Questions, Answers, and Time

Guitars don't lie

Tonight is the best kind of writing night. I knew what I wanted to write about…sort of. I jotted down a few ideas, tried smashing them together into a coherent mess…then I realized what I REALLY wanted to write about, and the words poured out of the pores of my fingers. Thank God for the backspace key and autocorrect, but sometimes you get the answers you want, and you just have to run with ‘em.

“There is always an easy solution to every problem - neat, plausible, and wrong”

— H. L. Mencken

I will probably never have my own Wikipedia entry like H.L. Mencken does, but easy answers exist…somewhere. They are just a lot less plentiful than we would all like to hope. They are out there, and some are neat, plausible and right.

Trust me, there are a few.

Or, if you feel like making a lifelong bitter enemy out of me, you can take the tact of a Philosophy professor I had in college. He informed us gravity is not what caused that egg to fall and crack open on the floor…and he proceeded to list a half dozen things that led up to that moment which are ACTUALLY the reason(s) the egg broke.

Mencken was a professional provocateur, so it is not hard picturing him writing something like this. There is enough truth in my experience, and yours, and your neighbor’s, to make this a true statement. It is true enough to make you yearn for a simple answer to a question…any question.

But when confusion reigns supreme, nothing beats a great guitar solo.

“But just believe in me, baby, and I’ll take you away
From out of this darkness and into the day
From these rivers of headlights, these rivers of rain
From the anger that lives on the streets with these names
Cause I’ve run every red light on memory lane
I’ve seen desperation explode into flames
And I don’t want to see it again
From all of these signs saying, “Sorry, but we’re closed”
All the way down the telegraph road”

— Dire Straits, “Telegraph Road”

Rock ‘n roll history is littered with great guitarists. It feels like Rolling Stone magazine goes to that well every couple of years by ranking the top 100-250-500 guitarists of all time. I’ll make it easy” It’s Hendrix, Clapton and Townshend…and everyone else.

In truth, Rolling Stone has probably compiled that list twice, but you read about guitarists A LOT more than the rhythm section. Edge has a cool name and a distinctive sound. Without him, U2 is just The Boomtown Rats with a savior’s complex, good genes and charming dorkiness. Adam Clayton is essential to the band, but he plays bass, and bassists always get short shrift…unless you are Paul McCartney and can play every instrument known to man.

“I have run, I have crawled
I have scaled these city walls
These city walls
Only to be with you

But I still haven’t found what I’m looking for”

— U2, “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For”

Great guitar work helps tie a song together, an answer to whatever question is being asked by the vocalist. Everyone knows “Free Bird,” and it is seemingly everyone’s second or third favorite classic rock song. This is almost entirely due to Allen Collins’ four-and-a-half-minute guitar solo that plays the song to fade out. As of this writing, Gary Rossington is the only remaining original member living, but 33 people (including the dead) can claim to have been a member over the years. Think of your Sophomore year homeroom…that is how many people have been in Lynyrd Skynyrd. Lynyrd Skynyrd is “Lynyrd Skynyrd” because of that guitar solo.

The rhythmic strumming and deliberate chord progressions of a great guitar solo also gives space to us, the listeners, to find an answer for ourselves. That is, if the dancing of fingers across a Fender Stratocaster has not already delivered us one.

I think it is safe to say we live during a time that is crying out for several very long guitar solos. Every generation thinks they are living through unique, never-seen-before, “unprecedented” times. I will state for the record, THIS is an unprecedented time, and I am looking for some answers for how everything became this reckless. Assuaging a leader’s ego is what happens in North Korea or Russia or any number of monarchies around the world. But are they also this reckless?

“The problem is not to find the answer, it’s to face the answer”

— Terence McKenna

I am not an ethnobotanist. In fact, I never heard the term before I looked up Terence McKenna. His main claim to fame was advocating for the ethical and responsible use of naturally occurring psychiatric plants. He was…a stoner. He died at an all-too-predictable early age of 53, but he left us with that pithy quote above which also has the added virtue of being true. And it is applicable for everything…from relationships to foreign relations.

Nothing is more frustrating than running into a person who owns the answer you are seeking but refuses to acknowledge it. While I cannot cite time, place or circumstance, I am certain I have been the one who said, “piss off” to an answer staring back at me in the face, denying reality, probably prolonging pain for all involved. There is a right way for accepting an answer, even if it is not the one you wished for.

“Time, flowin’ like a river
Time, beckoning me
Who knows when we shall meet again?
If ever
But time keeps flowin’ like a river
To the sea”

— The Alan Parsons Project, “Time”

I would add to McKenna’s quote something about time, specifically its fleeting nature. Whether we like it or not, we are in a race to the finish. We only have so much time to find, accept and live with whatever truths are forthcoming.

“Telegraph Road” is probably my favorite Dire Straits’ song. First…it has a great guitar solo. Second, the song is fourteen minutes long which bequeaths a certain gravity to it. Third, I love this song’s origin story. It is about an actual street outside Detroit. Mark Knopfler wrote the song when he was on tour in the early 1980’s. Turns out “Telegraph Road” tells the life story of Telegraph Road from the time Henry Ford started building cars all the way up to the collapse of the auto industry in the late-70’s, early-80’s.

The pace of “Telegraph Road” quickens and builds rapidly – Knopfler is an underrated guitarist, as weird as that is to say. The guitar solo has the feel of being on that open highway, hitting the gas, accelerating, getting ready to blast into a vortex of time and space.

It is a GREAT guitar solo.

“Time is what we want most, but what we use worst.”

— William Penn