and Words
Instrumental
Historically, my musical tastes have always leaned towards hard rock. My fascination with music started with Def Leppard, and in many ways that’s the way in which this blog started. That said, my tastes landed consistently on the hard rock side of popular music. On one bookend, music from the South Florida airways filled my ears, while I zipped between a half-dozen presets in the car. On the other bookend, hours of our console television glued to MTV bombarded the senses with flashing images.
Of course, that picture was far from perfect. Though radio stations of different genres lined the entire dial, I picked the music that sounded familiar and resonated in my ears. As for MTV, they wouldn’t even play Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean until Epic records threatened to pull their other artists from the channel. Still, the music continued to flow, and I was none the wiser.
As I started higher education, my music preferences expanded and melded like osmosis. It expanded like roots of a tree in different directions, and this was just one such instance.
On that freshman year, I lived in Pearson Hall at the University of Miami. My dorm room sat in the middle of the first floor of sorts. One small wing of the dorm sat between the ground floor and the second floor, up half a flight of stairs. Only one in the bank of elevators opened up to this floor, called “1R”, for rear, since that lift car had doors on both front and back. Incoming freshmen, who finished high school only months before, packed that hall like sardines. We arrived from all over the country and even abroad.
I still remember the names, faces, and hometowns. Sadly, many didn’t make it. The absurd cost of higher education in a private school may have accelerated their exit. Perhaps the higher demands over their high school curriculum drove them off. I’m sure that attending the number two party school in the nation, in a party town like Miami, didn’t help. Some of continued past that first year, most did not.
Across the hall and a few doors down lived George; he arrived from Pennsylvania. He was a geek of sorts, like me. While I majored in engineering, he majored in chemistry. He introduced me to other like-minded friends from our orientation. George endured the same 8am Chemistry 101 class in the large lecture hall off the main entrance of the science building. Three times a week, we stumbled out of bed, grabbed breakfast on the way to class, and listened to Mr. Hubinger’s lecture. I got a perfect score on that first exam but steadily declined from there. Yes, I still got an ‘A’ on that class.
On one day, George and I chill out in his dorm room, and he starts to play some music. It’s like nothing I’ve ever heard before. It’s all instrumental and it’s both hard rock guitar and classical. He described it as Neoclassical Fusion Guitar. We both listened to this piece, “Far Beyond The Sun”. For him, it was just another disc from his collection; for me, it was a start of expanding my horizons. Understanding that the world that I lived in was but a microcosm of the entirety of music, that there was indeed compelling new music which I never knew existed.
That artist was Yngwie Malmsteen, a Swedish guitarist that could play like no other. On the days before the internet, details about him came sparsely. We may occasionally read an article in a magazine or information passes by word of mouth. It’s not like his music got much play on the radio or even screentime on MTV.
George, other friends, and I end up sharing an on-campus apartment starting our sophomore year. They were my wolfpack until we started naturally dispersing from our coursework. On the early days, we all took similar basic classes like calculus, chemistry, and physics; in later years, we became specialized. We spent one spectacular day at Key West, which I still remember fondly. They often say, “The friends you make in college are the friends you keep for life”; they were part of that bunch.
My fascination with Malmsteen grew gradually over the years. I found that his favorite guitar was the Fender Stratocaster; he played it almost exclusively. Though you’ll often see him playing the same understated light tan guitar that offered a stark contrast with the flamboyance of his playing. I ended up getting a Fender Squire Bullet bass, though a black one. Those details, interspersed with the releases of his albums, fed my fascination for years.
It was sometime during my stint in college when Malmsteen suffered a car accident which nearly took his life. His recovery was long, and he maintained that he was unable to play as fast as he did before the accident. Though we made a point about seeing him in concert post-accident. We drove what seemed like a long distance through two counties to listen to this man spin his magic on a Fender Stratocaster. If his playing had suffered from the accident, I was unable to tell. The blur of his fingers on the frets of that guitar were mesmerizing. Similarly, the music similarly impressed.
George also left “The U” to continue his studies closer to home in Pennsylvania; he made a career out of the military. We end up settling across the country years later. I landed a job at Microsoft, and he was stationed in Tacoma. Now married with kids, life was considerably differently. While I stayed in the area, he eventually moves with his new assignment.
Though to this day, whenever I listen to Malmsteen I still think of my friend and those moments we spent listening to music in his dorm room on his boom box. I reflect on those first moments when I first discovered this music for which I’m still in awe. Mentally, those lightning-fast fingers are synonymous with friendship from a town by the name of Smethport, which I’ve never seen, but for which I have a mysterious fondness.