Eccentric Flower:201012/Now He Only Eats Guitars

I startled my wife at a Richard Thompson concert a few weeks back by explaining that, no, I could not tell what brand of guitar Thompson was playing in any particular song (he routinely switches between two or three in a given performance) just from the shape of the guitar, and that furthermore, I expected that most people would not be able to and that this was her indulging in one of my own common misconceptions, the "I know this so I don't think this is specialized knowledge" fallacy.

I still would not be able to point out the minute differences in body and head shape that were obvious to her. To me, unless a guitar is obviously of a deliberately weird shape, it comes in three basic shapes and three only: 1) acoustic guitar shape 2) rounded, soft-cornered Buddy Holly style electric guitar shape 3) sharper-angled, somewhat pointy Eddie van Halen electric guitar shape.

And since I do not play the guitar and never will (alas), that's really as far as I need to take the matter. It would be nice to be able to appreciate the subtle tonal differences between different styles of electric guitar (my wife can tell you from listening for a while what kind of pickups the guitar is using; then again, my wife can also taste a dish analytically and identify every single herb or spice in it, one by one) - but I have come to accept that this is a sort of specialized sensory ability I will never have.

I can hear the difference between a normal acoustic guitar and a resonator guitar or a dobro, though, and I bet you could too if you knew you were being asked to make a comparison. Resonator guitars ("Dobro" was originally a brand name for a kind of single-cone resonator guitar, but is now often used as a generic for single-cone resonators or resonators in general) essentially come with their own, built-in, no-electricity-required amplifier - working on the same principle as cupping your hands around your mouth to make your shout travel further. They were designed to prevent the sound of the guitar from getting lost in bigger bands/combos, and boy do they work.

I love their slightly metallic sound. If there were ever going to be a guitar that would tempt me to endure the frustration that learning guitar would entail*, it would be a National all-nickel-plated body resonator guitar.** If I bought one of those, and ever I got tired of just staring at it in sheer fascinated contemplation, that might actually be sufficient inducement to get me to try to learn it - just so I could say, "Yes, that beautiful shiny thing is mine and I can play it." Fortunately, they are expensive enough that I am able to resist this temptation.

* Believe me, I've tried, and it just doesn't make sense to me, so I know what sort of hours of anguish would be involved, and please don't comment to tell me how easy it is, because I've been there and you are all liars. I actually had a guitar player tell me once he didn't understand the piano. To me this is like someone who paints landscapes in oils telling me he has never been able to master finger-painting. There is no trick to a piano. All the notes are right there. Granted that playing a piano well is something that only comes with practice, and granted that reading sheet music fast enough to be useful is even harder to learn, the point is that I can sit you at a piano and leave you there for three minutes and when I come back you will know how to play a scale, and you will not need any particular digital dexterity to do so. This is not the case with a guitar.

** Sure, you've seen one. Haven't you ever seen the cover of "Brothers in Arms"? What, you don't like the only thoroughly good album Dire Straits ever made? I know none of you are too young to know about music with cover art.

Anyway, so, today I went out for a long walk, because I needed a long walk, and my walk took me into the general vicinity of the Museum of Fine Arts. A few weeks back I bought a membership to the MFA because I was down there and I wanted to see the new wing and it wasn't open to the general public yet, and I wanted to see it that day, and the cute young art-nerd girl with the iPad talked me into buying a membership. So now, for a year, I can go into the MFA anytime I want and so I decided to go in and take pictures of two guitars which I had decided on the previous visit that I wanted pictures of. (The MFA accepts picture-taking for personal, non-commercial use as long as you're not a pest about it and don't use a flash.)

(I also found out that it was the last day of a "members get 20% off all purchases" sale so I ended up doing some impromptu holiday shopping. But that is neither here nor there.)

One of the few great tribulations of using MediaWiki as the basis for this journal is that it simply will not allow you to embed images into the page body unless they are local to the wiki - that is, if I have uploaded them to this site. I keep images in Flickr so that I won't have to maintain my own archive of images on this site except as needed. So in this case (and in so many others like it), I have a choice between uploading the images into two separate places (wasteful), or putting them here and not on Flickr (undesirable for archival purposes), or providing a link to the Flickr page in lieu of embedding (which is not as much fun and which you won't follow).

Well, as an inducement to get you to follow the links, the rest of the text about these photos and about the guitars I photographed is actually in the Flickr descriptions for those pictures. So if you follow the links, you get a little more journal entry; if not, we're done here now.

National tricone resonator guitar

Valco "New Yorker" lap steel guitar

Closeup of neck markings on "New Yorker" lap steel

Aren't they pretty?

The title of this entry is a tribute, if that is the word, to the deeply disturbing discovery I made in a coffee shop the other day that I could recite the whole spoken portion of Blondie's "Rapture" from memory. If they ever clean out my attic, oh god, what they will find ....