Meeting Across the River

I started playing bass guitar when I was a teenager, like so many kids with dreams of rock stardom. I played in a few bar bands, doing covers. It didn't take long for me to realize that the rock 'n' roll lifestyle wasn't for me.

I continued to play on and off. The last band I played in was short-lived. I was thirty, married, and had a real job.

Then I had children, and I stopped playing music. I also stopped listening to it.

It wasn't a conscious decision. It's not as if I woke up one morning and decided I didn't like music anymore. It happened gradually, almost naturally, as my priorities shifted toward responsibility and putting my family ahead of personal concerns and distractions.

There was a part of me that seemed to believe I had to grow up, and music was something that belonged to being a teenager.

That stage lasted about twenty years. It ended around the time my eldest child was starting university. I had two others in university and my youngest was about to enter high school.

And then, one day, as if a switch had been flipped, I wanted to listen to music again. More than that, I wanted to play it.

Call it a midlife crisis if you want. There is a familiar phenomenon among men in their forties and fifties: the sudden need to get reacquainted with the irresponsible youthful part of themselves that had been abandoned somewhere along the way in the name of adult responsibilities.

That's probably part of what was happening to me.

But it felt like something more important, too. I was allowing myself an emotional reconnection with a part of myself I had left behind.

I dug out my old bass guitar and amplifier, which had been stored under the stairs, along with my old stereo and record collection. I also found the cheap Yamaha acoustic guitar I'd bought from my brother's girlfriend when I was in high school.

Music became my favourite hobby again. And what a great time for that to happen.

When I started playing bass around 1979 or 1980, the options for a self-taught amateur like me were pretty limited. You could buy instructional books or take lessons.

I did both.

My bass teacher was a guy named Paul Harwood, the bass player from Mahogany Rush, a fairly well-known Montreal band. The emphasis was mostly on technique and the basics. I only took a few lessons with Paul. Each time I went to see him I remember thinking that I should introduce myself again because he probably doesn't remember me. I learned enough with Paul to get by in a cover band. 

As for the songs, I learned them by ear from the recordings. Most of what I played was not exact, but it was a passable approximation.

These days, YouTube is an absolute bonanza for learning music. Music theory, instrument technique, songwriting, production, how to play virtually any song you can think of—you can find it all, usually for free.

For the past ten years or so I've been relearning guitar, not so much bass, although it's astounding how popular bass guitar has become on YouTube. One bass player, Davie504, has nearly fourteen million subscribers and billions of views.

Another music YouTuber I follow is Rick Beato. Beato has been a musician and professional music producer, and was previously a college-level music teacher. I started watching his channel when he had a series called What Makes This Song Great, in which he dissected and demystified some of the best and most beloved songs of our generation.

He's a few years older than me, so there is a strong element of nostalgia there.

But his channel is more than nostalgia. It's music education—music theory, practice, production—and above all, it's an expression of his love for music.

Since re-embracing music, I've concentrated mostly on acoustic guitar. I've learned songs I've dreamed of knowing since childhood and explored different techniques and styles, from fingerpicking and alternate picking to folk, country, bluegrass and old-time Delta blues.

These days I'm particularly interested in the pre- and post-war American blues masters.

I've even treated myself to two new guitars: a classic Gibson J-45 and a Gold Tone resonator, which I use for open tunings and slide.

I got a great deal on the resonator that I couldn't pass up, which is exactly the sort of rationalization a person makes when he has rediscovered a teenage hobby in middle age.

For some people, YouTube is a way of monetizing their skills and expertise. For others, it's a way of seeking attention. For others still, it's a way of sharing their enthusiasms with like-minded people.

More than twenty million videos are uploaded to YouTube every day. More than five hundred hours every minute.

I've been thinking about what this says about the state of our culture, and particularly about our sense of community.

Rick Beato made an interesting observation recently. He was in a park on a warm, sunny day in Salzburg, Austria, and noticed that he didn't see a single person with a musical instrument.

When he was growing up in upstate New York, he said, on a day like that you were likely to see several groups of friends sitting around with one or two acoustic guitars.

Think Saturday in the Park by Chicago.

