Should've Learned to Play Guitar

If I have any regrets in life, outside of not giving Nancy S. the high hard one when she begged me to back in college (seriously, what the fuck was I thinking?), it's that I never learned to play the guitar.

Because if you can play the guitar, you're getting laid. Period.

It's the one thing that can help you overcome almost any shortcoming. Not particularly attractive? That didn't stop Motley Crue's Mick Mars -- who looks like a waxwork dummy from the Smithsonian's Neanderthal exhibit -- from landing a twenty-four year old German masseuse. Something of an asshole? Axl Rose has his pick of underwear models. Christ, Keith Richards has been officially dead for about fifteen years, but he can still have all the teenage pussy he wants. Because he's Keith Richards, goddam it. And he plays the guitar.

You don't even have to be a particularly famous rock star, either. A fifty year old guy in a corner bar trying to pick up twentysomething girls is downright pathetic. But strap a guitar on that geezer, and chances are, by night's end, there'll be at least half a dozen chicks fighting for a lift home in his Lincoln Town Car.

For further evidence of the magic of guitars, check out this clip from Elvis Costello's Spectacle talkshow. A grandfatherly singer named Jesse Winchester, whom I'd never heard of before this show, reduces every woman in the place to loose change with a very simple, guitar-strummed tune. If he was the janitor in the local high school, he wouldn't get a second glance. But look how in this segment he has my girlfriend, Neko Case, in tears!



Typically, I'm the wise-ass making sport of old people. But I have to tip my hat here. If there was any pussy to be had that evening, rest assured, Jesse Winchester was having it.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have that guitar lesson at noon...