As a kid, I would sometimes go with my dad to the drugstore to pick up our copy of the Sunday New York Times. The drugstore only stocked it by request, so to pick up your Times, you had to walk through the store to a back room with a row of little hooks on the wall, take a small metal washer from the hook with your name on it, bring the washer up to the counter and give it, along with your cash, to Mr. Revis, who would then hand you your copy of the paper. One per customer, I guess, in case you were thinking of doing the crossword twice – once on your own, in pencil, and once in public, with a pen.
The
New York Times, like the
Wall Street Journal, does not have a funnies section, a situation I only really understood once I moved to Brooklyn. It's the same reason
Boston magazine does a cover story each year on the city's best ice cream, but New Yorkers remain obsessed with pizza by the slice: ice cream is something you eat for fun, while pizza is a working food; you eat it on your way to your next temp job, rehearsal or audition. Likewise, in the paper of record, there's no room for fooling around, so when my parents stopped getting the
Globe, my older sister and I got in the habit of reading the closest thing to humor in the
Times of that era, Russell Baker's weekly essay in the
New York Times Magazine.
I still remember my favorite column, in which Baker unfavorably compared his job as syndicated man of letters with that of singer and songwriter Hoagie Carmichael. As the composer of the 1927 standard "Stardust," Carmichael, Baker argued, had it made in the shade. "For the rest of his life, all he had to do was say "And now, I'd like to sing my hit song 'Stardust.'" This, felt Baker, was manifestly unfair. "After all," he took pains to note, "it's not like I can walk into my editor's office and say "and now, for this week's column, I'd like to do my hit essay from May 27, 1971."
I find myself in a similarly Baker-esque situation, and yet I think I have an inventive and not entirely valueless solution. I released almost two years of Youtube videos before I began including tab on a regular basis, and some of those lessons came out before there were more than a handful of subscribers to this Letter. So now, I give you The Fretboard Archive – new PDFs with notation and tab for a handful of classic – dare I say vintage? Certainly archival – Fretboard Confidential lessons. Click the link below to revisit my October 2017 video on "Travis Picking The Blues In C."
Travis Picking The Blues In CTo get the tab, you don't need to enter your email anywhere again. Just click the link below to go straight to a download page for the PDF:
Get the tabMore soon,
David
