You know, if I had to do it all over again I would have focused on playing the bass rather than the guitar. I think I am more temperamentally suited to the bass, and after all these years I am still just an intermediate-level guitar player. Bass, piano, and percussion should really be the package.

That being said, I do love the guitar as an instrument. It is a slick, shit-hot instrument, in fact. I especially love to play the bottleneck style repertoire since it marks a lesser known body of work.

I was just reading a part of Kenny Werner’s Effortless Mastery in which he talks about the anxiety people bring to the practice of playing an instrument. His observation is that people feel good about their instrument as long as they are at least 15 feet away from it, but as soon as they pick it up the anxiety kicks in. He gives the example of Coltrane’s search for meaning through his drug use in the 50s and 60s, only to find satisfaction within himself. Coltrane’s work ethic is one thing - and it certainly was monumental - but his level of personal satisfaction with his playing definitely marks him as a human.

I absolutely identify with the anxiety kicking in when I pick up the instrument. I love gigging, but I hate practice a rehearsal, particularly because it highlights what I don’t do well. By the time it comes to performance I’ve worked out the kinks in my playing. The big problem here, though, is that I don’t gig nearly often enough. I would love to be playing regular gigs in a band or two, but my social anxiety keeps me from making the kinds of contacts and forging the kinds of relationships that make gigging possible. In the end, it is my own personality that trips me up.

What I would love to do is to work up my bottleneck repertoire to the point where I could play gigs in a trio or some other kind of small group. I love the roaring sound of Hound Dog Taylor’s groups, so stripped down and raw that you feel every note as it teeters on the edge of abandon. Taylor’s playing is all about the party that’s going on, feeling the raw energy of the crowd and feeding it back to them. What would be really cool, in fact, would be to be able to produce that kind of an energy in performance while directing it to the kind of substantive audience interaction that a composer like Fela created with his audiences. Hound Dog Taylor meets Fela. That would be very cool.

Ideally, I would like to have a group with a singer where I could play the guitar and sing backup vocals. Let the guitar fill out the sound with a spare bass player and a tasty drummer. I would play solos that are closer to Taylor’s and Muddy Waters’s styles, eschewing the accurate, always-in-key approach. Not that Derek Trucks’s style isn’t also ab fab - I just can’t hope to rise to that kind of playing. Personally, I am more drawn to a raw, shaking-your-spine kind of energy and tone. In fact, let me get back to it just now rather than simply writing about it.