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The Magic Guitar

non-fiction

By Noel Chrisjohn BensonPublished 3 years ago 13 min read
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It was a crazy night. I didn’t know how much trouble I could get in, I knew LSD was illegal, but I didn’t know EXACTLY how illegal it was, or how rare it was to end up at parties, let alone people doing it. I had no idea. The back of the sheet had a painting, that Jerry Garcia did himself, so I knew that it was made with great care and love. I did it before a number of times, this was one of the most memorable, I had a sheet, and word spread through town that I was the man to talk to, within an hour, I had people I’d never met before who knew my name, and what they were looking for. I was 17, but I was far away from being in school, and the people I was hanging out with were still in school, and not quite used to this drug.

In my state of mind, I watched a guy play the bass, I saw how he was landing on the “dots” on top of the fret board, and figured out that I should be able to play 3 sounds, low, medium, and high, and since I used my hands alot, I was able to pluck and slap the big strings with my thumb, within no time, I was able to play a simple bassline, and the drummer got on and we actually jammed for a few hours at least, and then on and off all night. I was hooked.

From the bass, I found that guitar wasn’t too much different, I learned a bar chord, and many times could figure out how to play riffs from well known songs, at least the main part, it was fun, like entertainment wherever I went, and most of the time, people enjoyed listening to me strum along for hours, even if I just lay on my back and strum chord’s really slowly while looking at the sky. Problem is, I always had to borrow someone elses, and I didn’t want a new one, I wanted something old and reputable that was ugly but sounded great, something I could carry with me everywhere and not worry about it, but it had to be a nice sounding one.

Unbeknownst to me, a friend I had made earlier, Skip, was getting ready to travel to Arizona, and unloaded all of his belongings off to people in Woodstock, the town I lived in. It was almost a landing pad for nomads, hippies, backpackers and festival goers; to stop, rest, and get ready to go out on on another road trip to another location .But they always stopped to fix their cars, go to some parties, get rid of some drugs, acquire new drugs, and it made for a nice concoction of new people to hang out with and meet.

My friend Puppy, who was kind of like the “street shoe shine guy” in the movies who always was the eyes and ears of the town, was sitting in the graveyard like he was in a movie, strumming a really pretty Ovation, much too good for me OR him. I found a friend in the big parking lot, and my house was on Simmons Ct, so we were headed to my place for a bit. Puppy didn’t say much, simply “good afternoon gentlemen”. Me and a friend of mine walked up to him, and he tilted his weathered cowboy hat back and said “Noel, you had mentioned that you wanted me to keep an eye out for a guitar…..”.

I started to feel like a little kid, when their birthday was coming up, and had a hunch they were going to get something great, like a new bike or something. Puppy spoke “Skip left, and he dropped this off, I only had $30 and he took it, if you want this guitar, you just have to give me the $30”. I said “I don’t have $30 right now Puppy”.....”Hey man, I’ll take, I have the money right here”. The guy I was walking with kind of pried between me and my friend. “Fucking dick” is all I could think. I peered down at the beautiful neck, with mother of pearl inlay, and thought it was probably too good for me anyway, and kind of annoyed at the rudeness of the guy I was walking with.

“That’s ok sir, it's not about the money if you can’t tell by now, it's getting a beautiful, playable guitar to my friend Noel here”. I remembered giving him $200 to help him move into his current apartment a few months ago, and thought “wow, I guess that was a good move, I just wanted to help him, but this is the reward for that, what a great trade off”.

He immediately handed me this gift, and I brought it straight to the green in the middle of Woodstock and began to strum it. It was sooooo sexy!! It had a great twangy metallic sound from the Martin strings, and finally I had a guitar with a straight neck, perfect bridge, knobs were in place, nothing wobbled everything was parallel. I played it and played it all day until my fingers were dark grey where my skin would hit the strings.

