Da Lair 666

[12yearplan]

rip Tom

 

 
Songfacts: What is the hardest thing to teach somebody about guitar?
 
Lloyd: Oh, it's an impossible thing to teach them how to have the very elusive it. You've heard the phrase, "they've got the magical it." I've tried all my life to transmit that to another soul and it can't be done: you either have it or you don't.
 
There's a saying in alchemy: You need gold to make gold. You have to have a small reservoir of it to achieve the it-ness, and that's impossible to transmit. You can transmit technical stuff and you can hope for the best, and people do get better, but there's a certain innate... I don't know if I want to call it talent. It goes along with the talent but it's bigger than simple talent, and unless you have it, you're not going to get it.
 
Songfacts: But if you have that in you, can you benefit from a lesson of some kind?
 
Lloyd: Yeah, you can. All kinds of doors open for you. I once spent some time with Jeff Tweedy, who was Wilco, and he has his own it. We did some touring together - Wilco and Matthew Sweet and I - and his wife flew me into Chicago to spend the day with him and to teach him some guitar, ostensibly to give him a guitar lesson, which lasted about eight hours. We hung out, went to the studio, and I also tried to teach him some things about music and its theory, like the circle of fourths/fifths. I think he put that to good use, but he already had it.
 
Songfacts: There's such a mythology around the self-taught guitarist, but sometimes you forget that if you're self-taught you still need to learn.
 
Lloyd: That's right.
 
Lloyd: Well, I've always been into science. I went to an all-science high school and I'm still into science, whether it's chemistry, anthropology, biology, physics, astronomy. And I've always been into the space program. When I was 15 or 16 I was trying to figure out what I was going to do with my life, and I knew that I wasn't going to be one of the people who went to the moon, and I wasn't going to climb Mount Everest. I was not going to go to Antarctica and visit the North and South Poles as an adventure, and I wasn't going to be a yogi in India standing on his head for 12 years. So what could I do? I decided to become a guitarist.
 
At the same time, I would like to be one of those adventurers who goes out on a limb and goes to the moon, so this was a way for me to put it into musical terms. I've had the opening riff for a long time, trying to organize a song around it, and finally this sort of spoken dialogue developed about being in a spacecraft going outside the solar system.
 
Voyager 1 has left the influence of the sun behind - it's in interstellar space, which is the first man-made object ever to leave the influence of the solar system behind. I had that as the back plate - the idea-generating force behind The Countdown - that there was a way to get past the solar system. Not only to leave Earth, but leave the solar system behind.
https://www.songfacts.com/blog/interviews/television-founder-richard-lloyd