Bob-Dubery
Will Hodgkinson is a respectable member of the community in his 30s with a 9-5, wife and kids. Then he decides to buy a guitar. More than that he decides, having never played a lick in his life, that he is going to play a gig before time runs out and sets himself a goal of playing a short set before an audience 6 months after buying his first guitar. If life isn't difficult enough already he also decides to blag some lessons from his various guitar heroes. And he keeps a record of all the ensuing goings on.
I found this a very entertaining read. Hodgkinson's writing style is relaxed and readable. It offers interesting insights into why people want to play music, and why they keep on playing. The author eventually decides that his performing debut will be within the context of a band, so there's interesting insights on the dynamics of starting up a band with people you thought you knew well.
Hodgkinson has a good eye for the amusing and/or insightful anecdote, and keeps the language in the book away from the nerdy, inner-circle world of guitaring. You could give this book to somebody who knows very little about guitars or music and they would be able to understand and enjoy it (my Better 5/8 is currently reading my copy and having a lot of fun with it).
Some of the most interesting parts of the books are the sections that deal with Hodgkinson's attempts (often surprisingly successful) to cadge lessons and wisdom from some of his guitar heroes. So he gets lessons from Bert Jansch, Johnny Marr, Roger McGuinn and a couple of other people including the notoriously reclusive late Davey Graham. I enjoyed these passages a lot - Hodgkinson's treatment of these luminaries is always respectful but he doesn't go into tongue-lolling hero-worship mode, he presents them as people.
The best example of this is the chapter that deals with the evening that he spent in the company of Davey Graham. It's easy to fall back on cliches with Graham - the unreliability, the unpredictable moods, nervous breakdowns and so on. Hodgkinson sees a little deeper than that. Davey Graham is clearly not the sort of person you meet every day, but Hodgkinson gives a rounded portrait of the man he clearly considers to be a music hero without steering clear of Graham's obvious eccentricity and without condemning or patronising him.
An entertaining read. I won't give the ending away ? I enjoyed this much more than I thought I would.
Guitar Man by Will Hodgkinson
Published by Bloomsbury
ISBN 978 0 7475 8564 0
