Blues Album

Egads! I have a blues album on my hands!

In the continuing saga – or soap opera – that is the life of a hopper, I appear to have discovered a knack for blues playing. I’ve written extensively about my musical past (just go to the January archives over there on the left and click on any post that says “Subtle Hint” if you’re that bored). But I haven’t played in a band since 1996, haven’t jammed with another dude since 2002, and haven’t played an electric guitar since 2004, when my Les Paul was stolen. There followed a two-year non-performing-or-playing interlude where my musical style and ability rusted, neglected.

In 2006 my stepdad, quite out of the blue, bought me a six-string acoustic guitar. In no time those finger-tip callouses were thick and growing. I bought a classical songbook with accompanying CD to learn all those Spanish 16th- and 17th century ditties, but made little progress, having six-thousand-five-hundred-and-ninety-some-odd other things I wanted to do. So the guitar stays propped in the corner of my dining room. And I play it, anywhere from a minute or two or ten, every time I walk by, which happens to be about twenty or thirty times a day.

Now I have enough material for a blues album.

I don’t know where it comes from. I didn’t plan it, and I certainly don’t listen to it. 12-bar blues with seventh and ninth chords are a far cry from Miklos Rosza and Maurice Ravel, my two most-played CDs-du-jour. For some reason, though, whenever I pick up that guitar I’m suddenly like Robert Johnson reincarnated.

What to do, what to do.

I used to have a four-track Tascam mini-recording studio thingie, which I kept set-up in a corner of my bachelor pad. Whenever the spirit moved me and I came up with a cool riff, I’d record it for posterity. There’s a sealed plastic tub of just under a hundred cassette tapes in my basement which I haven’t listened to in years.

But the Tascam has long been consigned to the dustbin of history. I lost track of all my old bandmates. I know nobody who plays nowadays. This acoustic blues album, it seems, is fated to perish once I do, hopefully in seventy or eighty years.

Seventy or eighty years is a long time, by human standards. Surely I could get something up and running by then. But no, after thinking about it for a while, I realize I don’t have the energy or enthusiasm. My little plunkings on those metal strings are a nice little stress reliever, a nice little way to get those endorphins flowing. The Grammies will have to wait.

In the meantime, I think I’ll just jot all my blues tunes down in tab notation, in case Eric Clapton wants to give me a ring …