Posted on: Monday, September 13, 2004

ABOUT MEN
My guitar should be the air kind

By Michael Tsai
Advertiser Staff Writer

This is a test. This is only a test. Do not be alarmed by the hellacious squawking and squealing emanating from deep within Salt Lake.

This is merely a test of the "Doofus Here Still Doesn't Know How to Play His Guitar" emergency alert system.

If I were actually attempting to play guitar (instead of butchering the opening chords to "Summer Babe"), you would be advised to seal your doors from the exodus of vermin from our sewers and avert your eyes from the cloud of harpies descending from the blood-red sky.

For further instruction on the best way to shove a sharpened pencil in your ear to relieve the suffering, or how to determine the exact amount of Percodan needed to find your happy place, please consult my next-door neighbor.

We repeat, this is only a test.

Frailty of the male ego and all, it's a wonder that so many of us tone-deaf, schnitzel-fingered, badly aging boys persist, year after year, against all reason, in trying to wring music from the unseemly combat between fumbling hands and uncooperative instrument.

I got my first guitar when I was 15. At the time, I figured it would take a couple of weeks of practice to figure out everything I needed to know. After that, watch out — I'd be wailing like Randy Rhodes (cut me some slack, it was 1983) and deciding which Motley Crue video bimbo to pack on my handlebars.

As it turned out, the only thing wailing after two weeks was the dog. And in the 20 or so years since, I can't say that my musical (ahem) skills ever really yielded the desired response from women (except for that irritating ex who finally exited my life after a murderous two hours of me trying to learn "Terms of Psychic Warfare").

And it's not like I haven't tried. I took classical guitar lessons at UH just long enough to realize that the P-I-M-A finger-picking method was a royal P-I-T-A.

I've made repeated attempts to learn jazz guitar, but my playing, while enthusiastically improvised, would have left Miles more that "kind of blue."

Once, during a late-night moment of Sonic Youth inspiration, a buddy and I tried to tried to get experimental with a fuzzbox, a pre-amp, a busted Gorilla amp and a speaker I snaked from the college radio station. Sadly, the result was less "Teenage Riot" than geriatric uprising. I have no idea where Grandma and Grandpa learned those words.

As years have turned to decades, I've had to accept the fact that I'll never be Stevie Ray Vaughan or Herbert Sumlin or even D. Boon. These days, I'm happy to be in the ballpark of Johnny ("Three chords and the truth? What do you do with the two extra chords?") Ramone.

Still, with the help of those other fine male traits of stubbornness, delusion of competency, and apathy to the suffering of others, I don't expect that I'll ever stop trying.

This is not a test. This is a warning.

Reach Michael Tsai at mtsai@honoluluadvertiser.com or 535-2461.