From then on, me and my guitar were inseparable. I didn't know why I played it, whether I wanted to be in a band, or what, I just knew that I loved to strum it, even without a chord, it felt like a harp. I brought it to rainbow gatherings, to concerts, to sleepovers, to parties, on road trips, everywhere, my guitar was with me. I even did the ultimate hippie trip, and went out to visit a relative in Arizona, with the guitar and a backpack, that was it, played it in the train station in Chicago for 12 hours waiting for the next train, it was awesome.

The part that made the guitar what it was, were the people who picked it up and played it. I had musician friends, who would play Metallica songs, some were gals with great singing voices, some were random hippies that could fire out a great Grateful Dead or Dylan cover. I was always surprised at how it brought a few strangers together and how often it happened. Someone would pick it up, and start playing, and small crowd would temporarily form to listen, some were so good I couldn’t believe they were making it sound like that.

Shortly after, I brought it up to another concert at Marist College. The artist from the original Woodstock was headlining, Richie Havens was one of my favorite performers, his voice made me hopeful and sad at the same time, but usually gave me hope or strength when I’d hear his voice. He had to be in his 60s, and would still play the guitar with this incredible energy, often times breaking the strings at the end by how much he felt for some of the final songs, after all, his biggest one came out randomly by chance at the Woodstock 69 concert.

Suddenly I had an idea, I ran out to the parking lot, and went in my car, and grabbed my guitar. As I got close, he was onstage talking, and my friend Ric was hamming it up while he spoke and got the crowd laughing by interrupting his speech and said charmingly “Ahhhh…...WEEE LOOVE YOU RICHIIIIEEE” to the surprise of the artist and the crowd, everyone one laughed including Mr. Havens, he smiled and shook his head chuckling. At the end of the concert, I found a permanent marker, and there was a crowd around him, getting autographs. I was sort of far back, and he looked like he was sort of done with all the attention and was sort of aiming towards his crew and the van he came in. I held my guitar up, and pen, and Mr. Havens, looked up and reached out his long arm (he was a big guy) and grabbed the neck of my guitar and pulled me through the crowd, and just said “Aahhhhh”, he looked down at the signature, I’m sure he could read “ARLO” as it was readable and he grinned, I had the guitar signed by Arlo Guthrie at a previous concert my friends put on in Woodstock at the Playhouse a few months earlier. I had the marker in another hand, so he didn’t ask what I wanted, he simply signed it “A friend, Richie Havens”.

As time grew on, I went to college, I got accepted into art school at the Institute of American Indian Arts, and I knew I had a lot of energy to bring to the school. After all, many just graduated high school, and I’d already lived a lot of life going to Woodstock 94, and living in a cool town that had a neat reputation. I charmed people, I had a drum, and whenever I got frustrated with life (most of the time) I’d go out and just play my heart out for hours. I made a lot of friends, and became a fixture on the large grass field also known as the “quad”, where people knew there was a guy there, always on a blanket, always with a guitar, boombox and drum, usually playing Jimi Hendrix but always up for anything, often smoking joints and drinking beer, possibly shrooming and just enjoying the sun.

Sadly, I realized that my love for my guitar was starting to diminish. I kind of felt broken hearted, repeatedly, like lost. At a really dark time, I took my guitar to the middle of Santa Fe square, like I did on the Woodstock green. I had no money, I was an alcoholic, still doing ok in school, but not well in general. I looked down, closed my eyes, and played my heart out for hours. I looked up, and there was a rock, with several dollar bills underneath it. I guess people thought I was doing it for money, I just needed to play it, but it worked, I took the money and went and got a 12 pack, and went back to the dorms.

I truly did not feel like any other human at the college or in life. Like you had “people” and then you had “me”. I kept playing the same riffs, over and over again, and didn’t find any comfort in them. I stopped playing my magic guitar. The object that had a life of its own, it came to me in a magical way, now how was I going to rid myself of it, but how could I do this in the same way? The guitar that was always with me. The only thing that seemed to keep me alive in moments where I thought the world was going to end, where there was no safe place for me on the planet, no where. Just the sound of the open “E” would penetrate the dark and silence of any room, canyon, woods, rest stop, anywhere, and seemed to make it holy. The guitar did it, and now was the time for me to part ways with that magic.

