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Paul Sanchez

Jun 12, 08 - 8:02 AM

guitar lesson and life's blessins'

I usually say I'm self taught on guitar. it isn't quite true.
One of my older brothers, Andrew, was a good guitarist when he was young and he gave me a few lessons but I was always racing past the lesson trying to get to the song.
I was fourteen when he taught me. My mom paid for the guitar at Campo's on Broad Street, they put her on a payment plan. Mom didn't have the money for something like that but my sister's boyfriend, Dan, who had a good job at WWLTV selling advertising, co-signed for my mother so I could get the guitar. When I got a bit better on the guitar, Dan, who was to become my brother-in-law and still is, also taught me to play my first rock n' roll songs. Buddy Holly songs, showing me how to hic-cup like Buddy did when he sang. Elvis songs and how to moan like Elvis, taught me how to sing harmony with the Everly Brothers songs. This wasn't lessons, at least he never made it feel like that, this was just two guys hanging out strumming. Well, really it was one guy hanging out waiting for his date to finish getting ready and teaching me guitar was safer then trying to talk to my mother by a mile.
Banged on the guitar through high school, honorable mention should go to my cousins, the Burkes, who I lived with in my sophomore year of high school. I was learning to play and sing my first song, Proud Mary, it took me the whole first semester to get it done and it must have seemed like a whole year to them but they never complained. They were a family of athletes, the oldest sister became a nun, their father was a politician, their mother a tireless fund raiser for the Catholic Church. They weren't annoyed, though they had every right to be because I was quite terrible for the first week or two, they weren't annoyed because they each in their own way for their own ends, understood discipline and practicing the guitar may have been the first sign of discipline that anyone in my family had ever seen in me.
Never got any girls with the guitar but my friends liked for me to play because girls would come around and while I was caught up in singing, my friends would make new friends and when I'd open my eyes at the end of the song my audience would have vanished to a nearby car or empty field.
I took guitar briefly in college in an ill-fated attempt to be a serious musician.
Jimmy Robinson was my instructor first semester. Jimmy is a founding member of the legendary New Orleans fusion rock band Woodenhead, he also plays in one of the most mind blowing collection of guitar talents in town called Twangorama. He is also one of the kindest musicians I've ever worked with which surely explains the only passing grade I was to receive in classical guitar.
Now 28 years later I'm taking lessons again.
I'd come to accept long ago that I had limitations on guitar and that I was more of a songwriter. I have said that many times over the years to friends fans and musicians that I hire, " I write the songs and get real players to play them". Usually got a big laugh and everybody is generally cool with letting you run your own session even if it involves you not playing on your own songs.
I used this line with Alex McMurray recently when he asked if I wanted a solo on any of the songs in the set. Alex isn't from New Orleans, he's from New Jersey. In New Orleans we embellish or out right sling bull **** for fun and your friends "go yeah baby 'dat's right".
As I say, Alex is from Jersey and he didn't laugh, he smiled with his head tilted, a little confused by the thought and finally said,"yeah, that's one way of doing it I suppose".
I'd been wanting to take lessons from John Rankin for years and this time I was determined to seek him out. Naturally I didn't, insecurities about my playing and my ability to learn to play better,(careful of the bull**** you fling, some may stick with you), kept me from doing so as they had many times through the years with the Mouth when I would have had time and money to do so.
As it turns out John heard me speak about song writing at the Tennessee Williams Festival and he came to me, we struck a bargain. I'm taking guitar lessons and we are writing songs together. I think I'm getting the better part of the deal because John is already a fine song writer while I've built a career based on my limitations as a guitar player. We call it playing primitive in rock bands.
It's fun for me to work on his songs because he is mostly asking for the words to be shaped a bit which I dig doing. It's also fun because what he considers, "a pretty standard blues song", has little turns of chord and notes that are new to me as a player but completely familiar as a singer/song writer/listener so it's making connections in my head.
The lessons themselves are my favorite part. this is surprising because I only took John up on his invitation to come by because I like writing songs. I figured he'd see pretty soon that the lessons weren't going to help.
John Rankin is a great teacher and I hadn't counted on this. He focused on my strengths. We talked about songs and song writing. My love of melody as well as lyric. Then he showed me a few simple things about how to build around a melody, not to over complicate things with theory and let your voice, which knows how to sing, tell your fingers what to play without letting to much thought clutter up your expression.
He told me this over several weeks and lessons, all in the simplest of terms which still left me dazed and confused.
However, each week as I would practice, the light bulbs started going off and I am making more and more connections to what I'm learning and what I already know. Instead of being intimidated by the thought of soloing, I'm looking forward to it. I'm very grateful to John for my ongoing lessons and a growing friendship.
I'm also looking forward to surprising Shamarr Allen in the not too distant future and whipping out a guitar solo on Meet Me On Frenchmen Street, ya'll don't tell him, I want to sneak up on him.
red beans and ricely yours,
Sanchmo

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