Some men hit the mid-life crisis and buy a red convertible. When I hit 45 recently, I bought a red electric guitar. (Full disclosure clause: I bought the red convertible four years ago.)
It's a cheap Strat copy, but I love it. I started playing guitar when I was 17, in the height of the rock years, but I was never interested in anything other than acoustic instruments. When I picked up the mandolin a few years later, my acoustic fate was sealed. I just had no interest in all that electric sound. So what happened? I'm not sure. Maybe it was taking my 16-year-old nephew around last year as he shopped for an electric guitar. "Don't you want to play it, Uncle Johnny?" he would ask, offering me a Strat or a Tele or a Les Paul. I'd shake my head no, not because I didn't want to, but because I wanted to so much.
Suddenly I recognized something in myself, something that frightened me. I was being seduced by the electric siren! What would happen to my acoustic soul? I would lose my purity if I even touched one of those beasts!
Well, here's the progress report after a couple of weeks of rocking out. I bought a book with the ridiculous title of "Make Yourself Dangerous on Rock Guitar." (Can you imagine anything like that for our beloved mandolin?) I learned the blues scale patterns that fit on the guitar so well. (I already knew about these, sort of, but I really started to apply them and play with them.) I got a little Pignose amp and a multi-effects pedal, and now I'm flanging and distorting and phase shifting and chorusing and all this other stuff I don't understand but recognize immediately from a million rock songs. And Lord help me, I'm having the time of my life! There's something incredibly powerful about strapping that red guitar on and banging out power chords. No wonder this grips teenage boys so deeply, no wonder it seduces a middle-aged man so easily. This electricity stuff is pure, raw, sexy power.
And then I happen to look over there and see my little mandolin.
When I pick up that little wooden instrument, I feel my soul become a little more peaceful. It soothes me to play it. I have put down the machine and picked up nature. I have come home. But then it hits me that the mandolin is just as much a machine as an electric guitar is, just as much a product of engineering and science. And they're both natural too; they're both a combination of nature and human production. They both came from a tree, they both have metal, they both have been shaped my machine and by hand.
Here's the shock: letting myself be seduced by the "evil" electric guitar has made me understand the mandolin better, made me play it better. As I was running through downstroke blues licks on the electric, I instantly knew better than I ever had just why Bill Monroe was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Bill was a pure rocker, as far back as 1946 or so! (At this week's Sunday night jam, I played a break on "Bluegrass Stomp" that astounded even me. Fred the banjo player looked over in astonishment and asked where that had come from? It had come from my seduction by the electric guitar, and what that brought back to me of Bill Monroe, something he had taught several generations of rockers, something I had resisted for a very long time, something that I now had in my fingers, a direct but delayed gift from the Father of Bluegrass.)
So what does this have to do with the Tao of the mandolin? The Tao urges us not to limit ourselves. Don't put ourselves into ruts. Explore extremes. Go all the way out on the edge. Embrace contraries. Grow. Grow until we die.
I'm not sorry I waited this long to let myself go. Maybe if I had done this earlier, the electric side would have taken me over. Now there is no way that it can. That little wooden mandolin has reached into the very roots of my being. But that other side has much to teach me, and I was limiting myself not to explore it. Rock the Tao!
© 1999 John Bird
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