On Lessons and Classes

Recently I started taking guitar lessons, a drawing class, and (sometimes) a yoga class. For Christmas, I bought D woodworking lessons in Connecticut. We went there and she made a beautiful and subtly crafted walnut jewelry box.

I've been thinking about lessons. When I was younger, maybe as recently as seven or eight years ago, I had this ill-informed notion that taking lessons was a sign of weakness. The cluster of concepts was vast and sprawling and included such utterly stupid ideas as: "Anybody who ever did anything truly interesting never took lessons" and "Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach."

I have taken guitar lessons a couple of times in my life before now. Once with a great guy called Larry Bader, who taught from an apartment on St. Marks Place in the East Village. He had played backup and studio sessions with, seemingly, EVERYBODY, including (for some reason this is the only one I can remember) Mavis Staples. He had me listening to and learning Freddy King solos, which I was only sort of interested in at the time. More importantly, my very sketchy knowledge of music and what I wanted out of guitar lessons, coupled with my aforementioned weirdness about lessons in general, made learning anything at all from him very difficult. At some point, I think, I just stopped showing up.

In Santa Fe, I was studying with a guy named Tom who taught fingerstyle blues and folk. That was cool. Those lessons changed the way I play guitar. Still, in my shame at ever having been lame enough to have taken lessons in the first place, I think I just disappeared on him, too, at some point.

See, I used to think that lessons must be bad for you because they felt good. Because you felt like you were learning something. Does that make sense? No? It doesn't make a bit of sense to me, either.

Onto the good stuff: I now know that (if the teacher is good and good for you, and it's a subject you're into) Lessons are AWESOME! I also know that it is pure idiocy to think that you cannot learn anything meaningful with another person's help. A good teacher (and there are many of them out there, in many different disciplines) can be absolutely essential, even, probably, if you are a prodigy/wunderkind/complete genius, which I am not:)

FACT: After a wonderful yoga class on Sunday, I felt utterly relaxed, clear and focused for the whole day. The next morning I was a raving lunatic again, but, man, those eight hours were nice...:)

FACT: My guitar playing is getting much more subtle and beautiful under the tutelage of Mr. Jack Baker of the "Fretted Instruments School of Folk Music" (www.frettedinstrumentsnyc.com). He's teaching me old Mississippi John Hurt tunes and other level-appropriate fingerstyle folk/blues songs. The "curriculum" is organized intelligently, so that each new piece steps up the difficulty in a particular way--teaching me new chords, forcing me to make faster hand-position shifts. In short, I'm learning.

Now the skeptics among you might aver that I could have taught myself this same material with old records or sheet music. I mean, isn't that what the greats did? Listen over and over to old records and figure them out? Isn't that the REAL way to learn?

Maybe so. All I know is that I wasn't doing that, couldn't bring myself to do that in any consistent way, and I AM doing this, consistently and with joy. As a matter of fact, I would be much obliged if someone could point out to me the motherfucker who poisoned me with these ideas a couple of decades ago, so that I could a) throttle him , b) ask him what in God's name he could possibly have been thinking or c) both, simultaneously.

Am I the only one out here who grew up thinking like this? Literally not believing in the concept of Learning? Believing that unless you cut a tree down and whittled a guitar out of it, you were not a musician? That unless your dreams were tormented by whirling vortices of words, you were not a writer? Where do these ideas come from?

Art is special. By "Art," I mean writing, music, visual art, theatre, even original thought as expressed in, for example, a shimmeringly brilliant blog post. You must "feel" it, "know" it, if you want to be more than a technician. But a good teacher can guide you in both ways--pushing you technically and helping you to stay connected to that intangible thing that makes it worth doing in the first place.

You can't "teach" art, where "teach" means to give somebody something whole cloth, from the outside in. In this sense, you can't teach much, except for maybe flipping hamburgers (although I'm sure there's a Zen to that, too, if you look for it...). But you absolutely definitely undeniably CAN encourage its development. That's what a great teacher (who also happens to be a right teacher for YOU), can do. She or he can encourage that small, quiet voice that wants to speak out loudly and confidently but is afraid of being laughed at or is just unsure of how, where, and when to go about it.

And may all those who teach people otherwise be devoured by an army of scorpions.