…that I started teaching myself how to play guitar.

I’ve written about it before; when I was a little kid – the day of the first moon landing, in fact – my dad had brought home a guitar someone had left in his locker years earlier.  It’d been sitting around the house for eight years, serving as a fort or battleship for toy army men, as a rifle in games of Soldier…as pretty much everything but a guitar.

But seized with the urge to play, I repaired it – replaced three tuning machines, hammered a fret back into place, and restrung it – and started teaching myself.

You  may recall the classic Mitch Hedberg bit; “I’ve been teaching myself guitar.  It’s not going so well.  I have a crappy teacher”.  That’s probably the norm.  I lucked out – but not because I was a good teacher.  I had some good source materials.  It helped that I’d been playing cello for four years, of course; I knew theory, rhythm, key, the scale, all of that sort of thing.

And I had John Denver.  Say what you will about the guy and his music, but he wrote stuff that was eeeeeasssssy to follow on the guitar.

But most of all?  I had a copy of the Gene Leis “Nexus” Guitar Chord book, a cardback folio that was the perfect book on the subject; it started slow (how to hold the guitar, how not to), how to form the simple chords, how to hold a pick and strum…

…and, interspersed throughout, the little written bits of advice and encouragement a live teacher might give you.  (He warned the newbie about the first-position “F” chord – a plateau of hand-cramping agony that kills off a lot of new guitarists; “this one’s going to be tough.  Hang in there”).

I got the book at the local music store; it was actually a reissue of a 1961 publication.  It’s long out of print, of course.

Which is a shame.  I’ve been teaching my son to play, and it’d be handy.  I’m tempted to try to write my own sometime, here – but that’s another article.

But I did end up googling Gene Leis – and wow, what a story.