My Very First Guitar
It’s my cousin Rowena’s fault.
Issue #62 American Culture June 6, 2022
This being Black Music Appreciation Month got me to thinking about my musical hero and inspiration Jimi Hendrix, which got me to thinking about my first guitar, which got me to thinking about my relationship to Black music, and what exactly is Black music anyway?
Season 1 Episode 11 of the We Are Speaking podcast.
As I said, it’s all Rowena’s fault. As I may have mentioned in an earlier post about how I came to be a Hendrix fan, Rowena came to stay with us for about two weeks as I recall. I was 12 years old. It’s been a while – as in more than 50 years a while. But I do know she came to visit and we had a great time.
Rowena’s mother, my Aunt Jean, was my mother’s much younger sister. They all lived out in Los Angeles, as did the rest of the family on my mother’s side.
Rowena introduced me to Jimi Hendrix when she bought the Smash Hits album during her stay and played it for me on my portable black record player in my bedroom. I was already a huge fan of rock music, probably because nearly all my friends were white because most of the kids at my school were white.
But that’s OK because I feel no need to apologize for my love of rock, which persists to this day. The first album I ever bought was In A Gadda Da Vida by Iron Butterfly. In addition to them, I grew up on Grand Funk Railroad, Led Zeppelin, Humble Pie, Deep Purple, and others.
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But when Rowena introduced me to Hendrix, my entire world changed. Now I knew there were others out there with the same skin color as me who not only loved rock music but were damned good at it. My love for Hendrix is what led me to beg my parents for my first guitar, a nylon-string acoustic.
No way could I get anything approaching Jimi’s psychedelic wails and screams out of a nylon acoustic, but at least I could paint the carrying case with multi-colored psychedelic scrawlings and imagery to let the world know that one day I, too, would wave my freak flag high. So that’s what I did.
Then came the day, after weeks and months of tortured practicing (?), buying chord books, and doing everything I could to teach myself how to play, I formed a small band with a friend of mine, Tad Carson. Just me and Tad.
Tad played drums, and he lived about a half-mile away. We named our band Toxic Flower, and as often as our parents would allow it, I would make the trek over to his house, guitar case in hand, to hold our band rehearsals.
As I said, it was useless trying to make a nylon string acoustic groan and moan, unless…
So I had this idea. What if I used my battery-operated tape recorder, which had a microphone attachment, as a sort of amplifier? Emphasis on the two words ‘sort of’. Tad and I figured why not give this a shot, right? If it worked, we would be one step closer to our goal of becoming young rock gods.
So one day, as Tad watched from the safety of his stool behind his drum kit, I dropped the tape recorder mic into the sound hole of my humble acoustic guitar, then turned on the recorder as loud as it would go.
I kinda don’t think that Tad’s family would characterize the monstrous could-this-really-be-a-nylon-string-guitar sounds that exploded out of that tiny recorder as success, but we sure did. We may have even done a quick, senseless dance around the basement, whooping it up.
Now, this was rock and roll, baby. Soon after that we wrote our first song and called it The Toxic. I have no memory of how it sounded, except that it was loud and extremely distorted – just the way we liked it.
So the band didn’t last long, although our friendship did. A few years later, I once again begged the folks for my first electric guitar. My mother didn’t make it easy, but I begged like the pro that I was, and even offered to sell her my coin collection, which was pretty impressive.
Mom, a classically-trained pianist who once had dreams of being a concert performer, eventually gave in because she saw how serious I was. My first electric guitar was a wine-red Sears Silvertone that I oftentimes had to retreat to the garage for ‘practicing’ when I really wanted to crank it up.
Like the time I cranked it up and decided I wanted to try and play the guitar with my teeth as Jimi Hendrix did. The last thing I saw was a big blue flash after my teeth scraped the chrome pickup and the next thing I knew, I was seated on my ass up against the car and wondering how…?
There are dues to be paid if one truly wants to be a Rock God.
So fast forward to present days and times and I have been performing professionally off and on for close to 30 years. Mostly blues (performed with Luther Keith at the Windsor Blues Festival and also at the International Blues Competition in Memphis Tennessee in 2005), but also some jazz (I performed with my longtime brother and friend Salim Washington at the 2010 Detroit Jazz Festival on the Pyramid Stage).
Formed my own blues band, Blue Spirit Tribe, right here in Detroit about a year after I arrived in 1993, which I like to think is quite a feat given the extraordinary quality of musicians in this city. We weren’t the best (if there was such a title) but we were damned good and we earned our respect.
Years later I formed another band, Freedom Underground, where we played our own brand of fusion funk and even put out an album, Between the Funk.
So where do I go from here? Guess we’ll see. But let me return to the celebration of Black Music Appreciation Month just to close this out, because if it wasn’t for Black music my entire life would have been…hell, I don’t even know.
Because even the music I thought was white rock and roll when I was a kid was rooted in Black music. Matter of fact, most modern popular music is rooted in Black music. Black music in so many ways has not simply transformed American culture it has defined American culture.
What would American culture even be without Black music and arts? What would America be without Black people? What would America be without Africa?
Yeah. Think about that for a minute…
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