The EuroGuitar, the Train, and the Squiggly Light Bulbs

Mack Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com

The EuroGuitar, the Train, and the Squiggly Light Bulbs

“Guitar” is a French word for kindling, but a great many people enjoying listening to the guitar as well as burning it. A very few can play it well, and too, too many fancy they can play it without inflicting acoustic distress, but their haunted families will painfully scream a dissenting view if asked. But you’d have to ask loudly.

The other day I was at the store looking at music albums, which still exist physically as little plastic discs and so can still feature cover art, though much reduced from the grand days of 33 1/3 rpm albums. On any album on the rack in which guitar music was featured, the cover art featured the artist wearing a guitar. One young musician was depicted (1) playing her guitar, (2) posing on a railway line with her guitar slung on her back, and (3) in bed with her guitar.

Photo #1 makes perfectly good sense – the album photograph accurately advertises the fact that the young woman plays the guitar, and so if the customers wants guitar music he can purchase that album.

Photo #2 is less logical and heavily overdone. Everyone who has ever made a noise with guitar strings has had his picture made while posing soulfully on a railway line and wearing his guitar slung over his back. As we all know, rail passenger traffic declined in the early 1960s because the famous trains, such as the Santa Fe’s Chiefs and the Missouri Pacific’s Eagles, were wrecked in a devastating series of collisions with country-and-western singers. It is a little-known secret that this is the reason air travel become popular.

Photo #3 – I’m not going there, folks, other than to wonder if the guitar were a reincarnation of Les Paul.

Flutists, you will observe, do not pose on railway lines with their flutes strapped to their backs. Satchmo wisely kept his trumpet and himself out of the way of The Sunset Limited. Concussionists generally don’t carry their drums, cymbals, gongs, bells, and other crashy-bangy things about at all, and delicate people are grateful for that. I’m not sure about bagpipes. Since bagpipes sound like a muscular Celt squashing a pig to death I suppose the sound could stop a train.

Herbert von Karajan never required his Wagnerian ensembles to muster in a marshaling yard with their spears and helmets, and James Levine would look plumb silly trying to direct “Orange Blossom Special” with that little baton.

Other occupations avoid posturing on railway lines. The plumber does not gaze artistically upon his premiere pipe wrench while trodding the crossties, and the electrician does not cross the rails with his most expensive circuit-tester. A CPA is never shown gazing down the line with a calculator slung over his shoulder, and a nurse never listens for that lonesome whistle while trying out a new chord on her rectal thermometer.

Enviros have yet to stand in the way of trains while arranging garlands of those poisonous squiggly light bulbs around their necks, but one wishes they would.

Libyans seem to be inadvertently standing in the way of The Cannonball Express, and its stops are unscheduled, its destination is unknown, and no one seems to know who the engineer is.

Perhaps someone will take a photograph of a guitarist in the middle of the runway at the airport as he sings a song about growing up poor and barefoot in a broken-down old Boeing 747 and being snubbed by the rich kids in the AirBus A380 down the long and winding dusty long-lost country road through those old cornfields back home in the condominium where Grandma thawed her special recipe PETA-friendly critter-pie in the microwave lit by one of those squiggly light bulbs giving off down-home country radioactivity.

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