OPINION

PHILIP MARTIN: Do you close your eyes to see miracles?

EL DORADO -- You can learn almost anything.

Most of the time it's not easy, but it's doable. You just have to put in the work. I've been playing guitar for a little more than 40 years, yet never took a lesson until a couple of months ago. I was more or less satisfied with my playing--I write songs on guitar and am not vested in being a performer. Even when playing in bands, I never progressed beyond power chords and pentatonic boxes. I was a strummer, using the instrument like a shield.

I started taking lessons to learn a little music theory, thinking that knowledge might help in songwriting. When I first picked up the guitar as a kid I didn't spend any time at all learning riffs or practicing scales, but just wanted to learn a few chords. I could live inside an open E minor for a month.

But over the years I've acquired some nice guitars that get played regularly. It finally got to the point where I thought I ought to at least try to grow a little as a player. So I signed up for some lessons.

Going in, I managed expectations. But I had an idea, based on a drawing exercise first encountered in Betty Edwards' 1979 book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. If you want to copy an image, the first thing you should do is turn it upside down. There's a lot of science behind this technique, but an over-simplification of the process is that it disorients your brain so that it's not seeing a face or a castle--things it recognizes and has preconceived notions about--but sees only lines, shapes and space. It works. Given enough patience, just about anyone can turn out a fairly realistic copy of the model image using the technique.

So when taking lessons I decided to get away from the stuff I usually do. I'm normally an acoustic player, so I take lessons on an electric guitar. I like open chords and strings, so in my lessons I'm forbidden from using them. I'm a rhythm player, so roughly 80 percent of my practice time is devoted to improvising solos. And I'm doing a lot of reading about and even dreaming about music theory. Some tumblers have fallen into place; a few levels have been unlocked.

I'll probably never be a virtuosic guitar player, but now I understand that's not because of a lack of innate ability. It's because of a lack of will and practice time to be really good; it's because I'm satisfied with the way I play now. I'm good enough for what I want to do. Still, there are limits to what you can learn.

I've been playing close attention to Richard Thompson for longer than I've been playing guitar. I was one of the five or six people who bought a copy of his first solo album, 1972's Henry the Human Fly, cited as "the worst-selling album in the history of Warner Bros. Records," which is probably fake news but fits in nicely with Thompson's legend. He's widely considered one of the greatest rock/folk guitarists of all time and a songwriter on par with Townes Van Zandt, Joni Mitchell, and Bob Dylan. Yet he's never had a genuine hit record, and someone is probably going to proudly post a comment to the effect they've never heard of him on the online version of this column.

While I love Jason Isbell and his band the 400 Unit, whom we saw in January at Little Rock's Robinson Center, we likely wouldn't have made the drive here if Thompson wasn't Isbell's opening act at El Dorado's Griffin Music Hall.

I've seen Thompson a few times over the years, including his amazing one-man show at the old Arkajun House on University Avenue in Little Rock in May 1989. From my review: "He could drive nails through his custom guitar's fret board with his shuddering left pinkie. What B.B. King chokes out of an electrified Lucille, Thompson is capable of wringing from an acoustic flattop--such is the controlled power of his Celtic soul. Alternately spraying stinging arpeggios, clanky shuffle chords, and buttery melt-in-your-heart microbursts of notes, Thompson played for nearly two hours to a crowd that knew his catalog and appreciated his new material. Thompson dragged out bomb-hearted lovers and broken outcasts, gave us an abridged Hamlet, and argued for polka as Nordic soul music."

Thompson was nearly 40 years old at the time of that show.

Griffin Music Hall is a lot bigger venue than the Arkajun House, yet Thompson was a bigger name back then. Back then he seemed constantly on the brink of breaking out, of becoming something like a real rock star. There were a string of records in the '90s--Rumor and Sigh, Mirror Blue, the double album You? Me? Us?, Mock Tudor--that threatened to be popular. But there's something simultaneously prickly and self-deprecating in Thompson, complications that discomfit rather than assure. Even a crowd attuned to Isbell's challenging, incisive songs might not warm to RT's admittedly depressive, cynical mode.

At least I thought they might not. I worried that no solitary man on stage armed with only a Lowden acoustic, a salty boom of a voice and a Che Guevara beret could command a audience gathered for a bombastic, rock 'n' roll show. I shouldn't have.

For there is craft and there is talent and then there is something more. No doubt it helped that Griffin Music Hall's sound system is so precisely tuned we could hear the articulation of each individual string. We could hear Thompson's fingers finding purchase and release, the intention haunting every thrum.

You can learn most anything; I can play credible versions of most of Thompson's songs. He uses the same chords; there's a lot of overlap in our record collections. But there are things beyond one's grasp, and no matter how long and intentful your practice, you cannot call down a breaking in of grace.

That's why they are called miracles.

pmartin@arkansasonline.com

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Editorial on 05/13/2018

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