Teaching an old dog to play bass
Michael Price and I have been getting together once or twice a week for nearly two years to play music. At 55, Michael had decided to learn to play the acoustic bass in order to be able to jam with his musical friends. He had given up on trying to get us to play with him as he plinked away – badly – on his piano, which he had taught himself to play. We steadfastly claimed that it was not reasonable to match the 88 strings on the piano with the many fewer strings on a guitar and banjo, which is what his main two musical friends played.
I spent the two years reacquainting myself with the guitar (a Taylor), which I had laid aside for nearly a decade or more, while I tended to other things. Like many men of my age, I had played in bars when I was younger, banging out covers of Bob Dylan and Beatles tunes and writing some of my own. Over the years, I had accumulated a fair number of what I thought were pretty good tunes and even had had a couple performed and recorded by more proficient bands. In my mid-thirties, I had decided, for various reasons, not to make the move to Nashville, center of all songwriting activity in the area, thinking that I was too old, too unhandsome and too disinclined to play the game that was required there. I also wasn’t writing much in the way of commercial country music.
Our friend Kyle had also played out earlier, as part of a Louisville-area bluegrass band but had mostly given up his instrument while he built a successful business as a woodworker and tool designer. He had also recently returned to the banjo, having built his business to the point that he had time to play. Bored with making the items he was selling, he regularly hired the teenaged and young adult children of friends to do the work while he practiced. He began to drop by on Monday nights when Michael and I were practicing. Next thing you know, the music began to sound pretty good, not too bad.