Commentary: A couple of years ago something happened and I fell in love with the guitar all over again.
Opinion content—editorials, columns and guest commentaries—is created independent of news reporting and is exclusive to subscribers.Author Stephen J. Lyons, then 18, plays his Guild D-35 guitar at Salt River Canyon in Arizona, circa 1974.
It’s open mic night at the Hitching Post bar in rural southern Ohio, and the joint fills with factory workers, cubicle toilers and a biker who looks the part, right down to his long wallet chain and his leathers. “So, I suppose there is a Harley in your life?” I ask him. “Yup,” he answers looking elsewhere. “I drive a Subaru Forester,” I joke. He walks away.Guitar cases sprawl across a pool table. I have tuned my 50-year-old acoustic guitar and placed my name on the sign-up sheet. My wife and friends settle in with drinks and bar food, expecting to be entertained by, well, me. I think I am ready, but instead of reviewing the lyrics to my set, another, more disagreeable refrain repeats itself:Until recently, I had abandoned the guitar. I would come home exhausted and tired from staring at a computer monitor for eight hours. The idea of picking up the six-string was replaced by the couch and the remote. My guitar — my constant companion since the age of 10 when my mom marched me down to the Fret Shop in Hyde Park for lessons — sat there gathering dust while the hard calluses on my fingertips regressed to office worker soft.Author Stephen J. Lyons, then 10, plays his Sears guitar in his family's apartment in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood, circa 1965. My guitar deserved better. Not only was it the gateway to music and to the fellowship of friends, but also to the political. In the early 1970s, when the Vietnam War was still raging, I attended a Phil Ochs concert in an intimate courtyard at Northwestern University. My high school girlfriend accompanied me, with the following message embroidered on the back of her Levi jacket: “Women are not chicks!” In his leather jacket, his movie star good looks, and his defiant in-your-face manner, Ochs was the coolest cat I had ever seen. After anti-Vietnam War activist Jane Kennedy spoke, Ochs sang all the folk hymns of that time: “The Ballad of Joe Hill,” “Draft Dodger Rag” and “I Ain’t Marching Anymore.” I was hooked. I could see that these singer-songwriters, armed with only a guitar and some verses, could reach deep into hearts and minds of listeners and spur them to tears, anger and action. I wanted to do that too. I left Chicago at 17 and headed west to my own Colorado Rocky Mountain High because, well, John Denver told me to do just that. With my trusty Guild D-35, I slept under the stars in Utah using my guitar case as a pillow. I hitchhiked from Colorado to San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury . Somewhere along the path into middle age, the reality of making a living chipped away at the idealism that sprung from “three chords and the truth,” to quote Harlan Howard. But a couple of years ago something happened and I fell in love with the guitar all over again. The major change wasn’t simply leaving my soul-killing office job and choosing to work from home as a writer. No, I wasn’tI have a friend who once said that at some point in our lives — when we are much younger than in our 60s — we form a fixed notion of who we are. That definition, according to my friend, stalks us through the years. Since my early 20s I had always thought of myself as a writer and a guitarist, and, admittedly, I thought I was kind of special. The normal twists and turns of life chipped away at all that youthful narcissism. Practical matters, e.g., employment, food, rent, marriage, kids, divorce, have a way of getting your undivided attention.Through it all, the idea of the person I had built in my early 20s still stood. But when I returned to playing my guitar I had a more realistic idea of what I could do in the remaining third of my life. By then many of my mentors were gone, including Ochs who had tragically died by suicide in 1976 at age 35. I knew at my age of 62, I could never achieve what he and so many others had achieved, but I could keep their music alive. So I tuned up my old guitar, endured the pain of toughening my fingertips, watched countless hours on YouTube and slowly began to rediscover my voice — and my courage. My debut in southern Ohio was a success. I had set the bar low. I played easy, three-chord ballads. Not everyone was paying attention, but no one walked out, no bottles were thrown in my direction and even the biker listened. The Hitching Post will never be the Grand Ole Opry, but on that night in Ohio I revisited the spirit I felt so long ago when I truly believed that a singer with simply a guitar and an honest song could stir the hearts and minds of not only an audience, but maybe an entire country.
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