I’m in an online music group that started at the very beginning of COVID in early 2020 and has continued to meet one to three times a week (depending on weather and medical/social conditions) since. The group consists of three wonderful musicians— Stu Anderson, Harold Goodman, and Scott Jarrett— . . . and me. For the most part, this group is my musical dream and has been ever since I saw Cleavon Little in the 1985 movie, “The Gig.” We have zero ambitions for our group, nicknamed “Downstream Consequences” (DC), other than an excuse to get together and play music and hangout together for an hour or so.
Because I like the “work,” I have been recording some of our sessions and putting the music into an archive that is just for us. Mostly, just for me: because nobody else ever listens to it after I’ve played the “finished” work for the group after we’ve wrapped up work on a song. That might sound a bit disrespectful, but it has actually been incredibly liberating because for most of my life I’ve recorded, mixed, and even produced music for other people with the intent of making them happy with the outcome. With DC’s songs, I just have to make myself happy.
Back in mid-2022, Stu (who has a fair classical background) was dissatisfied with the music we’d been playing. So, we took on a couple of songs more in his familiar territory: “Rondeau” and one of my personal favorites “Sentimental Walk.” If you follow the links, you’ll find that we didn’t exactly play them as classical songs: there is improvisation and a rhythm section. But (and this is not a small thing) I had to relearn how to read music and practice doing that for several weeks while we worked out these two songs.
[You know how to make a guitar player shut up and stop playing? Put sheet music in front of him.]
I am the poster child for that joke. I played trumpet in school from 5th grade until early in my junior year of high school, but when it became obvious to me that I would never be Dizzy Gillespie and I discovered that I could fake it a lot easier on electric guitar and bass. And I hadn’t made much of an effort to read sheet music since . . . until February, 2022 when we started working on “Rondeau.” Reading music is, in no way, like riding a bicycle. Not much of it came back easily and, after we wrapped up “Sentimental Walk” I didn’t keep at it and it’s gone again. Which brings us to the point of this essay, I am fiercely disinclined to exercise, practice, study, or do much of anything that doesn’t come easily. I suspect that isn’t unusual.
When I mentioned this trait to an old friend, he reminded me that, when I lived in California in the 80s, I lifted weights, walked and ran, played outdoor racquetball, swam in the ocean, bicycled daily, and had a pretty regular yoga practice. “Exercise,” he claimed. Some of those things—playing in the ocean and racquetball—I’d argue are play, not exercise. Bicycling was exercise, but mostly cheap transportation in California’s year-around spring and summer weather. But the things that are clearly exercise were done for a purpose: I swam because I was a scuba Divemaster and I needed to have basic water-skills. The other stuff had a direct purpose, too. Every Sunday for 9 years, I played beach basketball on several fairly competitive SoCal courts. I have none of the physical gifts of a basketball player: I’m 5’9”, I can’t run fast, jump at all, I have mediocre reflexes and no court sense, and, at best, I was a fair outside shooter. What I could do was “take a punch.” Meaning, I could muscle my way into the paint and shove competitors out of their comfort zone, which usually required getting hit by elbows, shoulders, and body-slams. In 1992, I moved to Colorado and within a couple of years my entire exercise routine collapsed and it took me a while to figure out why that happened. I didn’t need it anymore. I’d quit playing basketball. When I didn’t need to be strong to shove 20-year-old, 6’5” guys away from the goal, I didn’t need to be strong at all.
Over the past 30 years, I’ve tried a bunch of exercise routines, just for the sake of exercise, and none of the have stuck with me: walking outside or one a treadmill every day, swimming 5-times-a-week, weight lifting or exercise machines, even some of the sports I used to play. Without a purpose, other than “staying fit” or losing weight, I quickly lose interest.
And so it goes with relearning how to “read music.” Without an end goal, it’s just exercise. I know! “It’s good for you” to exercise your body and brain. My response to that is “for what purpose?” I have never been a knowledge-for-the-sake-of-knowledge sort of person. As an electronics technician and engineer, physics theory of electron flow, atomic structure, and the chemistry and metallurgy of tubes, semiconductors, and basic components was never useful to me and, so, I blew through that part of my engineering education with no intention of remembering or understanding any of it. A few years ago, I took a college chemistry class, on-line, and found myself blowing off all of those same things until I realized that was the whole damn reason for trying to understand chemistry! Sadly, I did nothing with it and what I learned has vanished into the haze of my stubborn, thick, tired, old brain.
Currently, Downstream Consequences is working on a song that is somewhat difficult to sing, mostly because the lyrical delivery is necessarily a very syncopated rhythm. Geoff Emerick would have dismissed me as a “useless hack,” but he had the same opinion of George Harrison and a similar deluded self-importance toward George Martin. Generally, I sing a verse the way it feels to me at the moment, which is a fault in a professional studio musician. My days as a wannabe musician ended in the late 70s when I started a recording studio and discovered that every guitar player who came into my room was better than I’d ever hope to be. And I quit playing, entirely, until we were stranded in Elephant Butte, New Mexico in 2013-14 while I troubleshot godawful Volkswagen Eurovan electronics. For five months, I had nothing to do but work on the Eurovan, search the internet for advice on working on the Eurovan, hunt for Eurovan parts, beat myself up for buying a Eurovan riding my dirt bike on the sands of Elephant Butte Lake, and play one of the most awful guitars ever foisted on a sucker public. Five months of that and I came home slightly less embarrassed by my marginal musical ability.
But this current musical selection plays to all of my weaknesses: including needing practice. Yeah, I know it’s good for me. Practice and learning new things fends off a collection of aging mental diseases, including laziness. But I still hate practice, exercise, and learning things for the sake of learning things. It’s who I am.
