A Small Price to Play – Charles March

October 17, 2020

I’ve always been alternatively tuned;
At least that’s my six string theory, and explanation of the intonation.
I became a punk, and got into some pretty hardcore stuff.
At one point, the crepitating of crack was the only rock ‘n’ roll I listened to.
I had come to a tuning fork in the road, and knew I needed to get back in touch with some healing frequencies.
It sounds psychoacoustic, but my clairvoyant clarinet told me that it was time to get a whole new musical muse.
So by some Christmas miracle, I was vouchsafed a fretboard.
From the first time that she plopped her ebony, apple bottom body onto my lap and strapped her intimate noose around my neck, I knew it was one love at first sight singing; even though her repertoire consisted of mostly skank songs up until then.
I was never again a soloist speaker in my own little cabinet after she started to amplify my feelings.
And as a result, she banded my eclectic/electric friends and I together like an orchestral arrangement.
She helped me to stop using substances, since her wealth of effects became the only thing of substance to me.
Even though she wasn’t a twelve string, she helped me to work a perfect twelfth.
Her pickups always muted my depressive overtones and melancholic melody.
She tempered my tenebrous timbres.
She brought my lymph nodes back into harmony with the light touching of her nodes.
She pushed the envelope of my spectral soul.
She released my tension by putting tension on her strings.
She let me be picky with her.
She always gave me the feedback I was looking for.
She helped me leave the distortion of the city, and enter into the reverb of a suburb.
She put my pain on a sliding scale.
I would never fret with her around.
There were no chords barred with her.
She took away my whammy, ladder bar blues.
She was the bridge to a new beginning.
We sure had some classical moments together.
It was all soul music with her.
But the boisterous bending of her fender strings on the radio caused a car crescendo.
Maybe that’s why my Dad still thinks she’s to blame for me losing my way.
Whereas I always tell him the same thing…it was a small price to play.