Sing It Again, Jimi

One recent night, I pulled into the parking lot of a local bar/restaurant, looking forward to a gig by two old friends. I’ve been surrounded by musicians all my life and, when time and the wallet permit, I like to show my support while also having some laughs, and a few cocktails, with the rest of my motley crew.

This particular evening, I hopped out of my car just in time to help one of the players and his wife carry in his gear. I grabbed some equipment and was making my way through the back door when he exclaimed, “Hey Gloria, you look good carrying a guitar!” I just laughed and mentioned the name of another pal who gives guitar lessons to make ends meet. “Maybe he’ll take me on as a student. I promise I’ll be his worst one ever.”

It’s always been one of the minor regrets in my life that I have an ear for appreciating music, but not an ear for making it. Somewhere down the line, music was codified into a virtually limitless series of scales including diatonic, chromatic, pentatonic, whole tone and whatever the hell it is Philip Glass uses for his compositions.

Thanks but no thanks. Writing has always been my métier and I guess I’m stuck with it. But my friend’s remark revived a question that’s been rolling around in the back of my brain for some time: Why do demon guitar players make only serviceable lyricists and brilliant lyricists make only serviceable players?

For instance:

Way before he became “The Boss” (and picked up an incongruous Oakie accent), Jersey boy Bruce Springsteen felt he had to make a choice between developing his writing or guitar playing skills and chose the former. Elvis Costello started his creative life as a writer at the tender age of seven and freely admits that his fretwork is “primitive.” Bob Dylan’s playing has never come close to his lyrical pyrotechnics, although he may have been inspired to write the line, “everybody must get stoned,” when he “went electric” and drove the mob into a murderous frenzy at the 1965 Newport Jazz and Folk Festival.

On the other side of the guitar pick, Eric Clapton can come up with a “Layla” once in a blue moon, but the bulk of his hits were either cover versions (“Cocaine,” “Crossroads”) or two of the most mawkish ballads ever unleashed on the listening public (“Wonderful Tonight,” “Tears in Heaven”). Jimi Hendrix’s self-penned tunes were fine for the Psychedelic Sixties but, through the decades, have taken on a frozen-in-amber, “acid washed” quality. As for Jimmy Page, I think the line “If there’s a bustle in your hedgerow, don’t be alarmed now” sings for itself.

Of course, there are exceptions to every rule. Prince comes immediately to mind as a short, sharp rebuke to this theory, but I secretly believe “The Artist…” is not of this world and place him on a purple pedestal all his own.

To see if I could find a musical, scientific or cultural explanation for my half-assed hypothesis, I turned to today’s equivalent of the Three Wise Men: Goggle, Bing and Answer.com. I put the query every which way and couldn’t turn up as much as a crackpot blog post(!) to back me up.

What I did turn up, though, were lists – “The Ten Greatest Guitar Players,” “The 100 Greatest Guitar Players,” “Rock ‘n Roll’s Greatest Guitar Players,” “God’s Picks for Guitar Gods,” etc. But when I plugged in “greatest rock lyrics,” the search gurus spit back nothing, nada, zero. Could it be that listeners (or list makers) just don’t care as much about the words as they do the music?

Giving this question a little think, I came to a sad but true, “Uh, yeah.” Blow the guitar part in “Purple Haze” and you’ll get the same crowd response as Dylan at Newport, but lots of folks heard (and sang) the line, “S’cuse me while I kiss the sky” as “S’cuse me while I kiss this guy.”

At least my research turned up one interesting nugget: The mishearing of a lyric is called a “mondegreen.”

But that’s fodder for another column.