My Guitar Hero

For a few years I was welcomed into the home of a world-class guitarist, for private, powerfully inspiring instruction, earning quality chops but also, more importantly, a soulmate in song for life

The greatest teachers inspire every bit as much as they instruct, don’t they? Their influence upon you, if they’re truly extraordinary, long outlives the time in instruction you had with them, I think.

A few years ago I was armed with a brand new, gorgeous Fender Stratocaster, wholly clueless about what to do with it, knowing only, with conviction, that I wanted to learn how to play it. Into the Guitar Center on Rockville Pike near my suburban D.C. home I went, Strat strapped over my shoulder.

“Who here can help me learn to play?” I asked some kid behind a counter there. The kid smiled and walked me over to a board bearing the headshots and bona fides of the Center’s instruction staff, and I’ll never forget the enthusiasm with which he swiftly and resolutely singled out the profile of a warm and friendly looking instructor named Al, among more than a dozen accomplished instructors advertised on the board.

“I really believe you’d enjoy working with Al,” he told me, smiling again. 

A few days later I met my new teacher, not in the least nervous but rather excited to begin my late starting journey with committed music learning. I’d been seized by a dream of many years to take up the instrument, after a lifetime of being seized by songs, and the moment just seemed right to explore this wild dream of becoming a Guitar Hero near 50. But first I had to find out if my being a guitar novice near 50 was too daunting an instruction task — for me certainly but also for a remarkably accomplished, globe-touring musician like Al.

At my first appointment with him Al instantly became ‘Big Al’ to me: He was a man of imposing physical stature, tall and burly but with warm, piercing brown eyes. But his brawn belied a cuddly bear demeanor and endearing personal warmth. Big Al was a gentle giant.

But Big Al was also a giant musician. He played bass for a celebrity singer all over the world. He also built his own guitars. He also wrote and published music prolifically. He was very much a man of music. We would meet weekly for instruction when he wasn’t touring, he informed.

Right up front Big Al posed an important question to me in those initial moments of our meeting in a Guitar Center instruction closet: Why do you want to learn to play?

I was mildly embarrassed by my motivation, but it was as true and sincere as it was unyielding in its hold over me. I shared with Big Al a recurring nightmare-dream I’d had, for years, of being a guitarist in a big-time rock band, and waking up on the day of a big gig only to realize that . . . I didn’t know how to play the instrument. Such a bizarre dream. My new mentor smiled and laughed but . . . also . . . seemed . . . to understand. 

Perhaps in that vulnerable moment of my sharing my weird dream and my big ambition Big Al recognized that I was a guy he could work with. I learned that we were peers in age and two men with big dreams, mine basic proficiency with six strings, as a vintage guitar student, Al’s with making come alive new and distinctive song writing in his most musical heart. He was transforming his home into a studio to make it happen. Perhaps we paired so well because we were simply two guys about the same age with big dreams and a big love of music. I like to think so, anyway.  

I also shared with Big Al my lifelong love of rock music, classic and alternative, and how for too long I’d simply wanted to be able to play a few riffs of songs that were seared into my music loving soul.

“Make me a list of the songs you want to play for the next time we meet,” Big Al told me.

When I was in the fifth grade my parents conscripted me into guitar lessons after school with an acoustic guitar that was too large for my small hands and with an elderly man of rote musical pedagogy. Our lessons felt like an extension of math class. I quit after four lessons.

Big Al, however, wanted to guide me to where my musical heart was.

“Hey bass player,” I asked him in our second meeting, handing over my wish list of songs to master playing, “ever heard of Geddy Lee?”

My big instructor beamed a big smile. “Geddy’s one of the best, of all time,” Big Al shot back. “We’re gonna go after some Rush together, aren’t we?” he laughed.

Why dream small?

Big Al and I spent a lot of time in our initial sessions learning about one another, often leaving our guitars resting on our laps, unstrummed. Ours was a natural warmth, natural and mutual intrigue, natural and mutual fun. On about my fifth or sixth lesson with Al I successfully played two bars of a Beatles song he taught me. Then he seriously raised the stakes for our journey ahead.

“My students take a final exam,” he told me. “They go up on a stage with me, two guys and their guitars and their amps, and we play a song together, in public, for an audience.”

That was the lone moment in all my years of learning guitar with Big Al when I wavered briefly in wondering if I’d picked the right instructor from the Guitar Center instruction board.

“There’s no way I’ll be on any stage out in public performing music, with you or anybody else,” I told my teacher. “That’s what professional musicians do.”

“You can and you will,” he replied. “That’s why I agreed to take you on.”

Dream big a bit with Big Al and you see big dreams come to fruition, I think he was telling me.

