Playin' in the band

Sometimes I've been a guest player for the fabulous Bunker Brothers. It's a thrill when we mesh and produce something worth listening to -- even if it's something only we listen to. We don't do it half often enough as far as I am concerned. We combined in separate duos recently and worked on such things as "Danko/Manuel" and "Leaving Trunk."
I deeply appreciate it, Bros Bunker, and look forward to the next installment.

It's a long affaire I've had with the guitar. What little real talent I ever had on the instrument is dissipating now with age and accompanying carpal tunnel syndrome, arthritis and God knows what else. I never really had that much to begin with; though not from lack of trying. Anyone observing my attitude toward the instrument and the joyful noise I make with it would think I was a serious professional musician. Would that I were; but, unfortunately, the many inadequacies with which I started the violin carried easily over to the guitar.
This often puts me in an embarrassing situation. I've been making CDs of myself playing multi-track guitars, harmonica, violin (sometimes), and vocals. Each "album" seems a little better than the last, even though it's 99% covers of stuff the original of which is so, so much better -- leaving me with the question "who'd ever want to listen to this crap?"
And yet, music, to be complete, requires an audience. I do have a tiny fan base and they are all very kind and supportive and flattering whenever they have anything at all to say.
A few of the ones whose criticism I value the most never say anything at all, which is probably quite merciful. Yet the silence hurts, because there is too much damned ego tied up in trying to please someone's ear -- and that ego is quite fragile.

Sometimes it's an appealing thought to convert the guitars to kindling, though I'd hope that I'd give them away rather than destroy them. It's amazing how they get into the blood.
It was listening to Joan Baez play bluegrass back before the 60s got so colorful that got me started on the instrument nearly half a century ago. Soon, almost a year before I heard the man himself, I was picking out Baez versions of Dylan songs. Somewhere in there I picked up on blues in E which morphed into 3-chord rock -- about the time that the Stones, The Band and Traffic started doing songs that I was compelled by unseen forces to learn to play myself, so urgently that it seemed a matter of life and death.
San Francisco compounded the sickness. I spent many a night in flophouses or out on Telegraph Hill hammering away on a $25 pawnshop special trying to sound like a one-man version of Jefferson Airplane or Grateful Dead -- or Neil Young or Taj Mahal before I knew who either of them were.

That's still, basically, all I'm doing. I think maybe I still don't get it: I can't walk by a guitar without picking it up.