It can't be that people aren't playing acoustic guitars anymore. Guitar sales have been growing for years and boomed during the pandemic.

So where did the guitar players go?

Beato thinks it has something to do with the individualization of musical taste brought about by digital music services.

Put simply, we're all listening to different music now.

We each have our own algorithmically generated playlists, tailored precisely to our individual tastes. Music used to be something we shared because, to a large extent, we were all listening to the same music.

Now there may be a hundred people sitting in the same park, each listening to a different soundtrack through a pair of earbuds.

No one is sitting around playing the songs we all know anymore because we don't all know the same songs.

This might be a phenomenon that even predates digital playlists.

Last weekend I went fishing with my wife's first cousin. He's fifty years old, only a decade younger than me. We were chit-chatting, as men in a boat waiting interminably for a bite will do, when the subject of music arose. He's a big music fan like me. He claims to love music from the '60s and early '70s.

I mentioned Glen Campbell. He said he thought he knew who I was talking about but couldn't name one of his songs. So I said, "What about Wichita Lineman?"

Never heard of it.

I said, "It's only the greatest contemporary song ever written, according to both Bob Dylan and Billy Joel."

Still hadn't heard it.

[Aside: Wichita Lineman was the first song I learned to play from a YouTube video after I picked up the guitar again. I was so proud of myself I even posted a video of my rendition to YouTube, my very first YouTube post. I should probably take it down.] 

Back to Beato's point. There may be another reason no one is playing guitar in the park anymore: The general decline of songcraft.

Think of the great era of the singer-songwriter—the Beatles, Dylan, Paul Simon, James Taylor, Carole King, Cat Stevens.

People sat around singing their songs because the songs themselves mattered. The lyrics were savoured, memorized and passed around. They spoke to something inside us. I'm not sure contemporary popular music does that to the same degree.

That's one of the less encouraging things about music on the internet.

Another is that the medium rewards spectacle. YouTube favours the astonishing guitar solo, the impossibly fast fingerwork, the trick, the gimmick, the person doing something you can't imagine being able to do yourself. Technique is impressive, but it isn't the same thing as great music.

And yet there is another side to all of this. YouTube is also a community of enthusiasts.

There is something undeniably intoxicating about having access to a potentially enormous community of people who are interested in the same things you are. Especially when, like me, you spend a lot of your time sitting alone in your basement engaged in what is essentially a group activity.

Music cries out to be shared. Not necessarily in a look-at-me sort of way. More in a sing-along sort of way.

That's why, about a year ago, I uploaded my first guitar tutorial to YouTube. It isn't really a lesson. I'm not a guitar teacher. It's a tutorial on how to play a particular song.

Initially, I wondered whether there was any point in adding yet another video to the hundreds of hours being uploaded to YouTube every minute. One more contribution to the endless stream of content being processed by the world's energy-hungry data centres.

But I convinced myself there was a point, because I'd wanted to learn a particular song and, amazingly, I couldn't find a decent lesson for it on YouTube. The song was Meeting Across the River by Bruce Springsteen, from his classic Born to Run album.

It's not one of Springsteen's best-known songs, which is presumably part of the reason there wasn't a good guitar lesson for it. Also, the song is played on the piano. So I figured it out myself, at least a reasonable facsimile of the album version, and arranged it for guitar, which offers something a little different.

And then I decided that if I had spent the time figuring it out, there might be other guitarists out there who loved the song as much as I do and would like to know how to play it on guitar. So I uploaded it. 

I've since uploaded a couple of other songs, for similar reasons. Either an arrangement I haven't seen online, or a different way of playing a song. I'm not trying to add to the noise, just trying to fill a gap.

I spent twenty years thinking that music was an indulgence I couldn't afford.

Then, when I finally allowed myself to have it back, I discovered that the thing I had missed wasn't simply listening to music or playing an instrument. It was sharing it.

When I was a teenager, that meant figuring out a song by ear, getting the band together in my basement to jam and practice, and then performing it in a club.

Now it means figuring out a song in my basement, and then uploading it to the internet for other players. Kind of like meeting across a digital river.

I'm still not sure how I feel about that.

Except that it leaves me with a residue of sadness.