SMALL BLUE THING
That was the afternoon I started teaching Colin to play the guitar.
It was more or less a dare. "I can't play the guitar," he claimed.
"Sure you can," I argued back, and that led to me teaching him.
I put him with the Takamine, which had low action and was generally easy to play, and sounded good no matter what you did, and I used the Ovation.
"We're going to start real simple," I said. "We're just going to use the top three strings for now, and we're going to start with 'Mary Had a Little Fucking Lamb.'"
He was so earnest, he actually asked, "Is that different from Mary Had a Little Lamb?"
"No, except that you're playing it on a thousand-dollar guitar not a recorder."
"Why start with Mary Had a Little Lamb?"
"Because that's how you do it. Now shut up and do this." I played it starting with the open E string, just the first line.
He copied me. "That isn't anything like what you're doing," he said.
"Yes, it is. You're just slower. Remember what I was like learning to drive a car? At least there's no danger of you going off a bridge."
After fifteen minutes of that, I had him add a chord to the end of the line. I thought it was sounding pretty good. After a half hour he had three chords and could do the whole song.
"I'm still not really playing," he insisted. "I'm just putting my fingers down and sound comes out."
"Here's the secret, Col'," I said. "That's all playing is. You put your fingers where they belong. The more you do it, the better you'll get at it. That's it. It's just a straight shot up the mountainside from here, if you keep walking. You don't just suddenly start to fly. You just get better at walking."
"If you say so," he said, but it didn't sound like he believed me.
I suppose if I watched every night from the wings the kind of magic Ziggy and I were pulling off, maybe I wouldn't have believed me either.