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Philandering Fingers

The Source

I can’t think of a polite way to say this, but guitar players tend to be polygamous. Two-timing. A bit unfaithful. Whereby the typical piano player is monogamous. . . loyal. . . committed. Perhaps I should explain. . . I’ve worked with a great many musicians and have learned a bit of their ways and quirks. My very unofficial sampling has found that the average guitar player owns at least three guitars while the typical pianist is the owner of but one piano. Chances are good that a piano player is still playing his first piano while the guitarist has long since dumped his first love and moved onto a lovelier or perhaps more curvaceous model. After all, the guitar didn’t get its shape by accident. In the guitar business the name of the game is usually “trade up.” He’ll spend his life buying one guitar while salivating for the next model on the scale, scrimping, trading, then finally buying the instrument of his dreams until the next better model comes along. The pianist will tend to cherish his first love no matter what flashier models come his way. I have a friend who’s a professional musician. Barry owns over 130 guitars. This seems promiscuous to me. What do you do with 130 guitars other than tell people that you own 130 guitars? How many can you pack into your car to do a gig at the Missouri State Fair? Can you really remember the personality details of 130 stringed instruments? I own but one piano and I wouldn’t trade it for anything, and I certainly wouldn’t display my unfaithfulness to the instrument by purchasing 129 more. I know my piano well enough to realize that it has feelings and that it appreciates my faithfulness. My dear old piano was shipped over from Germany many years ago, played on the radio by a man from Quincy who ran out of funds and was forced to sell her to my mother who then passed the piano along to me. I defy any guitarist to come up with a lineage like that. Okay, you probably can, but I’m writing this column and you’re not. The point is that I have a personal attachment to the instrument and even imagining trading her off would be . . . well, unimaginable. If you’d offer me a new Steinway grand I’d take it for a spare, but my sweet little upright would always be first in my heart. Our Spirit of Peoria riverboat has three keyboards, one on each deck. The upper Texas deck houses the calliope that is really not a piano. In fact, I’m not sure what it is. Some would say a demon. The lower deck houses our boat’s dining room and a lovely Hammond piano with mellow tones suited to prime rib dinners and candlelight cruises. But the second deck is where most of the entertainment takes place and on the fore end of the hall sits a lovely old girl whose felt hammers long ago turned into rocks, giving it just the right honky-tonk sound needed for cruising the river. When I first took the job the former pianist told me about the piano, “She’s really flamboyant on the top end but her bottom is a bit muddled, but who cares because her middle octaves can be heard all over the boat.” Trying describing a guitar’s tone in such loving detail. Perhaps it’s the very fact that piano’s have such distinct personalities that causes their owners to become so faithful and unwilling to fill their houses with 129 similar instruments. Pianists will sit around in their Homes for Decaying Musicians and talk about the great instruments they’ve played over their career. “Oh, there was this honey down in New Orleans that. . . Yeah, but that little flophouse in Hannibal had the sweetest little baby grand . . . But you should have felt the keys on that honey at the First Baptist Church.” Piano players may age to where they forget where they put their teeth but they’ll never forget the touch of their first keyboard. Of course not all pianos are sweethearts and a genuinely bad piano can be just as memorable as a gem, but I’ll hesitate to go into those since I once wrote a Source column about the Ten Worst Pianos in Jacksonville and the members of a local church got a bit miffed. . . then purchased a new piano. The town also has some really great ones like the piano at Centenary Methodist that absolutely sings along with you when you play, and instrument at Grace that fills the space with such sweet sound even though it’s located on a tilting floor and I’m always afraid it’s going to roll backwards and crush me in the middle of the Doxology. Okay, to be fair I should give the guitar players of the world a chance to respond to this, but please send your rebuttal column to the editor of this paper and not me. I can’t be persuaded. After all, I’m a pianist. I’m faithful.