While My Guitar Teacher Gently Weeps

While My Guitar Teacher Gently Weeps

Miss Morrison was a very musical woman to the extent that I thought she might be related to that young lad Jim from the popular beat combo, the Doors, who lived in America. In 1969 she was my music mistress at school where she had the unenviable task of teaching me and a crowd of other uninterested twelve-year-olds to play the recorder. I should have twigged straight away that she couldn’t have been a relative of Jim Morrison because otherwise there’d have been a bit of recorder playing on some of his records, such as Riders on the Storm or Back Door Man, and she wouldn’t have had us faffing around with inane strains like Row, Row, Row Your Boat for an hour and a half every Tuesday afternoon.

In 1969 Miss Morrison smelt of the pages of the dusty hymn books piled up on the table at the back of the church. She brought a couple of dozen copies into school so she could coach us to sing a very highbrow canticle called The Earth Has Seen the Creator’s Glory set to music written by Beethoven and, as it wasn’t exactly a foot tapper, the training lasted several weeks during which we pleaded for a return to learning the recorder. She also had a whiff of cat about her but she never brought a cat into the classroom or taught us about anything to do with cats.

She wore huge crepe-soled T-bar sandals and thick stockings (or maybe tights, no one dared to ask) that looked like real human skin except they had holes in them. Where we lived in the North of Ireland in 1969, holes in the skin weren’t uncommon but her holes each revealed a mat of thick black hair within. This puzzled me because the hair on her head was pure white, largely due to the stress of having to teach us immensely scholarly hymns and the recorder, and also because of her methuselahistic age. It was rumoured that her first commission following graduation had been to show George Frideric Handel how to bang a tune out of a harpsichord.

She also had on her the temper of the apostles James and John, so I knew I was in big trouble when I strayed from the sheet music a little during a practice run through Three Blind Mice. Had I been Miles Davis or Jeremy Kwee I would have got away with it, but I wasn’t, so I didn’t. A week earlier, Miss Morrison had snatched fellow pupil Jean Stein’s highly polished rosewood recorder from her hands and hit her on the arm with it as punishment for playing Frère Jacques in the key of G major rather than her preferred F major.

I wasn’t a skinny bespectacled girl like Jean was, and there were traces of a Middlesbrough accent when I spoke, so the teacher was perhaps a little wary of me. Rather than doling out physical abuse she told me I was a good-for-nothing talentless waster of time before condemning me for the remainder of the academic year to the isolation of classroom 101 where I would do my homework in total silence.

This was the result I had been hoping for. I remember drawing diagrams of the stages of development of an ox-bow lake in my geography exercise book and thinking that such knowledge was no less useful to a kid hoping to pursue a career in rock music than being able to perform Old MacDonald Had a Farm on a hideously shrill wooden whistle was. It also meant that on the days of music lessons my homework was all done and dusted before the home time bell rang.

Jean Stein, if you’re reading this, I hope your bruises (both physical and mental) have healed and your mum and dad managed to get a refund of the money they spent on your recorder. Mine enjoyed a second life as a makeshift miniature rounders bat.

***

Walt Dodson was a very musical man to the extent that he had sung and played guitar in a band that had been the support act during Gerry and the Pacemakers’ 1963 tour of Essex. By the time that I got to know him he had flourished into a very convincing Neil Diamond tribute act, though in those days the term tribute act was rarely used so it didn’t matter the slightest bit that he looked nothing like his idol. I’ve still never seen Neil Diamond simultaneously making a roll up ciggy and squeezing out a Fine Fare teabag in a chipped mug, but I have heard Walt performing Song Sung Blue beautifully. So tell me now, who’s the most talented of the pair of them?

In 1974 Mick Taylor left the Rolling Stones and suddenly the band had a vacancy for a guitarist. By then, with my parents and sister, I’d moved to Leeds and was attending another school where the teachers followed a system of brutality more controlled than Miss Morrison’s erratic psychopathic outbursts, and had better personal hygiene standards. Strangely, I found that this made life a bit dull and I was keen to escape. I knew all the words to all the Stones’ songs so I considered myself the ideal candidate for the job until I remembered that I hadn’t a clue how to play a guitar. In the privacy of my bedroom a tennis racquet bought from Woolworth’s for a quid suited me right down to the ground but on stage at Madison Square Garden I’d have looked a right prat.

Walt sold me his old six-string acoustic guitar for £15 and proceeded to teach me to play it in the back room of his family’s frozen food shop where I worked on Saturdays and for a couple of hours most afternoons after school. The lessons took place when the shop wasn’t busy so effectively he was paying me 35p an hour as my bleeding fingers struggled with the apparently simple chords of House of the Rising Sun. The first few lessons had been little more than failed attempts at showing me how to tune the cursed twangy twat and impatiently he would snatch it from me saying ‘This is how it’s done,’ before giving a perfect rendition of the Everly Brothers’ Wake Up Little Susie.

It didn’t matter that the subject of the song I was trying to perform was located in New Orleans because the snatching part of the twice-weekly routine usually occurred before I’d reached the ‘There is a house’ bit.