I needed money, so at first I asked some cool people in my dorm rooms, a few, but no one had any money. And I didn’t want to sell it to a pawn shop, I wanted it to go to a person in a magical way, the same way it came to me, but apparently selling it wasn’t the way its magic worked.

I was in New Mexico, in a college dorm, surrounded by groundhogs, and lizards, and I was prepared to bring it out and leave it somewhere. I picked a bunch of purple flowers, and tucked them under the strings. I put it out on a desert path, one the students would take across the arroyo to the stores up the street. So I was sure someone would see it and take it.

As I started to forget about it, I went into the shower room, cleaned up, and when I was done, I walked to my dorm room….THERE IT WAS!!!! Sitting on a seat, with the flowers still in it, the first thing I saw as I entered my dorm room was my guitar, sitting propped up on a chair facing me. Apparently, my cousin Terry was walking down the same path earlier that day, and said “What? That's Noel's guitar” so he grabbed it and brought it back to me. Seems like magic right? But that wasn’t good enough. I needed to not hear those sad riffs, and I wanted to free up some space in my life. Every time I played it, I was reminded me of a day where the clouds would come in and start raining. That good feeling you have where you run back to your house, and you know there is a dry place to be, even a nice warm bath or shower and you can watch the dark skies and lightning form above, but now it felt like it was a never ending storm, like you run towards the house and like a mirage, it keeps getting further and further away. And the sunny sounding chords that used to make me think of palm trees, and board walks, started to remind me of a sad memory instead of a good time, time of frustration as a younger teen, something I knew was time to shake off, and start new, or it would be like a tooth that needed to be pulled out or it was going to get worse. This time I was going to try again.

This time I was going to make it obvious. I put the guitar, flowers, and all on the quad, on a picnic table with a note that said “take me”.

That night a younger gal came and knocked gingerly on my door, “Noel? Is there a Noel that’s in here?” More than likely, the young girl heard about the “Indian dorms” the shadowy Kennedy Hall in the middle of the College of Sante Fe, where all the native american artist students lived. You could hear it in her voice, she’d heard stories about me, and the students that were here and before us.

“Hey, I’m Mackenzie, you left your guitar on the quad, I didn’t want anything to happen to it, so I brought it to my room, it’s up there”. She had dark short hair and wore a red dashiki shirt like the ones they wore in the 60’s, “was there a note on it?” I said, “ You can come in, there's few people in here, we’re all cool”. My friend Dan, and my friend Johnny were sitting across from me, playing my Playstation and drinking beers. “Yeah, I read it, are you serious?”. So I explained to her this story I just told you, and she had her mouth wide open the entire time. “Whaaaaat??? Whhaaaaaat??” She was totally floored, and simply said ‘well, really, wow, thank you. I’ve been wanting to play the guitar for a long time, I just never had one”. She hugged me, and to be quite honest, she was probably only there for one semester because I never saw her again.

I’m sure out there somewhere there is a girl who tells people about how she acquired her first guitar, finding it with flowers in it, and a note that said “take me”, it would of been great if she kept it safe, and held onto it for what it was, for the rest of her life. But for some reason, I would bet money, she gave it to another person, and maybe another, and another. At some point, certain inanimate objects truly take on a life of their own, and somehow can travel in their own way, that guitar truly did, and for an object that is not living, it had a better life and got around more than most humans. Of course the name remains simple, but could be no other way, it simply was just a magical guitar.

fact or fiction
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About the Creator

Noel Chrisjohn Benson

Artist, jeweler,sculptor, and writer. Just putting stories out there for people who want to listen. I am also a registered (half) native american from the Onyota:aka, Haudenosaunee from NY

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