I've spent about 20 hours practicing guitar and singing this week. I've run through most of the songs in our repertoire many times, started writing a couple new ones, and recorded at least one demo worth mixing down and posting here (sadly, it's one of the most depressing songs I've ever written, being about heaps of discarded techno-trash, obsessive- compulsive disorder, and frowny girls -- all in three short lines!). I've practiced playing fast triplets, spent about a zillion hours dinking with the knobs on our amplifiers and my effects (more on the subject of amplifiers in a companion posting to this one), and broken a couple more strings. It's been a pretty good but very draining week.

Once upon a time I was yet another child prodigy (the San Francisco I live in is a place where social status is negotiated by what degree of child prodigy you were). I played piano from the age of 5 to 12, violin from 6 to 12, clarinet from 7 to 15 or so, and saxophone from 13 to 15. Now I play none of them, and therein lies a story.

I started playing piano because my mom had been forced to take piano lessons, and she thought I ought to share her "joy" at having learned to play a musical instrument. Having my mother as a piano teacher was not entirely joyful. My mother is very demanding, and the piano itself is an extremely demanding instrument. I was very scatterbrained and my mother was an impatient teacher. Hilarity ensued (the kind you tell your friends and therapist about years later), but I did learn an awful lot about music at a young age.

Like most children in the twilit, lost era when school arts programs weren't pawns in the endless battles between vindictive bureaucrats and self-righteous taxpayers, I started taking music class when I entered elementary school. A big problem with piano is that it's not really friendly to school music class, and my music teacher, Elizabeth Reeves, was a violinist in a local chamber orchestra, so I ended taking violin lessons from her. Later I ended up joining the youth orchestra attached to Elizabeth's group. Among other things, Elizabeth showed me a Moog for the first time (although we couldn't figure out how to make it work), and was otherwise the sort of person I'd be happy to count as a friend today. I took lessons from her for a couple years, and when I reached the edge of her abilities as a teacher, she handed me off to Dorothy McCormick, the conductor for the youth orchestra and another person with a superheroic ability to put up with my excuses.

More of my childhood than I care to relate is tied up with being a part of that orchestra and going to lessons with Mrs. McCormick. She was patient and very patient with my flakiness -- a trait, I think that set her apart from most music instructors, and which is to be credited with my enduring interest in making music. She claimed that I had a lot of potential, and pushed me as hard as my limited attention span would allow. I could have been better -- a lot better -- but she made a pretty good violinist out of me.

Meanwhile, time rolled on in school, and instead of music class we had band practice. There's not a whole lot of room for piano or violin in band, so it was time for me to pick up an instrument that was more band-friendly. This is how I came to be a clarinetist. Clarinetists are kind of the shortstops of the musical world. They're rarely flashy, and it's easy to be semi-competent and extremely hard to excel. Clarinet suited my temperament well, and I rapidly got to be a good second clarinetist (I don't think I was ever a first *anything* -- even child prodigies have to have to, you know, practice and stuff to get good).

At the same time, I'd started taking piano lessons from a neighbor up the street who had more or less given up on teaching her own children piano and was delighted to have a student who actually cared about playing well (or so I remember -- I may have been a flake, but I loved it when the notes all went right). She had me playing seemingly endless Chopin etudes and a lot of stuff that seemed really hard at the time and would undoubtedly seem impossible now.

So let's recap: I was in fifth grade and playing three instruments. I played second violin in an orchestra. I played second clarinet in band. I took piano lessons. I was middling to good at all three instruments but didn't excel at any. I had to practice all three, and with the possible exception of clarinet, I was at the point where I had to start really working if I was going to get any better. There was a lot of other stuff going on in my life, but the long and the short of it is that I freaked out and ended up bailing on everything except the clarinet -- mostly because it was easiest and I could play it in both band and the orchestra. Looking back, it was an incredibly stupid move -- I mean, come on, clarinet? -- but that's what I decided.

I played clarinet until high school, when I joined what was probably one of the worst high school bands in North America (which also sports Elliott Smith and Mark Hedrick (former drummer of the Dandy Warhols) as alumni). At one point we had nine members. Overall, we were well-suited to play as pep band for my high school's epically bad football team, which won three games the four years I was a student there. Someday I'll explain what a cruel blow this was, after the incredible experience I had with band in middle school, but this story is long enough as it is.

