Starting Note
Musically, I was the horse that always crashed into the first fence.
Different instruments, same story.
First there was the tenor horn, part of a job lot of brass mysteriously obtained by my school. Every Monday I would lug that beast, with its absurdly outsized case, onto the bus and then a tube, negotiating ten million stairs en route. Then, when the last bell sounded and the inmates raced to the gate, I would trudge off for my lesson.
The tutor, Mr Appleby, wore a blue naval jacket with on-brand brass buttons. He looked like he’d just stepped off the bandstand and was squeezing in my class between sets.
‘How have you been getting on? Show me what you’ve been practising.’
‘I find it a bit difficult,’ I would say miserably, an understatement that would become apparent with ever discordant honk. I was gawky, uncoordinated and seemingly incapable of getting the hang of embouchure.
Mr Appleby did his best. He tried swapping me to a French horn but by that point my confidence had drained away. Progress there was none.
My friend, meanwhile, was going great guns with a trumpet. I know now that this is an instrument better suited to a beginner but deep down I believed I would mess that up, too. I quietly returned my instrument to the school.
Guitar Hero
Hey-ho. No big loss. Who wanted to spend their life with sore lips and aching arms, bashing into every third passer-by? I was already a Beatles nut and there was encouragement from that quarter. Hadn’t a schoolboy Paul McCartney abandoned the trumpet for the far groovier guitar?
With this high bar in mind, I bought The Beatles Complete Songbook before twanging my first string. It was discouragingly packed with weird looking chord charts involving finger gymnastics. I swallowed hard but ploughed on with my mission. With a guitar in my hand all would be revealed.
After a sustained tugging of his coat, my father stumped up for a sunburst acoustic from Maurice Placquet’s Music Shop on the Uxbridge Road, W12. It was modestly priced (that’s how we rolled) and styled after a highly glamorous Fender. Unfortunately the copy versions, for families in the cheap seats, were notoriously difficult to play.
My new guitar was perfect for posing in front of the mirror. It was less pleasing for those forced to listen to me force chords out of it.
It was a similar story with George Harrison’s first instrument, also bought for him by a bus-driving dad. He ungratefully blamed his ‘horrible cheapo’ for early problems. I wouldn’t be quite so ungracious. Besides George did master the instrument overtime and went on to scrape a living from it. It didn’t quite work out the same way for me.
To play many rock and pop songs you only need three or four chords. Alas one of these is F, which involves a bit of finger bending on a guitar. If you can’t manage this the result is a sound like that of an ancient cat struggling for breath.
These days there are hundreds of internet cheat-sheets with practical advice about softer strings, and alternative chord shapes. Then you relied on books (impossible to follow) other guitarists (didn’t know any well enough to ask) or tutors (embarrassed to go through that again).
Eventually, I did take a couple of classes with a harassed hippy in a cramped flat in Willesden. With toddlers running around his feet, he demonstrated how to play ‘Don’t Think Twice’. His expression darkened as I muted strings, strayed between frets and generally departed from his instructions. I got the message, which was succinctly summarised in another Dylan song title, ‘You Ain’t Going Nowhere’.
Bass note
My final roll of the dice was the bass guitar — once foolishly considered the go-to instrument of the non-musician (see Stuart Sutcliffe, Sid Vicious etc.) This never worked out well and I didn’t buck the trend.
I bought the necessary kit second-hand, with money I’d saved from my Saturday job, flogging shoes and commission earning accessories (‘Would you a shoe tree, sir?’) My cash-pile stretched to a puny amplifier and another super-shiny fender imposter, this one pretending to be a jazz bass.
Like Bob, I had gone electric and faced an audience backlash (‘turn that bloody racket down’). I kept going for a while — my bedroom, my rules —but I didn’t have anyone else to play with. Plucking random strings soon lost its allure. After a decent interval, I quietly pulled the plug.
By the time I went to College, I was resigned to not having a musical ‘voice’. I still had the one spoke with, of course, but like most young men I only sang in public with it when alone or anonymous in a crowd at Christmas. Even then I kept my (minimal) output low, in pitch as well as volume.
I sang to myself sometimes, couldn’t help it. Once my girlfriend stumbled across me warbling The Patriot Game, an Irish folk tune, better known with words by Dylan (With God On My Side).
‘Sorry I was just -’
‘No, I like hearing you singing it.’
And I think she did, because she asked me to do it again a few times. Not after things went south, of course, but I was touched and at some level encouraged.
I completed my formal education and the decades that followed without further additions to my musical scorecard. To summarise, I couldn’t play even the simplest melody on any instrument and only one person had ever expressed the remotest interest in hearing me sing.
Not a promising start. Work to do.
Part 2: Count Me In — the comeback! I get up and finish a plucky tenth.
