Tuesday, January 9, 2018

Beauty to brokenness




     I'd never heard of McPherson guitars before I went to see Trace Bundy play at the Old Town School of Folk Music last October. There's no reason why I should; I'm not keeping careful track of music in general or guitars in particular. I wouldn't have noticed these were any different but for their distinctive bean-shaped, off-center sound holes.
     Bundy played an easygoing, virtuosic set, which had him keeping time to himself by beating on the body of the guitar, and deploying, then tossing away, a variety of capos, which otherwise were perched on the head of the guitar like splayed fingers, making the guitars look a little like Struwwelpeter's hands. He mentioned that the black guitar was made of carbon composite, which seemed something new.
     Before introducing his last song, "Joy & Sorrow," he said something along the lines of "There is a deep beauty to brokenness."
     At which point, his guitar somehow failed—I wasn't sure if it was the microphone pick-up, or what, but he tried to shift to the second one, and that failed too. The audience couldn't hear.
     So he shifted to a different song and played it acoustically, without amplification. And he was right, there was a deep beauty to it, though not the one intended. I don't blame the guitars, which can run up to $20,000 a throw. Sometimes things go right by going wrong. Assuming it wasn't all part of the act. If it was, we fell for it.
     

8 comments:

  1. “””So he shifted to a different song and played it acoustically, without amplification. And he was right, there was a deep beauty to it, though not the one intended.”””

    A man,
    a wooden box,
    long board glued to one end,
    gut strings stretched across:
    Bach Suites for Unaccompanied Cello,
    Proof of God’s Existence,
    OM

    Money,
    electronics,
    electronic media,
    a seductive, yet degrading whore:

    Rather,
    face to face,
    the warmth of conversation,
    the softness of skin,
    the sweetness of kisses.
    OM

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  2. Jimmy Page would have liked that guitar.

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  3. The number “pi” and the Euler Number “e” – did they exist before human beings?

    What is this “DEEP BEAUTY” of which you speak?

    Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and Bach’s Suites for Unaccompanied cello and Coltrane’s My Favorite Things: Merely a fulfillment of a biological imperative? Better than Mary Had a Little Lamb? A mere matter of convention?

    Beauty, love, friendship –that transcendent worm in the apple
    Om

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  4. I don't know about beauty in brokenness, but the attractiveness of imperfection has been celebrated by poets. Notably, Robert Herrick observed:
    "A sweet disorder in the dress
    Kindles in clothes a wantonness"
    and concluded:
    "A careless shoestring in whose tie
    I see a wild civility
    Do more bewitch me than when art
    Is too precise in every part."

    And then there were the Gershwin brothers:

    "The way you wear your hat.
    The way you sing off key.
    The memory of all that.
    No, no they can't take that away from me."

    Tom

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    Replies
    1. Yep. It's like loving Neil Young. Which I do.

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    2. Psychedelic Pill is kick-ass driving music. You can cover a lot of miles with that CD. Check out his first memoir. Fascinating.

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  5. Speaking of broken. It does not bother me, having to go to the SunTimes site to read the entire piece, since they paid for it. What I do find irritating is their site fighting my attempts to return to yours.

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