Soon Big Al needed new scenery and a new schedule, one a lot more liberating from teaching at the Center, one more conducive to making his dreams of creating new music come true, and in a great gift to me, he wanted to include me in his new horizons, new student though I was. His home was his recording studio, and we’d meet there, every week. He was abandoning a fair number of his students at the Center to chase his dream. But he was retaining me. What fortune. What a blessing.

Learning in Big Al’s music museum home was extraordinary fun and extraordinarily inspiring for me. He built what he called his “Frankenstein guitars” there, an ever lengthening homemade rack housing and showcasing them along an entrance wall. He’d always make me pick up the latest one he’d assembled, asking me to “take it for a ride” with the basic chords and progressions he was teaching me. He wouldn’t identify himself as a luthier in the traditional sense, but the volume of his instrument building work so vividly showcased his passion, his musical soul.

Big Al’s passion for guitar and music was infectious, and I began acquiring additional guitars myself, buying them on eBay or used from Guitar Center. I found a small travel guitar to take with me on family vacations with which to keep up my practice and progress.

Big Al had a monstrously large flatscreen TV in his living room, and we’d sit before it and watch extraordinary guitar performances on YouTube. He’d freeze a lead player in mid-solo, or a rhythm guitarist adding texture to a wall of shimmering sound, and then mirror perfectly on his guitar the virtuosity on the screen. Importantly, he wasn’t showing off; no, he’d demonstrate a pattern or technique and immediately embark on making me a participant in it, slowly, methodically, ever so patiently and supportive. I was in the presence of two Guitar Heroes then, both world-renowned, with me the aspiring one, novice and apprentice, but Al always made me believe I was in their fraternity.

My life in Washington, both professionally and personally, was waning in reward my final years there, but before I made my move to Maine, for one hour each week those last years I had a special sanctuary in Big Al’s home. By now Al was every bit as much my friend as my teacher and mentor. I’d pull up in my Jeep in front of his house for my lesson and often see him standing in the open door of his home, smiling and waiting on my arrival. I smiled entering his home and smiled wider an hour later exiting, always eager to race home and practice what I’d just learned.    

I so badly needed my move to Maine at the end of 2019, but the happiest hours I had in Washington in my final years there were those with Big Al, in his home, learning, laughing, progressing, and most especially dreaming.

Every new guitar player has a chord that’s a brutal barrier, the bane of his progress. For me it was F major. Al was patient and supportive of me with it, but clean, reliable fretting of it remained elusive, week after week after week.

For two months I spent just about every day working on it, seldom seeing any improvement. I kept thinking that younger hands probably had no difficulty with it. But one day at last I laid down all three fretting fingers precisely as I needed to, strumming the chord cleanly. I said nothing about it to Al at our next lesson. That was a lesson in which I sought to impress my teacher by deftly ripping off a string of 10 key major chords in row, cleanly, including F major. He wasn’t expecting a sequence like that, and when I nailed F major he stopped his teaching for the day, to celebrate one not so little victory.

“You don’t realize it,” he told me then, “but you’re now an intermediate guitar player.”

“You’re my guitar hero,” he told me.

Today in Maine I have a guitar playing neighbor and pal named Zach. Zach was actually in a modest band here in New England at one point. Back at the beginning of summer Zach pushed me to purchase an acoustic guitar so that he and I could play together around the firepit that sits between our homes and is a source of wonderful R&R for us. So I did. I actually purchased yet another guitar! And it’s gorgeous.

Around the firepit strumming with Zach this summer I had some amusing thoughts about my journey with the guitar. Zach and I regularly discuss one day forming our own band. Just two guys and their guitars. And you know, that might just happen, even if it’s for but one single gig . . . like a set of three Christmas songs played on a snowy December Saturday night in front of a fireplace for our neighbors.

My final exam for Big Al.

I have a feeling that when it happens he’ll somehow be an audience for it. I hope so, at least.

A couple of weeks ago I started reading the newly published memoir of that other remarkable bass player, Rush’s Geddy Lee, and necessarily it made me think about Big Al. A lot. I hadn’t spoken to him in a couple of years, but connected so powerfully again with music with this memoir by a guitar hero, I felt a resurrection of so strong a series of memories and reminiscences of my guitar hero back home. And at the dawn of the Christmas season I badly wanted to reconnect with him, offer him an update on my enlarged guitar collection, my playing, and simply tell him what he meant to me still. I addressed a Christmas card to my guitar hero this past weekend, and in it I wrote:       

“All these years later, all these hundreds of miles separating us, here is what I love most about the gift that was your coming into my life, and at a tough time: today I own even more guitars than I did at the end when we worked together, today I lay down that bastard F chord with unthinking, reflexive ease (never not smiling from it, never taking it for granted!), and never can I pick up a guitar without thinking about you.”