He didn’t like to talk about personal troubles of his own very often, feeling that the world is a bitter enough place without adding his complaints to the conversation. We remained close friends over the years. This move was the right thing to do, and as far as I know, he never regretted making it. He took the litigation skills he developed at that corporate law firm and, taking a big cut in pay, went to work defending the environment as the lead lawyer in a branch office of The Earth’s Law Firm, fighting the same powerful world destroying scoundrels he used to represent. After a relatively short time, he changed sides. He got a highly paid job at a prestigious law firm which involved, among other things, defending toxic polluters against lawsuits from tree huggers. He worked hard, graduated at the top of his specialized high school class, went on to Harvard and then Columbia for his law degree. It struck me as a shallow vision of the good life, even at fourteen, but who the hell was I to judge? To each his own, or as we learned to say in our Junior High School French class “ a chacun son gout“. His vision of success, he explained (as I smoked a joint he would no longer share - he had extra credit homework to complete), was coming home every night to a beautiful home where his beautiful wife would hand him a perfect drink as he relaxed, admiring his sunset view, as the final touches were put on his gourmet dinner.
With the benefit of hindsight professional#
He explained to me, when we were adolescents, that he had to work hard in school, to graduate at the top of his class, to maximize his chances for getting into a top school that would be a ticket to professional success and ultimate happiness. I had a friend, since Junior High School, who became a locally well-known lawyer. Particularly in light of how things ended for that beautiful guitar, and their long friendship. As a sign of respect and friendship, the songwriter would have been well advised to give some credit to his friend for his major help on a bunch of his tunes. Finally in a bout of mania he fucked up the guy’s expensive, vintage guitar (this guy I’m talking about, not George Harrison).įootnote: credit or no credit was purely academic since not one of the songwriter’s songs was ever published, let alone performed and monetized. The songwriter, like Lennon and McCartney before him (when they gave Harrison no credit for his many great arrangement ideas and melodic contributions, like the brilliant, soulful song-making opening riff in “And I Love Her”) never gave him any songwriting credit. The songwriter always viewed his friend as a side kick, his loyal accompanist. He often added inventive keyboard parts that greatly enhanced his friend’s songs. The occasionally crazed man was a fairly good musician who could sometimes come up with cool parts for the songs of his friend the songwriter. It makes no sense in the cold light of pure Reason, but I understood part of the rage that made the gleeful desecration seem momentarily justified to my out of control friend.
As for the guitar he destroyed, I knew the back story right away. With hindsight I came to understand how deep my friend’s reservoir of rage was, but that was a lesson I’d learn much later. The guy in the guitar shop just shook his head sadly when he saw the brutality of what had been done to this wonderful instrument.
With the benefit of hindsight full#
Its remains were then left floating in a bathtub full of soapy water covered with hair the nut had maniacally clipped from his partially shaved head. The neck was violently pried off, splintering some more great wood. The lovely guitar, a pleasure to play, had its F-holes gouged out with a file, its mellow Humbucker pickups pried out, it’s perfectly formed, smooth mahogany colored hollow body partially bashed in. I used to be good friends with a cheerful madman, hospitalized periodically for bouts of mania, who inflicted terrible, fatal damage on his old friend’s beautiful Gibson ES-335 (BB King’s Lucille was an ES-335).
A seemingly small thing you didn’t see as any kind of problem can come into focus as an important clue to what went wrong, once the entire situation is in the past tense. Something you had no way to understand as significant when it happened can become clear as part of a pattern you can only see looking back. Sometimes it is impossible to see a thing clearly, if you you feel a certain way about it, until you can look at it with the benefit of hindsight.
0 kommentar(er)
