Guitarist Funny Quotes

I knew that being funny always came in second to musicians. (In the world of music, there’s a hierarchy, too—it’s my contention that bass players tend to get laid first, because they’re stolid and cool and their fingers move in gentle yet powerful ways [except for Paul Mc-Cartney; he never got laid first]; drummers come next because they’re all power and grit; then guitarists because they get those fancy solos; then, weirdly, the lead singer, because even though he’s out there up front, he never quite looks fully sexy when he has to throw his head back and reveal his molars to hit a high note.) Whatever the correct order, I knew I was way behind Eddie Van Halen—not only was he a musician, which means he was able to get laid more easily than someone who is funny, but he was also already married to the object of my desire.

Based on the findings of a recent qualitative survey carried out in Switzerland, in fact, most of us have up to ten discreet interdependent social identities—identities, the study concludes, which are often in conflict.16 Let’s imagine a middle-aged bank teller living in Pensacola, Florida. He is a father, a son and a husband. He is a Floridian. He is a bank employee. He is also a bicyclist and a recreational runner, and at night, drinking with his friends, he is “the funny one.” He is also a vegetarian, an amateur guitarist, and on weekends he helps coach soccer at his daughter’s high school. Then there are his online identities, including his Facebook, Twitter and Instagram selves. Most surprising is that the man’s ethical mind-set, honesty, sociability and even level of social engagement changes from personality to personality. Imagine that in his professional role, for example, he may be primed to dissembling, or outright deceit, while simultaneously, as a dad, he finds dishonesty repellent.

In 1969 the Swedish folklorist Bengt Olsson and his partner, Peter Mahlin, spent a summer loitering around Beale Street in Memphis, interviewing and recording blues musicians. I'm certain it was hot, thankless work. In 1970, Olsson compiled some of those interviews into a short, now long-out-of-print book called Memphis Blues. In it, Olsson recounts a conversation with the guitarist Furry Lewis, who was born in Greenwood, Mississippi, in 1893 and come up playing blues with the Memphis legend W.C. Handy. Olsson never did much editorializing on the page - he just presented the material he'd collected - but there's a quote toward the end of the Lewis chapter that's become lodged permanently in my cortex, repeating endlessly like a koan: 'The people I used to play around with, they all done died out,' Lewis tells Olsson. 'And sometimes I get scared myself, 'cause it look like to me it gonna be mine next. You know, it's a funny thing, but you can do a thing for a-many years, and all of them die out and you still here,' he continued. 'And you know, that's more than a notion if you come up and just think about it.' I had thought about it. And I knew they were all still here, together, etched into shellac, tucked into sleeves. I could hear them.

Radiohead! Thom (we called him “Thom-with-an-H”) was cute, but it was the guitarist Jonny Greenwood we were really hot for. He was skinny and pale, with brown hair hanging in his eyes, long fingers, and terrible posture. We sat onstage and screamed every time he looked at us, which wasn’t too often (I think he was afraid).