Anyway, the band was probably too small to call itself a band, and we accompanied school musicals, as well as performing as a jazz band. You have to make a lot of noise when your band is that small, so I started playing the tenor saxophone and bass clarinet instead of clarinet. They weren't a whole lot harder than regular clarinet, and saxophone was pretty fun for the few years I played it.

However, by this point, most of my enthusiasm for making music had evaporated. I'd stuck with band in middle school because I had a lot of friends in band with me (of the nerdish, fair-weather variety), and suddenly there was only one person from that group left. We sat outside during Portland's dismal autumn nights and tried to care about playing "Land of 1,000 Dances" to our football team's perpetually dismal performance as part of the pep squad, which increasingly seemed like total bullshit to me -- someone who was pretty far outside of the social orbit that cared about things like team or school spirit. I liked the band teacher, but I wasn't learning a whole lot from her. I stayed with the band for my sophomore year purely out of loyalty to her, even though I wasn't going to give up a regular class period for it, which meant I got up at 6:30 for zero period band practice. I was burnt out on being pissed off at myself for not practicing (sort of like my entire school career in microcosm), and it just wasn't worth it any more. So I told Ms. Gardner that I wouldn't be back the next semester halfway through my sophomore year and concentrated on other things, like being even more miserable over girls.

One more brief coda until I return to the present. When I entered college, in 1991, I had no idea what the hell I was doing (like most students). Music theory was very attractive, especially because my first college was attached to a fairly prestigious regional symphony. The urge to play violin reasserted itself, so I declared a major as a music student, started taking lessons from the conductor's wife, and took a lot of theory classes. It didn't take very long for the old guilts and anxieties to come flooding back, and my stint as a music major lasted for less than a year. Thus ends my history as a musical prodigy.

However, that's not all that was going on. At some point, both of my parents have been guitar players -- my father folk guitar, my mom spanish and classical guitar. So guitars were always around the house. At about the same time that I discovered Love and Rockets, I also decided that I was going to see if I could figure out the guitar (if you can't figure out how to play Love and Rockets songs, there's probably little hope for you). From that point on, I was always noodling around with the guitar at least a little bit, in a completely aimless and haphazard way.

I only realized after my dad tried to set me up with some guitar lessons (and gave me my first electric guitar -- my dad nurtures some weird fantasies involving me becoming a rock star and him becoming my limo driver) that I'd made a decision: I didn't care if I sucked at it, I played guitar for me and myself alone. I wasn't going to practice the guitar, I wasn't going to learn how to read sheet music, I wasn't going to sit in the dark trying to perfect ripped off Slayer riffs for hours and hours. I was going to play me some guitar when I felt like it, and if I eventually figured out how to play some stuff, hey, that's great.

It's taken me fifteen years to get as far with guitar as it took me to get in a year with violin, but when I play the guitar I feel like I'm actually saying something, rather than being a trained monkey. The guitar and the songs I write with it are mine -- when I copy music I hear, I copy feelings and riffs rather than actual songs, and I try to make those things mine. And this time, my work will pay off or it won't, but I'll know that I put everything I have into the effort -- weeks like this one convince me that I'm not nearly as much of a slacker as I used to be, and that I'll eventually justify whatever faith people decide to entrust in me as a musician.

I still own the electric guitar my father gave me, although I curse its shitty, cheap name on a regular basis (hey man, I've fully amortized whatever Dad paid for it about ten times over by now). I have a much nicer guitar that looks a lot like it while sounding about nine kazillion times better. I have a cheap Martin acoustic that I play all the time, when I'm sad, or I need to think, or I just feel like playing the guitar. I'm the lead guitarist in a band that practices twice a week and trembles on the brink of finally being a real band, which would mean that we can play out and maybe get a little famous. In short, I've slowly become an actual guitarist, and that means that I've finally realized that it's time for me to start actually learning how to play.

The upshot of all of this is that it feels a lot different, and a lot better, to be a half-assed, self-trained guitarist than it ever did to be a highly-trained, three-quarter-assed violinist or pianist, even though I owe most of my talent as a guitarist to people like Elizabeth, my mom, and my neighbor Susan, who drummed the basics into me, even as they were writing their own musical agendas over me. And I still have my violin -- who knows what I'll do with it?