Walt was my very first rock ‘n’ roll hero. He could play any tune on a guitar, except the David Bowie and Velvet Underground stuff that I loved at the time. He probably could have played some of it really well if he had tried but he made no attempt to hide the fact that he really didn’t like it. Once, while we were listening to Bowie’s Aladdin Sane album, he told me that during the five seconds of silence between tracks he got the same nice feeling that he did when somebody unexpectedly gave him a fiver.

Whilst serving customers in the shop he would sing classic songs from the fifties and sixties. Songs by legendary stars from the exciting early days of rock such as Eddie Cochran, Jerry Lee Lewis and Marvin Rainwater. Those I didn’t know would be played to me on his expensive stereo system whenever I called round at his house just a few doors down from my own. In the mid-seventies he had taught me everything I knew about rock music but the poor fella, through no fault of his own, had failed to teach me how to perform it.

One day in the back of the shop, just as I was about to announce that my mother had sewed my new blue jeans, a look of sadness and disappointment came over his face. He took the instrument from me and handed me three £5 notes from his wallet before doing a note-perfect delivery of Buddy Holly’s Peggy Sue. My rock star days had ended before they had begun and soon afterwards Ronnie Wood filled the vacant post in the Rolling Stones.

Ronnie Wood, if you’re reading this, you owe me a pint.

***

Sheila Morton was a very musical woman to the extent that she could play the piano in a jaunty honky-tonk style just like Mrs Mills had done in the 1960s, performing medleys of melodies without the aid of sheet music and always with a broad smile on her face.

For much of the 1980s and all of the decade that followed, Sheila was my mother-in-law. She was an utterly lovely woman who was incredibly kind, caring and knowledgeable with a great sense of humour. She was the complete opposite to Les Dawson’s mother-in-law but laughed at his jokes anyway.

Together we could talk at length about most things in the world. As an obsessive gardener she could spot a leucanthemum vulgare from a mile away, she made the best Sunday roasts this side of the North Pole, she abhorred Tony Blair’s right wing politics, being a Leeds girl she always kept an eye out for Leeds United’s results and she made the sun shine brighter than Doris Dragović. Whatever she had to say was always worth hearing. She’d trained as a nurse in the 1950s when a student nurse’s salary amounted to a mere £100 per annum and all her working life had been spent in a nursing capacity, with a short break in the middle to see her two children through to secondary school age.

With my wife and three young kids, I spent many a holiday in the comparatively opulent surroundings of the home of my parents-in-law in a village near Lincoln. During one such visit, a day of heavy rain meant the cancellation of a trip to Skegness and in the afternoon everyone but Sheila and I retired to their sleeping quarters to fill the time. Whilst watching raindrops run down the glass of the patio doors, and the garden beyond morph into a quagmire in which children would delight in getting clarted with mud the following day, we listened to vinyl records of classical music.

‘Who do you like best?’ is a question that always comes up when I’m discussing music and that afternoon was no exception. Our answers to the question showed no overlap, though neither of us had any time for Kylie and Jason, or German Neue Deutsche Härte bands like Rammstein. Sheila loved the music of Doris Day who she had been told she bore an uncanny physical resemblance to when she had been younger.

Considering my love of music of most genres, she was surprised to learn of my inability to play an instrument. I told her about my distressing experiences in the past with Miss Morrison and Walt Dodson. I went on to say how much I would have loved to have been one of those people who could sit with friends by a campfire at night and strum a few chords to get the group singing. Accepting my clumsiness with the guitar I thought that perhaps an Alpine horn, a set of bagpipes or a triangle might be a better bet.

For Christmas in 1996 Sheila bought me a blues harmonica and a book containing instructions to enable tone deaf idiots like me to turn out a half decent tune. It contained all the crotchets and clefs and quavers that you’d expect with real sheet music but it also had something even cleverer, or simpler. My new harmonica’s holes were all numbered and each piece of music was depicted in the book as a series of numbers which were to be blown or sucked in the order shown on the page. For example, the first line of the Black American folk song, Camptown Races went 6 6 5 6 -6 6 5 5 -4 5 -4 doo dah, doo dah! It was a doddle and soon I had a three song repertoire. It later turned out that it was my struggle with numeracy rather than my tone deafness that prevented me from going on to mimic legendary bluesmen like Sonny Boy Williamson and Dr Ross.

For months I practised every evening as I supervised my lovely children getting ready for bed. In doing so, I noticed that a good old blast of When the Saints Go Marching In would see them in their pyjamas a lot quicker than usual, On Top of Old Smokey had them in bed with their heads under their Ninja Turtle duvets in fewer than five minutes, and my version of You Mistreated Me Baby, originally made popular by Little Mac Simmons, always had them in tears. My youngest daughter suggested that if I was going to do anything by numbers perhaps I should try painting.

Sonny Boy Williamson, if you’re reading this I owe you a pint.

***

Every musical instrument I have ever laid my hands on has brought misery to me, my teacher and my audience. So these days, inspired by John Lennon, sometimes I play the fool.

Image:

Me jamming with Pedro ‘Axeman’ Hernandez in the town of Aguas Calientes in Peru.