I had been hoping to visit the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame while I was in Cleveland. I had even made a point to schedule a little extra time into my travel plans, to make it easier to fit that visit around the conference agenda for Crossroads. So I didn’t necessarily need the extra prompting from John and Adam to go out and spend time in those sorts of venues – but they gave me a more focused sense of purpose in their suggestion we pay attention to the ways the space afforded opportunities for learning.
When we first entered the main exhibit hall, on the lower level, I struggled a bit to stay among the group with which I had arrived. Everyone seemed to diffuse in different directions because, while the layout provided some structure, it didn’t really direct visitors through a particular path. At times it felt like I had entered the buffet line from the wrong side, because everyone else seemed to be headed the opposite direction I was. But when I turned to try to follow the flow of traffic, I found I was once again swimming against the same tide. So I eventually gave up trying to go with the flow and just wandered toward whatever caught my eye. I began to suspect this was designed into the museum on purpose. It seemed to parallel the history of musical influences the exhibits depicted: there isn’t really a clear linear flow of musical influence over time. Different artists drew inspiration from different forerunners at different times. It was interesting and all…
…but here’s the thing: as much as I was trying to be mindful of how the space afforded learning opportunities, what I found myself continually drawn to, was guitars. There were hundreds. The collections included lots of other things too – handwritten lyrics, photos, Tre Cool’s burned-out drum kit… but… there were just so many cool guitars! Bo Diddley’s perfunctory, rectangular slab of wood, Les Paul’s aptly named “Clunker,” Muddy Water’s tattered and worn Tele, Elmore James’ hollow-body… They were worn and scarred like the brand-new instruments in music stores are not. They had corroded strings and pickup covers. Their finish was faded, cloudy, or altogether missing. Some were surprisingly plain – others ridiculously embellished…
It.
Was.
Awesome!!!
Kurt Cobain was left-handed. Perhaps that is common knowledge, but amid so many other guitars, it was striking how backward his appeared with the tuning pegs on the other side of the headstock and the pattern of the fretboard cutouts reversed.
Jeff Beck’s heavily worn Telecaster is in the collection. It seems like he left that guitarist behind, with the guitar, as he moved on from The Yardbirds. Over time his tone thickened – never to the extent of Jimi or Stevie – but the recent videos I have seen of him feature Stratocasters.
Something was amiss with Stevie Ray Vaughn’s cream-colored Strat. I had read somewhere that he used bass-guitar strings to achieve his trademark tone and I wanted to see how thick they really were. But his guitar had standard-gauge strings on it. Had new strings been put on the guitar (by someone who didn’t know about Stevie’s tone) when it was added to the collection? They bore the corrosion of used strings, covered in oils from someone’s fingers. Had the rumors I had heard about Stevie’s strings been wrong? Or intentionally misleading…?
I thought ‘I’ll get back to attending to John and Adam’s thing (the space), after I spend some time attending to my thing (guitars).’ But at some point, it occurred to me that the guitars WERE a learning opportunity afforded by the space – for me. With so many instruments in one space, they began to embody so much about the musicians who played them and the music they had produced.
I have lost track of how many articles I have read, over the years, featuring particular guitarists – but they all inevitably have included some discussion of that artist’s “tone.” Early-on, I had little idea what that meant (and I still am not entirely sure I know what Eddie meant when he talked about a “brown sound” or “jape”). But the more I played, the more music stores I visited to noodle on different instruments, and the more I tried to imitate other guitarists, the more I started to appreciate different nuances in the ways the same notes sounded different when played by different people – different fingers. I came to recognize the difference between the sound of single coil pickup versus a humbucker, solid versus semi-hollow versus acoustic bodies, neck versus bridge pickups, and so forth. The physics behind these differences are fairly straightforward: frequencies, resonance, absorption, and all that. But here were all those ideas, embodied in wood and steel. And it was all in one place – with all the marks of the sounds I had previously only known in the abstract.