Time for some pickin’ and a grinnin’

After years of talking about it, and talking about it, my old man finally got a banjo. It was a Father’s Day present I picked up at a yard sale, from a young man who claimed bluegrass is the only kind of music worth listening to. I happen to like bluegrass, but saying it is the only music out there is like saying blue cheese is the only item worth putting on a pizza. Sure, it may be tasty in small doses, but it doesn’t take long to get sick of it. We talked about bluegrass, how the banjo was invented by slaves stolen from Africa, and how the two most famous banjo pickers anyone can think of are Roy Clark from Hee Haw, and that dirty little inbred hillbilly from the movie Deliverance. We would have talked longer, but the guy said his roadkill barbecue was just about done, and he still had to help his girlfriend find her teeth. I remember watching a lot of Hee Haw when I was a kid, especially Misty Rowe’s “jug” band, but I’m by no means an expert on how to tune a banjo. It needed some work and I needed some help, so I set out to find a music store; which isn’t easy when you don’t know the terrain. I finally found one tucked away in a quiet corner, like so many music stores are, with a big drum kit in the window, guitars hanging on the walls, and words like Gibson, Godin, Gretsch and Green Day splashed everywhere. It was getting late at this point, just about 4:20 in the afternoon by my calculations, because there was a sign on the door that the person inside was on a five minute break. Sure enough, five minutes later, the lock on the door clicked open, and the banjo and I ventured inside. The proprietor was hard to find behind the stacks of amplifiers, sheet music and microphone stands. He would also have been hard to find in a police line-up of homeless drifters. He looked like a rat. If a rat had slits for eyes. With long, stringy hair sticking out from under his ball cap, and two long, stringy arms sticking out of a sleeveless Black Sabbath concert shirt, he looked like the kind of man who stayed up all night playing guitar, woke up hungry, and ate his belt because he thought it was beef jerky. He said he liked the banjo, and held it like it was a baby. And I knew immediately I was in the right place. Ratman said the repair job was simple, that all the banjo needed was a few screws, and he had just the thing. From under the counter he produced a plastic bowl full of screws, and began sifting through them like he had all the time in the world. He certainly had most of the screws. In a miracle of hand-eye co-ordination, he actually found three suitable pieces, but they were too long. Not to worry, he said, and from further under the counter he brought up a clamp, a hacksaw and a grinder. There were a lot of things rushing through my mind at that point, but worry wasn’t one of them, and he cut the screws to fit. In the end, in that little one stop machine shop guitar shop, I ended up with a dandy five-string banjo. When I told him it was a present for my dad, he winked at me by opening one bloodshot eye, and said “No charge”. All that’s left now, is to start the pickin’ and a grinnin’.