I've said to someone at least once that even if you are David Gilmour playing the first note of the guitar solo from Comfortably Numb in front of a stadium of 45,000 people who have given at least a day's wage to see you and share in this particular moment, and all of whom have physiological reactions such as chills goose bumps or tears, and all of whom will remember this moment as being one of the greatest of their lives, being a musician is still kind of silly.
And that's kind of where my head was when we arrived in Cleveland on Tuesday to visit the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. As big a music nerd as I am, I felt a little embarrassed that America built a place, a geographical position, to adore people who often seem like little more than narcotic endorsements with moderate musical discipline.
This is from the guy who felt too old to be in a band at 23.
The museum is mostly guitars and clothes. I don’t care about clothes. There should be a pair of blue suede shoes and everything else could be trucked off to a separate building. Guitars though... I can stare at guitars all day.
I stood near a guitar that once belonged to Johnny Cash and looked at the fretboard. Cash means a lot of things to me. And for a while, this guitar was in his hands. And I don't know if he performed or recorded with it, if it was special to him or just one whose memory was lost among the hundreds of guitars he must have played. I thought of my dad. I thought of being a kid. I thought of growing old.
My favorites are the ragged, road-bitten strats and LP's, tattered finishes and clawed frets. And really it doesn't matter much if it belonged to Joe Strummer or some blues guy I've never heard of, or even if it’s hanging in a pawn shop. I like looking for traces of a player's habits and neglect -- replaced hardware and hardware no one bothered to replace.
They've got some pianos, but that didn't mean anything to me. I saw Greg Allman's B-3. I'd never stood that close to a real B-3 before, so the celebrity of it was lost on me. There was an anonymous Moog Liberator there, which was a treat for me since a gay Goth kid tried to sell me one back in the band days. I was sitting with him on his living room floor trying to explain the difference between MIDI and control voltage. Good times.
The only keyboard instrument that got me was the homemade keyboard glockenspiel that Springsteen's keyboardist used. I've talked to anyone who will listen (and that's just about no one) about the arrangement and instrumentation of Born to Run and the key thing for me as timbre goes, is this instrument. I point out the simple and persistent little theme that is outlined by piano and this chimey box and describe it as the hidden engine of the song. Seeing it was very exciting.
What topped it though, and this surprised me, was seeing one of the four-tracks used to record Sergeant Pepper. It surprised me, because I'm not really a Beatles guy, but I can appreciate the enormity of Pepper's influence and knowing that this album, which has existed for over forty years as LP's, cassettes and CD's in millions of copies across the globe was once just a strip of tape moving over these heads, seems gigantic to me. I got a little light-headed.
My ground zero is where music intersects with technology, seeing the Sun Studios gear, the old wire recorders, ecoplexes and proto Les Pauls. I stood in front of the Tascam Port-a-Studio Springsteen recorded Nebraska on and felt like I'd been part of something, humans catching music and struggling to save it.
There have been plenty of times in my life when I regretted the time I spent chasing music. It distracted me from skills and lessons that would have served me longer and maybe better. But I'm glad I was alive during this time. I'm glad I got to sit in an on-air studio and cue up vinyl records, I'm glad I know what it's like to play in a band in a shitty little bar and breathe river air and cigarette smoke in a gravel parking lot. And I like the scar on my lip that hasn't faded in the twenty years since I busted my face on the top of a bass cabinet carrying gear into a Uniontown bar.
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