Look what pops out of the copious stream that is Youtube! Robben Ford and a killer band playing live in 1984 – stuff from his first solo album ‘The Inside Story’. Which naturally leads me to wanting to include a backstory (coffee is natural, right?) …
Well, me and Paul … we played rock and roll together in high school.
Then high school ended. But our band ‘Sgt. Rock’ had gotten stitched in with two booking agents, and so like many, we found work playing in the alcohol distribution industry (which, when you get to bring a Les Paul to work, and plug into a overdriven tube amp sprinkled with the burgeoning fairy dust that was digital delays, flangers, and the rest, why it seems like a good job to have). Me, I’d moved into the basement of the Schmidt house as a bold THC-fueled strategy to achieve autonomy. (The fact was, as a keen …independent, scholar of the guitar throughout high school, I really hadn’t paid any dues to walk the promised path of further schooling. Colleges were not exactly pounding down my door to grace them with my attendance. More like, those four guys on the Led Zeppelin poster in the basement kept peering at me … possibly wondering when I was going to attend their Misty Mountain Hop school of fun.)
Us OTHER four lads in Hibbing Minnesota just kept driving to gigs. [ From forty years in the future, I can assuredly qualify those jobs as the “times of our lives” (as though ANY time is NOT…) ].
When contrasted to the extensive public school charade of me trying to fit my square curiosity peg into an institutional round hole; having to responsibly practice, rehearse, engineer, set up, and play [in tune] was a welcomed change. [ Big digression … that is, if this riff about Robben Ford playing at GIT (Guitar Institute of Technology) in North Hollywood has digression lane markers. It doesn’t. ]
Anyhow, GIT was the place we all learned about in the back of Guitar Player magazine. (Once, after finding my OTHER educational mags, my dad inquired if I was “studying to become a gynecologist”.) Heck, I practically learned how to read via keen analysis of its [ mostly Guitar Player, that is ] monthly pages in the great project that was … well whatever it was it didn’t seem to be launching from the basement … (fun fact: My dad and stepmother bought me a giant sized suitcase that year for “a gift”) Still, I continued to listen to Steve Morse, Pat Metheny, Allan Holdsworth, and a bunch of other utterly unique players whom I thought might be good to just magically transform into … Including Robben Ford.
Theses days I’m lucky if I get around to playing like Darren Schmidt, i.e. picking it up. Back then, it was all about finding your monstrous musical mojo bag. Tough task actually. More ‘externalities’ than I would have ever guessed back then. [ Zziing… time travel message to 18 y.o. Dare : Read some Spinoza sometime, you douche! … and get that thing out of your hand! It might open some OTHER worlds! ]
Ok. okay. So Paul and I come across Robben’s album ‘The Inside Story’. Actually, I purchased it from the cut-out bin at Hibbing’s Woolworths – for FIFTY cents! (Such disconnect between music and commodification should have been Music Industry Lesson 101 actually.)
Paul and I drank in this new level of tasty chops. And yet, our confines that was Hibbing, was feeling all the more … confining.
And Robben – why he was associated with this coveted GIT (and other monster players too numerous to list). Well, to wind this tale up, one fall day, Paul and I, somehow having procured a ’74 Chevy Impala – one of the less graceful Impalas that would ONLY shimmer and shake when going at an inconvenient 56 mph; We loaded up the car and headed to California; a large mixing board in its road case strapped to the roof and a spare tire tied to the top of the trunk … heading down Highway 73 … our favored Pat Metheny Live ‘Travels’ album leading the way.
[ largely not required cannabis disclaimer: one of our band achievements was having found a distributer who transitioned us from ditchweed to something much more enchanting ] Alas, this meant that by the time we got to the loopy freeways (offramps in Metheny-speak) of Minneapolis … Paul and I unwittingly chose the fuzzier option of looping in great circles around the Twin Cities as we peered through bleary eyes for the door to the promised West. We eventually found it (Intersate 80) … and the rest is history. (Too much f*cking history!)
And Paul, and me, and Robben, are still kicking. And Robben is still a monster musician. Paul and me? … we are still delighted and grateful to play this instrument loosely termed the guitar.
(dedicated to fellow guitarist Bliss Nakayama, whose passing I only recently learned of. Bliss was part of a very musical groove here in East Hawaii and I hope he found the sweetest Stratocaster in the beyond. Aloha Bliss.)
Island Notes 