When I was a teenager howling at the moon, I loved harassing my parents with the sound of a Gibson SG and a half-stack from my bedroom. I would play rock records loud and strum along. I would have been lost without tabs because I was musically illiterate in regards to guitar.
Back then, if your favorite band, no matter how obscure, released a single, odds were somebody sat down, figured it out, and wrote it out for you. In a few minutes, you could be compounding your parents annoyance by playing along (badly) with Element Eighty, Down, Deftones, or any number of other headbanger classics. It truly was an exploratory community.
Enter today. A band I’ve listened to for a while put out a new album. I’m grooving to it, and the urge strikes me to pick up my six-string noise-maker now that I’ve got a wife to annoy instead of parents. I cue up 911 tabs and ultimate-guitar and go looking for the new songs. Nothing on the previous three albums has been tabbed out. I just haven’t thought to look before now.
And the band wasn’t hyper-obscure either. It’s the death of a culture. The doers are fading away and now it’s all about the listeners. “I could never do that so why bother,” is the philosophy. All tabs come from somebody brave enough to sit there and try.
I can’t be mad. I’m not willing to figure out the tuning and tab stuff out myself. I’m just sad that something active became passive and faded away. We’re all just sitting here waiting for something easy, and all of the doers seem to have gone off into the sunset. Maybe it’s the long hours in thankless jobs, the incessant drumbeat of mediocrity and appetite in the media, or just the general abulia of the age.
The doers seem to have all collectively gone on vacation and we’re left in a world of dreamers. We passively observe the works of others and wait for the ability to make things ourselves. We’ve got to eat that elephant in the room before we can figure out anything else. And you eat an elephant one bite at a time. Figure out something small you can stop dreaming about and do it. Do it today, because tomorrow is uncertain.
-By Dixie Anon
O I’m a good old rebel, now that’s just what I am. For this “fair land of freedom” I do not care at all. I’m glad I fit against it, I only wish we’d won, And I don’t want no pardon for anything I done.
It could also be copyright ’cause they’re probably selling a tab book of their own.