this is what Clay tells me he goes through. He does pretty well most of the time, having quit his job in the financial district to focus on being a guitarist. Now he's found a little space and is starting to put together a studio. His girlfriend works a day job and he gives lessons.

"But sometimes it just nails me," he said, "and I think I've really screwed up, that everybody else is moving on with their careers and I'm just a bum, and I'm deluding myself."

"Well, yea, that's all also true. I remember this guy talking about Damon Runyan saying gamblers always die broke. And the interviewer assumes it's a kind of morality statement, that if you gamble you end up losing. The guys says no, what he meant was that gamblers live a life in the eternal present, and even if they don't have money they're generous with their friends, because they expect some more to show up. But because of their confidence, which breeds their generosity, they don't bother to accumulate."

He runs a few riffs on the electric, a Stellar Black Beauty plugged into a Line 6 amp. I picked it up for $225 on e-bay and we're both amazed at how good it is.

"Which guitar are you going to play today?" he asked.

"I'll just play this one," I said, picking up an old Conn dreadnaught. "You can play the Seagull."

He gets out the Seagull and we both admire her looks. "Maybe I will play that one," I said.

He smiles and hands it to me. "You should. That's an amazing guitar, dude."

I am working on learning to finger pick, and I know that what Clay said last week, when I first showed him the Seagull, is true. It has beautiful balance across the range. Every note is clear and ringing. "You got that guitar because it forces you to grow into it," he said. "I'm sitting over here listening and I can tell you that from here that is one beautiful sounding guitar."

"Yea. But it's so ... bright."

"It sure is. Every note rings like a bell."

And I know that the trouble is not in the guitar, but in the demands I am making on myself. There is that shadow side that says I am fifty-six years old, look a bit ridiculous just starting to get into music, should concentrate on what I already know ... all the same voices Clay hears. The same voices that separate me from my new guitar. "Suspicious minds are talking. Trying to tear us apart. They say our love is wrong."

"It's the negative mother," I say. " She wants to keep you a child, so that she never grows old. Old parts without the power of self-reflection think like that. It's the stuff of horror genre."

It sounds so easy on this side. But I remember being his age and I know the power of those negative voices that say you are weak, that you should not try because you will fail, or which just fail to say something encouraging or hopeful, so as "not to build false hope." They are entwined in centuries of unconscious behaviors, complexes, wars, murders, humiliations and rejections. They are the shadow of Love, which struggles above this den of thieves and murderers who use the easy way of fear and power. That's the abyss, and it's arms are open wide.

"You can't sell that guitar," he says again. "That guitar's amazing, and it's gonna just keep sounding better and better. You just have to grow into it."

And I look at her and think, even if her beauty has a hardness to it, and even if there's nowhere for a false note to hide in her, I'm going to pluck her tonight.

Posted: Wed - February 11, 2004 at 06:04 PM