전 우울
If I must blame someone, then I’ll stick it to the Koreans. There were two of them in my high school orchestra — the assistant principal bassist, who was two years older than I was, and my stand partner in the first violin section, who was in my grade but a year older.
When you’re fourteen, that extra year makes a big difference. My stand partner was not only much better at sight reading, but also smarter, more well-read, more mature, and more self-aware. Two of the freshman second violinists were obsessed with him. (He had also charmed a violist and a cellist.) He didn’t date them; he would just make them laugh and casually tell them how beautiful he thought they were.
This guy was an outsider. His family had moved from New Jersey to our little white-bread suburb along Route 92. He came from a louder place than we were used to, and the tapes he shared were strange — Rachmaninoff, New Order, Eddie Murphy, Run-D.M.C., Guns N’ Roses. He got an exemption from reading To Kill a Mockingbird in English class because he had read it when he was eleven. (So he sat in the corner and wrote his book report on The Mill on the Floss.) The jocks would be in the hall talking about Caddyshack II, and this guy was asking why no one had seen Polanski’s Frantic. He was an impressive kid and a loyal friend.
One day at school he tells me he’s got something for me to listen to. He hands me two CDs — volumes one and two. The cover photograph shows a man in a pinstripe suit and a fedora holding a guitar. The man’s left eyelid is drooping a little, but you don’t notice it much because of his smile.
The instructions to me are clear: “Make sure you tape this.”
Shortly after this exchange, I find out that the other Korean, the bassist, plays guitar. He drives a Volvo 240 sedan with a hand-cranked sunroof, and he likes to speed while listening to British and Southern rock — stuff that I’m not too familiar with at the time. He proceeds to make me a curious mixtape; the thirty minutes of Side B contain five versions of the same song (spanning 1968 through the late ’70s), by Cream, Derek & the Dominoes, the Allman Joys, and Clapton.
So I am fourteen and I have these tapes — courtesy of the Koreans — linked by a song that was first recorded by a black man in 1936. It is something for me to figure out. A couple years later, it would lead me to a guitar.
Me and my blues — now you know who is to blame.
