I think I've told this story before, but it's been a while, and like many things, it bears repeating. You can learn solid life lessons just about anywhere, if you're open and aware to the situation and its relevance to you. A big one found its way to me a quarter-century ago in a Guitar Center, of all places.
In the summer of 1994, I took a road trip down-state to visit my dad for his seventieth birthday. He lived out in the Coachella Valley, being a lifelong "desert rat" as he always put it. I hadn't been to SoCal in several years by then, so I decided to hit one of my favorite places -- the Hollywood Guitar Center on Sunset -- before heading out to the moonscaped canyons past San Berdoo.
I had been playing music for over half of my twenty-seven years at that point, and guitar for nearly ten of those years. I had spent the late '80s learning all the hard-rock heroes of the day -- the usual ones like Eddie Van Halen and Randy Rhoads, the classic British guys like Page and Beck and Blackmore, Hendrix of course, and the European proto-shredders like Michael Schenker and Ulrich Roth.
By 1988 or so, hair metal had taken over, and it was not unusual for me to call in sick to work, and spend the entire day with a stack of tab books, blasting through the so-called "neo-classical" players, your Yngwie Malmsteen and Steve Vai types. I knew my scales and arpeggios backward and forward, drilling with speed and precision. I still have several binders full of all the violin partitas and sonatas that I used for practice material.
I got to the point where, in the middle of playing Roadhouse Blues on stage, I would flip the guitar behind my head and do double-tempo runs of Bach's Invention #4, or a couple lines of a Kreutzer etude. My playing was not as broad-based as it should have been, but I had a decent mix of "classic" and "modern" rock playing under my belt, with some classical flavor and modality. I felt like I was pretty damned good.
So anyway, there I am in the Sunset GC, farting around with some Sabbath and Pantera riffs with an Jackson guitar and a 2x12 Crate amp on the main floor, not too loud but starting to get into it, when a couple guys come in. The store was about a third the size it is now, and was in the middle of some renovations and add-ons. There was a small mezzanine section off to one side from the main entrance, about eight or ten steps leading up to the deck.
There were a number of toys on the deck, but the main attraction was this Soldano full stack -- two 4x12" cabinets topped with a 200-watt customized head. I don't recall exactly what they were asking for that setup, but it was several grand. I wasn't going anywhere near that fucking thing and making a fool out of myself, but it was impressive to look at.
These two guys headed straight for it, one of them short, like 5'6" or so, but wearing high-heeled rocker boots and pants and a jacket that, in the middle of the grunge era, made him look a bit out of his time, like maybe six years or so behind schedule. Sorta ridiculous in the flannel-shirt epoch, but he carried it with a confidence that made you wonder if he was with Extreme or White Lion or one of those type bands. But I didn't recognize him, and I knew every signed band you could think of at the time.
So the little guy just walks up the steps in his heels, grabs the Charvel guitar propped next to the stack, turns it on without a second thought, and just starts blazing. Ultra-fast, clean, precise, and loud. And musical, without a doubt. A lot of that stuff came off as "switched-on Bach", but this guy had done his homework. You could hear the ten thousand hours -- at least I could, because by then I had put in those hours as well.
The guy just rips for about eight or ten minutes straight without missing a beat or flubbing a note, stops, sets down the guitar, turns off the amp, heads down the steps, walks out the door. Just like that. Doesn't say a word to anyone, barely looks around. His sidekick didn't do much of anything the whole time but stand and watch.
At the time, I figured that someone that talented must be with a band. And I'm sure he was. I bet if I had hit the Whiskey or the Rainbow that night or the next, they probably would have been there, working on their Racer X retreads or whatever. But I never saw this guy in any band, before or since. Probably a student at GIT (Musicians Institute), which was just a few blocks away.
Now, that kind of music really is geared not just toward musicians in general, and not just toward guitar players in particular, but toward a very specific niche of guitarist. It takes a ton of carefully applied work to get those patterns down to high-speed muscle memory. You're running all this stuff with a metronome, logging your speeds, and then working it to the next "level" on the metronome; at lower tempos you might be able to jump up six or eight beats per minute per week or two, but at higher tempos it's more like four to six or even just two to four bpm increments per month.
And just like with athletes, it is very much a "diminishing returns" scenario -- it probably took me as much time to get from 180-200 bpm as it did to get from 100-180 bpm, which was a couple years in each case. It takes real work and dedication. You can't half-ass it. You may even have to tear down and rebuild significant parts of your technique in order to obtain the efficiencies of motion necessary to just move your hands that quickly and precisely. You really have to love the process.
