Miguel de Maria -> RE: Todd's latest Buleria (Jun. 29 2004 22:53:29)
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Some people can master the guitar, but not life. They get mad because people want to buy CDs of teeny-boppers but can't appreciate the true skill they have painstakingly developed. Those people get madder and more bitter as the years go by, until they are absolutely intolerable. The sad fact of their lives drowns all the good they do in acrimony. Their stubbornness and unconventional nature helped them to excel at the solitary art of playing the guitar, but they can never get "over the hump" and realize how to excel at life, at career. I have a friend here in Phoenix like that. He is a lot better than Todd, and he lives in a trailer with two cats, and everyone who hears him play is enchanted, regular person or musician, but he's intolerable and angry and will probably go to his grave thus. When in the presence of people like that, it's tempting to subject them to hero-worship. But they don't appreciate you for it. They just get pissed at you if you don't... the guitar is their only source of power in life, so they use it negatively. Once I was poking fun at Miguel, my friend who is in this boat, and his retort was that I would never learn how to play guitar. Remind you of comments such as: "I can tell you're not a good player, good players don't say those kind of things," or "You obviously don't have any talent and are bitter at those who do." That's how these people are. They are toxic. When you kiss their butt and compliment them and try to get them to make albums, go on tours, etc., they just despise you for it. You enable them in the same way that abused spouses of alcoholics sometimes enable their partners to live their dissolute lifestyles. I have personal experience of musicians like this, and they live out their personas to a "T." It's a sad thing, but you just have to keep them at an arm's length or they will try to crush you. I have been burned too many times now... and I try to warn people from making the same mistake. By the way, I don't look at it as a positive, necessarily, that pro-level guitarists hang out on amateur forums. It shows that they are not accepted and respected within the community of pro-level guitarists. Big fish in little pond syndrome.
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