Aberfoyle, ON with 1975 VW. When I first moved to Canada, I listened to a radio contest that required a written submission to win a week in a guitar music workshop with the Canadian band Lighthouse, in Collingwood, ON. The topic was why I would want to attend the workshop.
I actually received a call from the promoters who asked me to come to the workshop to speak to them about writing a story about the band. Although I attended the wonderful workshop, I declined the writing assignment as I was attending York University and working as a Pulmonary Technologist at Western Hospital in Toronto at the time. The experience was amazing. Here is the letter I submitted in the summer of 1974.
Dear Sirs:
One night when I was barely big enough to require a real bed, the type without side rails, I remember hearing the oldsters gather together in the front hall beneath my bedroom and harmonize on whatever the flow of music required. That happened quite frequently until I was about ten years old. I have no idea how long it had been commonplace before my first recollection.
Mom was in her late 30’s then, didn’t look her age at all and could play a tune on the piano as well as the concert harp – played really well too. She had the long thin fingers and the dexterity required for the classics and Christmas carols, but could never create music from within and was later unable to understand my musical score notation of “get down”. Of course, I never got it together to comprehend her score notations; consequently to this day I have difficulty reading music. She never discovered that fact until while I practicing on my trumpet one day under her command, she asked me begin at a particular bar. After giving several notes the opportunity to be correct, I had to admit I was not sure of the beginning. After a brief discussion with my father, my trumpet lessons were cancelled – after a year of Saturday mornings with Mr. Kratz. Mr. Kratz had played with Sousa’s Band and should have retired years prior but continued to give music lessons. I remember him of short stature, overweight, and had heavy lips congruent with a horn man. He set my goal to be able to play the trumpet while the aforesaid was suspended from the ceiling – no hands. I couldn’t really think of a time when I would be required to perform such a feat and therefore could not get that together either. The worst part was that he was a friend of the family and I was required to be in his presence thereafter, realizing that he knew of my failure. That way the guilt had a recurring effect.
My father had a curtness about him concerning this situation. The facts spoke for themselves and the outcome was totally logical. He had been through the older school, having been born in 1889; he was fifty-nine when I was born. I guess he always seemed a grandfather image, stern but with a good heart; and, man could he play the fiddle. Hell, I was twelve or thirteen before I discovered that it was one and the same as a violin.
I’ve still retained his violin and each year I give an oath that I’ll learn to play it a bit better. I’m improving, but there never seems to be enough time.
The guitar has been my instrument now for about six years; and unlike my sister who studied piano from my mother or my brother who captured the fiddle skills from my dad, I learned myself. That’s not completely true, because I was exposed to the music and the chord structures while pretending to play a portable Lowry organ in a teenage band called “The Chambermen”. That was my first and last experience with a “professional group”. Our biggest gig was playing the opening of a shoe store. We were once asked to leave a school prom because all the girls were in high heels and couldn’t dance to fast music, which was all we knew.
I played a coffee house in Berlin, Germany; they paid $2.50 a set and didn’t mind talent that was in need of about ten years experience. I’d watch the other sets, half glued to the movement of the fingers more talented than my own and half absorbed by the music: wandering and wondering if I would ever be able to disclose the identity of each note and chord which flashed before me faster than I could assimilate. Once, I tried to audition with my twelve-string, for a gig in Columbus, Ohio. I was so uptight that I took a book of words with chords which I had gotten together in my compulsive days. The manager was honest and told me I had potential but that I needed more exposure to crowds larger than myself. He was not a bad guy but explained that John Denver was booked that week. All I knew about him then was that he had written a song recorded by Peter, Paul, and Mary.
It wasn’t long after that, that I realized I was never going to be a rock star. I still believe it, but like most dreams and schemes, one always secretly hopes to have it happened around the next corner.
So music has been a great part of my life which has been educated and has educated, has expressed eras of me and is constantly pulsing within me at several levels of consciousness. It has been the theory and lack of exposure which has bogged down my creative flow, like the essentials of rhythmic structure – I speed the tempo constantly, or the idea that no one has ever heard of 12-bar blues ending on the I7 chord.
But by now I’m ready to get into a musical workshop. A learning situation has the ability to enhance the creative riffs and acquiring and developing new musical skills tend to keep that creativity flowing. And besides all that, it would get me off this musical plateau where I have been stagnant for what seems an eternity. Which reminds me of something my father said that night when as a child I was supposed to be asleep.
My older sister and brother had composed a duet of piano and violin which they were presenting for the first time. Upon completion of what I recall sounding like something that would have awakened the gods, my father smirked, with a contained grin, “Well, that’s one way of playing it”. He and my mother then took over the respective instruments and accomplished what my brother and sister had attempted – playing a classical duet in ragtime beat.
As to why I would appreciate the opportunity to attend the school is quite simple. I would never have a chance to jam and learn music from the talent composing the workshop otherwise.