And yet -- there I was, sitting there in that room on that day, with untold thousands of hours of practice and probably eight hundred or so live performances under my belt, learning a very important lesson in about ten minutes, something that any person in any walk of life should know and keep close to their heart at all times:
There is always someone better than you. Whatever it is you're good at, there's someone out there who is better at it than you are, than you'll ever be.
That's not necessarily a bad thing, mind you. It's healthy, even freeing. I mean, music is about being musical, not about playing with perfect calisthenic precision and stamina at impossible speeds. I've seen some of those "speed contests" on YouTube before, and they give me a headache. There's nothing remotely musical about any of it. It's just a mechanical trick and some calisthenic conditioning. So being "better" is obviously and incredibly subjective ideal in any creative area.
I took it as a reminder to focus more on making music that would connect with people, and less on pursuing this unreachable athletic ideal that would only appeal to other guitarists in the first place. But as I began broadening my horizons and cultivating other skills, it was a valuable lesson to keep in my back pocket at all times, to listen and observe other people who could do those things well, and learn from them.
There was another lesson learned as well, but it was a few years later, when I realized that I had no clue who this very talented person was, and probably never would:
Sometimes you can be great at something, phenomenal even, and it doesn't get recognized like it should, because no one ever knows about it.
Maybe you don't have the people skills to go with that technical or creative skill (I have seen this multiple times with creative types; woodshedding is an intensely personal experience, and can make you a bit of a loner). Maybe you just have bad luck. Or maybe you just don't have good luck, which is a different thing.
And that's okay too, when you love the work for itself, because it doesn't really feel like work. You would do it for free, and lo and behold, you are. That may not seem "fair" when you see lazy halfwits derp their way into fortune and fame, but whoever said anything in life was fair?
We reassure ourselves that virtue is its own reward, that the harder you work, the luckier you get. But that's not always true; in fact, it's impossible to quantify or even estimate just how often it isn't true. Lots of people practice and hone a skill, turn a buck at it for a while or pursue it as a hobby, and die.
The NFL is a great example for this sort of thing. I frequently think about two of the most talented players during the 1980s, when I was coming of age and really starting to appreciate the game: Barry Sanders and Dan Marino.
Obviously, Sanders is easily one of the most talented people to ever pick up a football and run with it. He routinely did things only a handful of others could. Do yourself a favor and watch a couple of his classic runs on YouTube, they never get old. Amazing, almost superhuman at times. And yet he never even got close to a championship game.
Marino had more success, getting to the Super Bowl in his sophomore year and losing to the Bill Walsh juggernaut. But that was it for him. He spent the next fifteen years chasing that dragon, finally going down in the 1999 divisional playoffs to the "expansion" Jaguars in a humiliating 62-7 blowout. Never won the big game, nor did Tim Brown or Randy Moss or countless other superbly conditioned athletes who worked impossibly hard with a singular goal in mind.
You might say that at least they made it to the big game, even if they didn't win it, and you'd be right. But that's not what they worked so hard for. I don't personally know any NFL players, much less any who played in the Super Bowl, but I feel pretty confident in speculating that if you were to ask them, every single one of them would tell you that it's not remotely the same. As the prophet Ricky Bobby sagely advised, if you're not first, you're last.
Sometimes hard work is just hard work, and sometimes lazy, stupid, vile individuals get to cut to the front of the line. Not even "born on third base, think they hit a triple," more like shat out on the floor in a stadium bathroom, and insist they hit a grand slam, and insist that everyone around them repeat that as gospel truth. And they never receive justice, or karma, or any of the other narrative tropes we have been conditioned to believe are inevitable stations on the story arc.
Assholes and thieves and killers get away with it all the fucking time. Fact. Justice only occurs when it is the goal of a sequence of deliberate actions by a sufficient number of people with the right ability, skill, communication, and luck. Any one of those elements is not present, it doesn't happen. For every Bill Cosby or Harvey Weinstein, there's a Roger Ailes or Les Moonves or Brett Ratner, or many of them. And so on. Life isn't fair, nor has it ever pretended to be.
Depending on one's perspective on life, that can be profoundly depressing, or it can free you from preconceptions and assumptions and bullshit "obligations" that we saddle ourselves with unnecessarily. If we stop trying to assume whom "everyone else" "thinks" can "win" -- and really question our assumptions about what all those terms even mean -- a different candidate emerges and gains traction. If we each make our personal decisions about what we expect out of our short time on the planet, and not what "everyone else" expects from us, a different path reveals itself. It may be narrower and rockier, but the view is much better.
Hang in there. Don't despair, prepare. Whatever it is, vent, grieve, and then get back at it. Never give up, never give in. It does get better, but only when people stop second-guessing themselves, or waiting around for "someone else" to do "something," and simply start taking action and doing what they know to be right.
