If you do something out of the ordinary like build birdhouses or run marathons or play the guitar, people always ask how you got started. I play the guitar, and I can actually remember what happened to make me want to play. I had seen guitars and guitar players so I was interested in the intstrument, but what finally clinched it for me was going to see a live folk music group. They played in the gymnasium of my school. The school housed kindergarten through eighth grade in one building. It was 1963 and I was ten years old. I went to the gym on a Saturday night to see this group and I leaned on the front of the stage all night. At one point the guitar player who was strumming a big bodied acoustic guitar dropped his pick and I leaned forward and picked it up from the stage and reached up to hand it back to him. He gestured and made a facial expression that said ‘don’t worry about it, you keep it’. He kept playing and I kept the pick. Eventually I lost it but for a while I remember carrying it around with me and taking care of it. It became a magical thing for me, something that a real musician had touched and used and somehow it lit a fire in me that made me feel more connected to music. And that’s when I crossed the line and decided for good to become a guitar player. My first guitar, which I had for a few years, was a piece of crap and hard to play but I practiced at least an hour every day and sometimes as much as three hours a day and I did that for years.
A killer live experimental rock LP from Chris Forsyth with the rhythm section of Sunwatchers, full of blistering energy. Bandcamp New & Notable Mar 30, 2021