Gigantic.10

Tobacco Sunburst

Kingston 78.

I walked into Sam’s Swap Shop on North Front with a tennis racket, a Monkey Ward ten-speed, and $65 cash.

I walked out with a brand-new, single-pick-up Kay electric and a used amplifier.

The amp was a crackly piece of crap from the get-go, but the guitar was a tobacco sunburst that radiated like the sun. It was a beauty.

We had started a band. I would sing and play guitar. My friend Scott would play bass. There was another Scott from Rosendale who would play lead, and Larry would play drums.

We were called Solid Gold. We were all going to wear matching gold track suits and running shoes.

Every day in the cafeteria at J. Watson Bailey Junior High School, Scott and Scott and I would sit at the table, being a band. Larry was still in 6th grade back at George Washington Elementary, but he was there in spirit.

When we finally practiced, it was at Larry’s, way up Linderman Avenue Extension. He had a drum kit in their basement family room. Scott didn’t have his bass yet, and I hadn’t figured out any chords but did an open tuning and slid my index finger up and down the neck.

We played Love is Like Oxygen for half an hour.

You get too much, you get too high

Not enough and you’re gonna die

Heavy.

At home, I got my hands on a teach-yourself folk guitar book with terrible illustrations from the 60s. I taught myself the G chord, then tossed the book. But here’s the weird thing:

I got it in my head that this one chord I had learned was not G, but C. Which means that, as I started to figure out other chords in relation to this first chord, I got the names of ALL the chords wrong.

I’m not sure if I’m explaining this well enough. It’s like living in a city where you know the street names, but they don’t match the actual streets.

At any rate, my transitions between wrong chords were so tortured that I wasn’t really playing the Kay so much as fighting with it. It was not going well.

Solid Gold persisted as a lunch table band. We failed to practice much beyond the Love is Like Oxygen session. We never got the gold track suits. But we never officially broke up, either.

So, on some theoretical plane, we still exist.

About a year later, it came to my 8th grade music teacher’s attention that I was some sort of piano prodigy, which was true, but I didn’t tell anyone. I still wanted to be a guitar player, even though I was making no progress in that direction.

At any rate, my teacher paired me up with this guy named Joel who lived on Washington Avenue and played drums like an animal. We started playing everyday in the music room after school, Joel on drums, me on piano.

My friend Scott finally got a bass. I can’t remember who actually played guitar when we finally pulled something together. We didn’t have a name, but hung up posters and played a single after-school show in Gymnasium B at J. Watson Bailey.

A lot of kids turned up. There was no place to sit, so the band and listeners all commingled with the wrestling matts and whatnot. The only song we knew was Freebird. We played it, with an extended jam section, for forty minutes.

After that I went underground. I played our used upright piano every day but just to blow off steam, not realizing that at some point these skills would actually come in handy. My guitar playing remained off-kilter to nonexistent. Tired of looking at it, I gave my beautiful tobacco sunburst to a neighborhood kid, so I could at least have the pleasure of blowing his mind when I handed it to him.

During our Elephant Gun period in Syracuse, Bill leant me his acoustic for a while. I made some small progress, but could not actually play any of our songs, and still could not make my fingers change chords in real time.

Over a decade had passed since I walked out of Sam’s with that first guitar, but I had not progressed. It was time to either throw myself into this endeavor with heretofore nonexistent resolve, or admit defeat, which I was not about to do.

And so it was that I dove head first into the guitar like my life depended on it.

After years of starting and giving up, I finally learned to play the guitar in Seattle, Washington, in 1989.

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