Where Guitar Legends and Coders Overlap
Keith Richards’ wild life inspired me to trade code snippets like guitar licks
For the last two months Keith Richards’ massive autobiography, Life, has been occupying my nightstand real estate. It’s the story of a life where musical genius and rock star excess combine for spectacular results. I mean, Keith Richards has lived a LIFE. As someone who consumes music history with his Wheaties every morning, this book is a treat.
Putting the sex and drugs aside, there is a heck of a lot of rock & roll (and blues) littered throughout this book. See, Richards discovered American blues in his teens and became an absolute blues freak. He couldn’t get enough of it. In the chapters describing those early years he spends every waking hour and every spare pound learning blues guitar and buying blues records.
Once the Stones gained enough traction to tour the United States something amazing happened: they got to learn at the feet of American country and blues giants. And rather than eye these young English imposters with skepticism, these established musicians happily handed over their secrets to these new bloods.
One of Richards’ buddies, Waddy Wachtel had the same experience. Here’s a great quote from Life about sitting down with the great Don Everly:
“I sat with Don Everly one night… I said, ‘there’s something I’ve never understood on your first single, ‘Bye Bye Love’, and that is the intro. What the fuck is that? Who’s playing that guitar that starts that song?’ And Don Everly goes, ‘Oh that’s just this G tuning that Bo Diddley showed me.”
That’s a tuning that’s been passed from Bo, to Don, to Waddy. That’s community, folks, and it’s something that happened to the Stones night after night on the road.
I’ve played in bands before and know what it’s like to trade ideas and secrets. It’s part of what makes that community so great. That moment of “Whoa, how’d you do THAT?” happens at every show I’ve been to. And musicians love to pass things on because it’s how we get better.
Nine months ago I jumped into the world of software development and for a while it shocked me how quickly I felt at home in the Ruby community. Coding languages had always seemed so intimidating from the outside, a bunch of jargon and techniques that were utterly foreign. The people who practiced it were unapproachable geniuses that had something I didn’t. It felt a lot like a kid at a concert watching a Guitar God bring down the house:
I’ll never be able to do THAT.
But once I jumped in I found the web dev community to be a lot like the music community. It’s a place where code snippets are traded on GitHub because those devs want to share their new trick with the world. It’s a place where devs huddle around laptops pounding keys like two jazz heads at an old piano.
There’s always going to be stuff that makes you say, “I’ll never be able to do THAT,” but more often than not there’s somebody out there that wants to show you exactly how you can. That sense of generosity in the open source community is what makes coding so great. It’s lowering the barrier to entry for new blood and also making the experienced coders better. You might not place guitar players and developers in the same spheres, but there’s more overlap than you’d think.
Do you see connections between music and coding?
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Top image: Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones lounges in his New York City office during a 1980 portrait session | Photo by George Rose/Getty Images