In the summer of 1994, I took a road trip down-state to visit my dad for his seventieth birthday. He lived out in the Coachella Valley, being a lifelong "desert rat" as he always put it. I hadn't been to SoCal in several years by then, so I decided to hit one of my favorite places -- the Hollywood Guitar Center on Sunset -- before heading out to the moonscaped canyons past San Berdoo.
I had been playing music for over half of my twenty-seven years at that point, and guitar for nearly ten of those years. I had spent the late '80s learning all the hard-rock heroes of the day -- the usual ones like Eddie Van Halen and Randy Rhoads, the classic British guys like Page and Beck and Blackmore, Hendrix of course, and the European proto-shredders like Michael Schenker and Ulrich Roth.
By 1988 or so, hair metal had taken over, and it was not unusual for me to call in sick to work, and spend the entire day with a stack of tab books, blasting through the so-called "neo-classical" players, your Yngwie Malmsteen and Steve Vai types. I knew my scales and arpeggios backward and forward, drilling with speed and precision. I still have several binders full of all the violin partitas and sonatas that I used for practice material.
I got to the point where, in the middle of playing Roadhouse Blues on stage, I would flip the guitar behind my head and do double-tempo runs of Bach's Invention #4, or a couple lines of a Kreutzer etude. My playing was not as broad-based as it should have been, but I had a decent mix of "classic" and "modern" rock playing under my belt, with some classical flavor and modality. I felt like I was pretty damned good.
So anyway, there I am in the Sunset GC, farting around with some Sabbath and Pantera riffs with an Jackson guitar and a 2x12 Crate amp on the main floor, not too loud but starting to get into it, when a couple guys come in. The store was about a third the size it is now, and was in the middle of some renovations and add-ons. There was a small mezzanine section off to one side from the main entrance, about eight or ten steps leading up to the deck.
There were a number of toys on the deck, but the main attraction was this Soldano full stack -- two 4x12" cabinets topped with a 200-watt customized head. I don't recall exactly what they were asking for that setup, but it was several grand. I wasn't going anywhere near that fucking thing and making a fool out of myself, but it was impressive to look at.
These two guys headed straight for it, one of them short, like 5'6" or so, but wearing high-heeled rocker boots and pants and a jacket that, in the middle of the grunge era, made him look a bit out of his time, like maybe six years or so behind schedule. Sorta ridiculous in the flannel-shirt epoch, but he carried it with a confidence that made you wonder if he was with Extreme or White Lion or one of those type bands. But I didn't recognize him, and I knew every signed band you could think of at the time.
So the little guy just walks up the steps in his heels, grabs the Charvel guitar propped next to the stack, turns it on without a second thought, and just starts blazing. Ultra-fast, clean, precise, and loud. And musical, without a doubt. A lot of that stuff came off as "switched-on Bach", but this guy had done his homework. You could hear the ten thousand hours -- at least I could, because by then I had put in those hours as well.
The guy just rips for about eight or ten minutes straight without missing a beat or flubbing a note, stops, sets down the guitar, turns off the amp, heads down the steps, walks out the door. Just like that. Doesn't say a word to anyone, barely looks around. His sidekick didn't do much of anything the whole time but stand and watch.
At the time, I figured that someone that talented must be with a band. And I'm sure he was. I bet if I had hit the Whiskey or the Rainbow that night or the next, they probably would have been there, working on their Racer X retreads or whatever. But I never saw this guy in any band, before or since. Probably a student at GIT (Musicians Institute), which was just a few blocks away.
Now, that kind of music really is geared not just toward musicians in general, and not just toward guitar players in particular, but toward a very specific niche of guitarist. It takes a ton of carefully applied work to get those patterns down to high-speed muscle memory. You're running all this stuff with a metronome, logging your speeds, and then working it to the next "level" on the metronome; at lower tempos you might be able to jump up six or eight beats per minute per week or two, but at higher tempos it's more like four to six or even just two to four bpm increments per month.
And just like with athletes, it is very much a "diminishing returns" scenario -- it probably took me as much time to get from 180-200 bpm as it did to get from 100-180 bpm, which was a couple years in each case. It takes real work and dedication. You can't half-ass it. You may even have to tear down and rebuild significant parts of your technique in order to obtain the efficiencies of motion necessary to just move your hands that quickly and precisely. You really have to love the process.
And yet -- there I was, sitting there in that room on that day, with untold thousands of hours of practice and probably eight hundred or so live performances under my belt, learning a very important lesson in about ten minutes, something that any person in any walk of life should know and keep close to their heart at all times:
There is always someone better than you. Whatever it is you're good at, there's someone out there who is better at it than you are, than you'll ever be.
