For The Record
Blackbird
Lennon/McCartney

You may be questioning this particular song selection for “For The Record,” this time in that I had nothing to do with the writing of it. Since though we are getting close to finishing the Beatles CD (14 or so songs by the Beatles arranged with a string quartet, the band, and a bevy of guest musicians), I thought it might be appropriate to trace the beginnings of this one as a golden thread that reaches back to the very earliest days.

I got my first guitar, a Suzuki classical guitar at the age of 12. My parents pulled a surprise on me that Christmas by hiding a strange shaped cardboard box behind the tree. Instead of the obligatory pair of socks and new winter coat, I opened a box full of songs…yet to be. I don’t think Mom and Dad knew right away that they had immediately earned a “most improved parents” award for 1970, and would not know for a few weeks that they had given their son the tools needed to keep them up late at night with loud strumming and out-of-tune banging upstairs, that a wood floor happily amplified for the poor captive audience on the floor below.

I never was much one for lessons. I was going to learn my way. Why? Because that’s what George Harrison did, and what George did had already been proven sacred. But one afternoon I came walking through the living room and my sister was sitting on the plaid comfy chair in the living room with her feet in the inch and a half orange shag carpet (yes this was the 70’s), and I could not believe my ears. She was playing “Blackbird,” Paul McCartney’s beautiful acoustic guitar song that talks about the civil rights movement in the previous decade, though I did not know it at the time. I simply could not put up with the fact that my sister knew a song I did not, and I asked her to show it to me.

That was my first encounter with that tremendous song. Soon to come were strange looking friends that were all too happy to drag big amps over to our patio in the back yard where we had rehearsed a recreation of the Beatles “Let It Be” rooftop concert. We were good enough, or so we thought, to graduate to electric guitars. Our first visitors were the Crestwood police who said one song was enough to convince them we were on our way up the ladder… of the Missouri penal system if we continued to so rudely entertain our neighbors.

I practiced hard and got into a few bands who also found out I could sing a passable version of “Saturday in The Park,” and “Eight Days A Week.” My brother Jim, meanwhile, had picked up the bass and was turning into a monster good player. I asked him how he was getting so good, and he said, ”Man, you’ve got to learn your scales and music theory!” I said, “How do I do that?” He replied, “Practice man!” And so we did. One of us would go upstairs, that old wood floor upstairs would creak and thump with foot tapping ‘til the wee hours of the morning, and one of us would go down to the basement. (In order to stay up till the wee hours, we’d go to Perkins Pancake house and drink 14 cups of coffee and eat three cinnamon danish. Try it sometime. It works!)

Practice does work too, and I got good enough (never by my standards), to join some pop, top forty bands, and Jim joined some jazz and pop groups. It was through the jazz playing that Jim met Roger Guth, the marvelous drummer/songwriter and we started jamming together. We were three peas in a pod, into the same music, and trying to make a living too, so we’d join groups together to play weddings and funerals and bar mitzvahs, etc., around town. One of the groups we played with got us booked on a USO tour that went overseas to Germany. It was the experience of a lifetime.

It was on this trip that the next life changing encounter with “Blackbird” came in a late night hotel bar in Germany, where all of us had had some of the double-powered German beer and were trading stories with a bar manager. He found out we were musicians on a mission, so he went in the back and brought out an old guitar and said in pretty good English, “Goh ahet, you pley sumpsing.” We had no bass, no drums; so I sat in a booth and played “Blackbird” for an empty bar, cohorts, and a wide-eyed bar manager. It was that night that Roger said, “we’ve got to do something together, we’ve got to officially get a group going and do something with what we’ve got.”

And so we did. Back home we bought new music stuff with the money we’d earned and we started writing and experimenting with different sounds and styles. One of those pieces of gear I bought was a Roland guitar synthesizer that Pat Metheny, one of the premier jazz guitarists in the world used. You could make a 6-string guitar sound like a 12-string, or a trumpet, or a flute, or individually tune the strings to different pitches, and have those pitches play along with the original guitar tuning. One afternoon in my apartment above poor old lady… Man, I can’t remember her name, but she used to complain about the loud racket going on upstairs with the phrase in her German accent; “Pleas vud you schtop pleying sumpsing.”, I started playing “Blackbird” with this synthesizer hook up, and discovered a whole new pallet of psychedelic sounds and harmonies that gave a new color to the song.

A good song is a good song, no matter who sings it. You can put it through the ringer, and even do it badly. Even a fake, or wanna-be can sing it, and it somehow remains true. Time has no effect on the heart of a good song, though its style can sometimes sound dated. Here I am 25 or so years since that day in the apartment getting ready to release a recorded version of Paul McCartney’s beautiful song. The Fab Four have never let me down, and as I send it on to you I’m going to give it my very best shot.

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