Scratchin...

Scratchin'

Scratchin'

By Alfred Lehmberg 

Does the reader know what an "Outsider Artist" is? This is not pretentiousness... I'm too old for pretension. 

An Outsider Artist works "outside" formal institutions, has no traditional training, creates from a deeply personal... idiosyncratic vision, often ignores or is unaware of mainstream artistic trends, and produces content that feels... different... raw, original, or unfiltered. After a fashion (in a few of these "fashions," actually), I am that outsider.

The guitar, for example. I can’t play it in any conventional sense. I tried—Gawd knows I tried—though perhaps this mythic instrument and I may have negotiated an uneasy détente, of needs. The guitar agreed to tolerate me, perhaps? I certainly agreed to stop pretending I could play it like everyone else. That much will become obvious to the listener, in any case. 

In truth, the guitar often ends up playing me in some manner, or we arrive at an uneasy cooperation worked out over hoary time? The listener can judge the success of that "arrangement," themselves. Decidedly, it was not an easy cooperation.

I tried hard to play the way everybody else was doing it… but right‑hand picking escaped me, and the left hand wouldn’t chord the way it was supposed to. I suspected my left‑handedness. 

So, play "left‑handed" like Hendrix, reader? Well, that seemed to this person like something happening in an alternate universe where people could learn chords "backwards" when they couldn’t chord them "forwards" in the first place!  Most would chalk that up to a simple lack of talent… I did. Still, I wanted to play. I aspired to play. 

...That may be right up there with needing to play...

I noodled for decades, tried for leading expressions of individual notes… putting my fingers down where they could go comfortably and moving that comfortable placement up and down the fret board… but trying for original sounds that were pleasing… to me. I don't know what the chords are, I only try to remember where the fingers went when I'd chance on an expression or progression pleasing to me. That chance musical discovery is a "peak" experience, in accordance with Maslow, making the endorphins run like a bubbling torrent! Ecstasy!

Remains... a strum is what I have going... a loping strum with a palsied if percussive thumb strike... Conventional picking has ever eluded me... my hand turns into a clumsy Golem’s claw, still. Nails snag strings... or? I'll miss them altogether!

...Onward to snatch some victory from defeat's depressing jaws? That's up to the listener.

Remains. I wanted to make the music that was inside me… with a guitar. I needed that music to be as original as I could make it, even as my wholly instrumental tunes would be inspired, if not derivative, by the likes of Carol King, Tim Buckley,  Joni Mitchell, and Tom Petty et al… I wanted my music to go where THEY go. ...Music that flowed compellingly and then landed conclusively, right? A musical story told to be understood and believed?! 

Aspirations are nothing if they are not lofty. So say the bards...

I don’t do any covers of other songs because I am incapable of remotely performing them as they have been performed. Any attempt would be, and has been, just risible. That said, it all started to come together for me musically after I’d seen “Close Encounters of the 3^rd Kind”! I began by trying to find that ethereal five-note sequence, defining the film, on my fret board.

Noodling around on the neck provided ultimately that it was a D chord, notes struck 212…4, 3… You can almost hear that musical phrase just reading it. That progression of the D chord, somehow discovered in a manner not recalled (Joni Mitchell?), was facilitated by slack-tuning the sixth string to a D... and there it was, all right there in the harmonics of the D-tuned 6th string, itself! "212…4,3" and the best harmonics of "6…5," in answer! I was off! "D" was where my music was!

Then the "peak" experience magic happened for me! Many years ago, I heard about not tuning to 440 Hz… as I had been doing previously, but using 432 Hz, instead! The tone was now palpable! Now, I could feel the lowered frequency of those chords in my GUT, and it was like something startlingly new was opening up in my mind!

I don’t perform, per se, but I record—little fragments minutes long, rough and earnest, the way they arrive. You hear the ones with the least amount of errors in them...

These bits and pieces, if finished songs aspiring to that “flow” and “landing” aforementioned, are on Facebook and YouTube. They are amateur and unpolished but have a sincerity of originality pleasing to this content creator, a content creator not being able to play a guitar… …but wanting to, needing to... so… finding his way. 

…Some people like it. Some of it IS risible… but if I may? Much of it is not. Have a listen... ...and then restore John Ford! Read on.