a brief history

honestly, i just want to be cindy wilson. just look at that dress and--oh, lord-- those extensions. cindy wilson is someone i will never be, though. nor will i ever be a musician.

i'm convinced that every mormon girl is subjected to piano lessons at some point in her life. i went through six years of them. like everyone else i hated them, and argued with my parents every week that i wasn't getting anything out of it. it would be so much easier for you to let me quit, and then you wouldn't have to pay anymore, i said. but no, no, no, they said, and you'd get better if you practiced. blah, blah, blah. i want to play drums, i told them. so i joined band in sixth grade.

then my dad brought out this guitar. not that guitars were anything new in the house, but this thing was electric, and it was a fender, and it was red. i had to have it. even though piano lessons had been a failure and a waste of money, they agreed to buy me an amp and find a teacher. the amp was a baby vox. the teacher was tim. tiny tim. i could look him in the eye and i'm only 5'3". at my first lesson he asked me to make a list of all the bands i liked, and every lesson thereafter was tim giving me simplified tabs of led zeppelin and weezer songs.

i hated guitar lessons too. i could noodle around on a piano and know what every key meant. someone could put a sheet of music in front of me and i would know what that meant too. frets and strings didn't make any sense to me, and the only kind of tab i could read was tim tab.

in high school i started going to basement shows and was jealous of all the kids that could play stuff. yeah, i was still in band, but once band directors found out i could read music they put me on mallet percussion. which was cool, but one cannot easily throw a marimba in a van and tote it around. my friend kirstin had a synth. my friend dante wanted to start a band. i bought a keyboard, named it the beast, and got with those guys. so all those piano lessons had come in handy. the problem was that i couldn't improvise. kirstin already had ideas in mind so she basically wrote out parts for me, but with dante i was on my own, and i didn't last long.

i still can't improvise. i'm too nervous. a few weeks ago, though, james was kind enough to show me the fingering pattern for bass scales. it clicked within minutes because the bass was presented to me like a piano. here is this note, this is a major third away from that note, here is the octave. i figured out arpeggios. i don't have a bass so i haven't played since then, but at my grandpa's house there's an acoustic guitar. i play scales and noodle around on the first four strings. i'm hopeful.