It was my first job, when I was 14.

I had reached a plateau in my playing and knew I needed some formal lessons. There was no YouTube back then, and the guitar teacher I had for six months when I was eight, had been murdered. The tiny town I lived in only had one guitar teacher at the time.

So I went to the new music store in town to see if they gave lessons. The guitar teacher, replete with cowboy boots and bolo tie, came into the tiny, sound-insulated closet that they used for lessons and asked me to play for him. When I finished, he left the room without saying a word and came back with a short, stout, balding man with a firm handshake and a big smile.

“My name’s Jim,” said the stout man, “and I’m the owner. I hear you’re our new guitar teacher!”

“No,” I said, “I’m here for lessons.”

“Well,” he said, gesturing to the lanky cowboy, “He says you play better than him. And today’s his last day; can you start tomorrow?"

I inherited 35 students that day, and started to teach them the next afternoon, after school.

That was 53 years ago.

Synchronicity and happenstance brings me back to that (now much larger) town, and I sometimes walk past the little store, now a beauty salon.

I can still smell the distinct aroma of sweaty hands on guitar strings and the scent of WWII-era military-surplus sound insulation.

Time has taken me on quite a journey since then, in many other cities, and through careers in medicine and education and psychology; getting married and raising a family; college and grad school and becoming a business owner and author.

Music has been the great unifying constant, through it all.

No matter what else was going on in my life, I was always playing and performing, writing and composing, engineering and recording and mixing and all the rest that comes along with being a professional musician.

I have worked in some of the great recording studios, from London’s Abbey Road Studios to The Village Studios in LA and many in between. I have released albums of my own music and performed solo, and in bands, and as a guest soloist with orchestras and choirs.

And I have always taught.

I still—more than half a century on—have a great passion for teaching music. For me, music is the perfect pursuit; a blend of muse and magic, emotion and technical ability. And there is an art to teaching the art.

But more than the scales and minor thirds and tritone substitutions, it is about the people. 

The gift of hindsight shows me that all of it—all of my life’s work and experience—has been and is about people, but more so, I think, with music.

Thousands of students later, I can see patterns of motivation and intent:

Some of them come solely to learn how to play. 

Some come because they are lonely, and looking for connection.

Many have come because they’re seeking healing, even though they may not be aware of it. 

And some are in search of nothing less than salvation.

God only knows how these last two groups they find me, but they do. It doesn’t have anything to do with professional credentials or a career as a counselor; music students sought me out for more than music training long before my PhD program in clinical psychology. 

One of the earliest realizations I had about this situation came when I was still a teenager and had a string of students who seemed to be emotionally distraught when they came to me. I knew nothing about psychology then, so it was more an observation and a gut feeling than anything else. 

Years later, I discovered that there was a local therapist of some ilk—psychologist or psychiatrist—who was regularly sending his patients to me as an adjunct to therapy. He never contacted me; I learned of it from the patients/students themselves. I still don’t know how or why he found me.

Looking back now with the benefit of training and clinical experience, I recognize more than a few behavioral patterns that would warrant categorization in the DSM.

But that is not the point. 

At some level, we’re all aware that we are the ghost in the machine. We come from a mystery, spend a brief time here—much of it in fear and loneliness—and disappear into an enigma; irretrievable, and without a trace.

For most of us, music eases the pain, celebrates the triumphs, and—if we listen closely—communicates deep truth in a language far more universal and efficacious than speech.

I suppose it makes sense that a teacher of music could be seen as a wielder of that unspoken healing.

Being a guitar teacher allows me to have regular moments of humanness and connection. We are loathe to reach out for help, most of us, and so seeking connection under the guise of professional music instruction is a safe means by which we may evaluate the potential for a healthy—perhaps therapeutic—interpersonal bond. And maybe learn how to play guitar.

The fact that I’m the teacher means nothing: I need the magic, the connection, as much as they do. (And, by the way, I’m still a student; I seek out teachers whenever I find someone with something I want to learn. All good teachers have teachers.)

So, thanks to the student who recently asked, “Don’t you ever get tired of teaching the same thing over and over?” His question spawned the bit of introspection that you are reading.

And my unending gratitude to all of the students for all of the years. I have gained every bit as much as I have given.

And some of it even had to do with music.

(The author, teaching in the mid-1970s)

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