In the spring of my fourteenth year, I had been two years into having abandoned piano lessons for the more portable and intimate luxury of the guitar as my instrument of choice. A love affair quite the opposite of the relationship I had literally grown up with the piano. The house I lived in for the first five years of my life had two pianos in Gramma's (living room) 'studio' and a steady progression of regular piano students trooped in and out of that room for their lessons to tinkle out into my peripheries of those toddlerhood times. She (Gram) had me learning music and fingerings on a child-sized accordian until my hands were finally adjudged to be big enough for piano lessons. From around age nine until about age twelvish, nearly three years, I had my weekly assignments to learn and the weekly piano lesson to see if I had learned my lesson enough to go on to the next lesson in the piano-lessons book; including the daily parental reminders to be sure to practice my lesson(s). It was probably the spring of '53 that mom, the inveterate 'thrift store' cruiser that she was, found a child-sized (3/4rtrs-size) Washburn guitar, rigged with 'gut' (today it's nylon) or 'classical' guitar strings, and brought it home. I, of course, rather instantly glommed onto it and, using a Burl Ives folksongs book I found in my parents bookshelves that illustrated chord formations, proceeded to labor away at learning how to do guitar-playing. Freed, at long last, I was never 'cut out' to be the classical concert pianist I am sure my grandmother and mother probably entertained the idea of me one day becoming, and I clung to my determination that I would no longer endure the uncomfortable regimin of piano lesson and that my switch to the guitar was irreversible. I bought Les Paul records to try to figure out how he did all that amazing guitar stuff; completely unaware of the concept of multiple track recording. I listened to the music stations on my radio and found songs I could learn to play and sing along with; mostly on the country and western music stations. I learned Hank Williams' songs (Jambolia, Cold cold Heart, Hey Good Lookin'); Johnny Cash's Folsom Prison Blues; and in '54 when Rock Around The Clock hit the top 40 radio stations, I learned that one. And then—I'm fourteen now—my folks became aware of a guitar teacher in need of pupils, temporarily living with the contractor-builder guy who had helped Paul Fourman get our first home remodled to suit his newly-acquired wife, my mother and me. As it happened, the real estate guy who sold Paul Fourman our new 2nd house over on the warmer side of Mill Valley's hills, whose wife was also like my grandmother: a teacher of music making ability on the piano, their son, just my age and at the same near-embryonic level of our budding carreers as guitar players, would also like to take lessons from (Rolfe Khan) the guitar teacher, who said, yes: he could teach us blues and finger-picking styles, both of which John (Cipollina, later of world-famous Quicksilver Messenger Service of the San Francisco Sound era of the latter half of the nineteen sixties shortly before, during, and, as far as I am concerned: after the psychedelic experiential stages had fizzled out. So, each Saturday morning for the next few months John and I went, our parents driving us over to the guitar-teacher's place where he actually showed us how to teach ourselves not only finger-picking style and blues, but Flamenco stuff, fingerings and runs also.
It was during this time also that my grandfather—Paul G. Fourman Senoir—had just recently taken me to a guitar concert at the broadway type glitzy theater in San Francisco (The Curran) where all the broadway stage plays came and the higher-end big name performers of the day to entertain the theater-going crowds and, of course, make money for the impressario and his backers, where the world famous spaniard classical and flamenco guitarist: Andres Segovia held forth in a really fantastic surround sound, couldn't have heard a pin drop, two hour performance of many of his perfected pieces of guitar-playing genius. Of course, I was taken with such a thrilling experience; but I just knew beyond all doubt that I could never be able to play like that, evermore. Still, the overall effect upon my desire to be a guitar-playing entertainer/singer was very much a learning experience. Concurrent with this Adam-at-fourteen business to do with my infatuation with the being of a player of the guitar, I bought an (“LP” 33&1/3rd) album of finger-picking style guitar renditions by the only other highest-escelon finger-picker of that time, Merle Travis, and actually learned to play three of those twelve songs on that record. Another relevant exposure of that same era in the very early life of musical exposures—including seeing The Spike Jones Review at that same Curran theater some time earlier, exposing me to his fabulous show of comedic music-merry-making—Mill Valley's local (& only) record store, often an after school point of interest, whose proprietor knew of both John and my interest in finger-picking guitar, dropped two 'courtesy' tickets to Chet Atkins' unveiling of the 1954 models Gretch guitars in the unremembered name of the room in the fabulous famous hotel to the rich and famous Palace Hotel, up on San Francisco's highest (downtown) peak. Wow! Were John and I ever stoked and could hardly wait for the Saturday of this truly amazing, for a fourteen year old boy just barely wet behind the ears and going all goo-gah over his fantasy of what being a player of the guitar means to him, experience; made all the more pertinent for the intimacy of the side dinning room sized room's narrowness, front-to-back which had John and I just four feet away and right in the very smack dab front of Chet and his stand up bass-player friend for the forty-five minutes or so of Chet's first playing first one, than another model of the guitar line for 1954. He was completely at his ease and sucked us all—maybe two-dozen folks in all—big deal, huh?--right on in with sprinklings of humorous wisecrack-like anecdotal commentaries: A regular professional of the very first order. Needless to say, both John and my heads have been spinning ever since—from a guitar-player's sense or perspective and pure melodic inspiration!
The larger bulk of most all of my band-participant experiences were spent at/on the piano, keyboard, or electronic organ; and mostly just because no one else could wham out any and all chords in any key on demand, at the drop of any hat. As lazy of a piano-player as I was, I could play in any key or any progression of chords, no problem, I don't care what key the song is being played in nor the bandleader to shout out the chords to me more than once, the first time. That much, as a piano-playing bandmate, I could do with ease. I just knew I would never be that virtuouso guy, but even just being a lowlife lazy rock and roll/blues piano-player/singer and being a mediocre chord-playing back up keyboardist for all the other guitar-playing entertainer guys (and a few of the gals as well) whose level of guitar-playing virtuousity far exceeded mine. After the fall of 'grace' wherein I swore off dealing in money as much as was (or is ever) possible, and just floated on what I knew about music and playing with other musicains and 'running' (ha!) a band for fun and games type entertainment value only, thep Redlegs band deal was perfect for me. I truly enjoyed just lying back a bit in the shadows of Joe and Maggie, and Jeff and Joey's flash and just giving them and our overall musical accompanyment as full of a backup fill in sound as I dared. I say dared, which is not quite the correct term. The challenge in a group band experience/setting is to blend, to fit together, work to play together, and when one or another of the band's members starts getting too cockily loud and obnoxious, unless this is Eric Clapton or Jimi Hendricks, it tends to detract from other band members' ability to stay focused and involved in the best pulling off of the rendering of the tune at hand; and after a decade of being the front man out pushing and pushy, I was greatly relieved to have Joe and Maggie do the out front stuff. After all, I still enjoyed the experience that being absorbed within loud string music's manufacture—and this enjoyment did not cost other than a little effort dragging equipment around from gig, to storage, to next gig, and back to storage . . . My, by then, addicted-to-audience-attention—that hungering for the abnormal socio-emotional relationship that, as a musician/entertainer personnae, such of us who have participated in this experiential no-man's land—I'm sorry: I realy have no way of communicating with any true clarity what this, call it, relationship actually comprises and consists of and what type of philosophical arrangements may be influencing the experiencer and the experiencee in any one given moment.
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