ToBe Fare

When man first walked on the moon, I was walking into a guitar lesson. Luckily, Neil Armstrong was far better at being an astronaut than I was at playing a six-string guitar.

It was my second shot at guitaring, having my first go-ahead in second grade. That series of lessons ended when the aged gentleman who ran the music studio made an abrupt decision to retire. My second effort finished when my instructor marched off to Vietnam. As far as I know, there is no truth to the rumor that he made his enlistment decision while showing me how to contort my fingers into an F chord for the 12th time.

It may be hard to believe unless you’ve heard me play, but I was not a good guitar player then, and I remain almost as poor today. Oh, I can strike a resounding A chord, an E-minor, a C, G or D with the best of them. Hey, even a D7 or D-minor is not out of line (I still hate the F), but to add a bunch of them together in quick succession is not going to be pretty to the ears.

My short, stubby, Jimmy Dean Breakfast Link Sausage fingers don’t work together like the Borg collective, moving in unison to make beautiful sounds. Persistence is futile. My fingers are rogues. They play their own notes. They prefer to play them one at a time. It’s up to the second finger or the third finger to make their notes fit with the first one.

That turned out to be just boogie for playing bass.

Unfortunately, I didn’t understand bass in second or sixth grade. I dug modern music, which back then was pretty much The Beatles, The Monkees, Paul Revere and the Raiders and the Mamas & the Papas. I was hip to Johnny Rivers, and I stacked those platters one after the other, spinning on my own small, teenager-sized record player while dreaming of playing in a band just like I saw on “The Ed Sullivan Show” and “Where the Action Is.”

Alas, my guitaring skills popped that dream bubble.

Then, in 10th grade, I dropped into a free show on the high school track, sat my darned carcass in the front row, and watched a band play. I heard it! The driving, diving, swirling, pounding sound of bass, the sound I’d heard in my head and couldn’t make with my fingers.

It was a white Fender Precision with a rosewood fretboard and maple neck thumping through an Ampeg B15N amplifier/cabinet combo, and I loved it.

I heard every note and anticipated the next. All those records, all the radio tunes all this time, this was the sound I recognized. I heard the basslines. Joe Osborn, Carole Kaye, and James Jamerson were my people.

A guy I knew offered to sell his old bass to me so he could buy a new one. I had a bit of a job on the weekends, and he agreed to sell it to me for $50, about $355.07 in today’s dollars. It was not in the best of shape, already had lost parts and half-ass repaired, but I could play it and play it by ear. I seemed to know where to play on the fretboard without even knowing the notes.

With a fool for a student and an idiot for an instructor, I taught myself to play. I studied those little dots and squiggles that folks plop over lines on a page and call “sheet music” until I could read what others wanted me to play. (I still can, but it’s never been easy. Give me a week to memorize it, please.)

From my senior year in high school, it was on. I played in a band here. I went to a jam there. I sucked. I rocked. I hit good notes wrong and bad notes right, each performance making me a little less bad and a bit more better.

As time marched on and money became available, I treated myself to a variety of tools that are toys, grabbing cool instruments and playing them whenever someone let me.

And then came BiG! And then came TheBandBig! And now, ToBe Fare, this is the most fun I’ve had in my life, and I’m pretty sure my 15-year-old self is looking 50 years into the future and thinking ‘sweet!’

And at every gig, when JR counts it down, Gary hits that first chord, and I reply with a quick run, I swear I can see him in the back of the room with his finger horns raised and shouting, “F**king, aye! Rock on!”

--Mac