That's not necessarily a bad thing, mind you. It's healthy, even freeing. I mean, music is about being musical, not about playing with perfect calisthenic precision and stamina at impossible speeds. I've seen some of those "speed contests" on YouTube before, and they give me a headache. There's nothing remotely musical about any of it. It's just a mechanical trick and some calisthenic conditioning. So being "better" is obviously and incredibly subjective ideal in any creative area.
I took it as a reminder to focus more on making music that would connect with people, and less on pursuing this unreachable athletic ideal that would only appeal to other guitarists in the first place. But as I began broadening my horizons and cultivating other skills, it was a valuable lesson to keep in my back pocket at all times, to listen and observe other people who could do those things well, and learn from them.
There was another lesson learned as well, but it was a few years later, when I realized that I had no clue who this very talented person was, and probably never would:
Sometimes you can be great at something, phenomenal even, and it doesn't get recognized like it should, because no one ever knows about it.
Maybe you don't have the people skills to go with that technical or creative skill (I have seen this multiple times with creative types; woodshedding is an intensely personal experience, and can make you a bit of a loner). Maybe you just have bad luck. Or maybe you just don't have good luck, which is a different thing.
And that's okay too, when you love the work for itself, because it doesn't really feel like work. You would do it for free, and lo and behold, you are. That may not seem "fair" when you see lazy halfwits derp their way into fortune and fame, but whoever said anything in life was fair?
We reassure ourselves that virtue is its own reward, that the harder you work, the luckier you get. But that's not always true; in fact, it's impossible to quantify or even estimate just how often it isn't true. Lots of people practice and hone a skill, turn a buck at it for a while or pursue it as a hobby, and die.
The NFL is a great example for this sort of thing. I frequently think about two of the most talented players during the 1980s, when I was coming of age and really starting to appreciate the game: Barry Sanders and Dan Marino.
Obviously, Sanders is easily one of the most talented people to ever pick up a football and run with it. He routinely did things only a handful of others could. Do yourself a favor and watch a couple of his classic runs on YouTube, they never get old. Amazing, almost superhuman at times. And yet he never even got close to a championship game.
Marino had more success, getting to the Super Bowl in his sophomore year and losing to the Bill Walsh juggernaut. But that was it for him. He spent the next fifteen years chasing that dragon, finally going down in the 1999 divisional playoffs to the "expansion" Jaguars in a humiliating 62-7 blowout. Never won the big game, nor did Tim Brown or Randy Moss or countless other superbly conditioned athletes who worked impossibly hard with a singular goal in mind.
You might say that at least they made it to the big game, even if they didn't win it, and you'd be right. But that's not what they worked so hard for. I don't personally know any NFL players, much less any who played in the Super Bowl, but I feel pretty confident in speculating that if you were to ask them, every single one of them would tell you that it's not remotely the same. As the prophet Ricky Bobby sagely advised, if you're not first, you're last.
Sometimes hard work is just hard work, and sometimes lazy, stupid, vile individuals get to cut to the front of the line. Not even "born on third base, think they hit a triple," more like shat out on the floor in a stadium bathroom, and insist they hit a grand slam, and insist that everyone around them repeat that as gospel truth. And they never receive justice, or karma, or any of the other narrative tropes we have been conditioned to believe are inevitable stations on the story arc.
Assholes and thieves and killers get away with it all the fucking time. Fact. Justice only occurs when it is the goal of a sequence of deliberate actions by a sufficient number of people with the right ability, skill, communication, and luck. Any one of those elements is not present, it doesn't happen. For every Bill Cosby or Harvey Weinstein, there's a Roger Ailes or Les Moonves or Brett Ratner, or many of them. And so on. Life isn't fair, nor has it ever pretended to be.
Depending on one's perspective on life, that can be profoundly depressing, or it can free you from preconceptions and assumptions and bullshit "obligations" that we saddle ourselves with unnecessarily. If we stop trying to assume whom "everyone else" "thinks" can "win" -- and really question our assumptions about what all those terms even mean -- a different candidate emerges and gains traction. If we each make our personal decisions about what we expect out of our short time on the planet, and not what "everyone else" expects from us, a different path reveals itself. It may be narrower and rockier, but the view is much better.
Hang in there. Don't despair, prepare. Whatever it is, vent, grieve, and then get back at it. Never give up, never give in. It does get better, but only when people stop second-guessing themselves, or waiting around for "someone else" to do "something," and simply start taking action and doing what they know to be right.
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