T H E I N T E R V I E W: EL MCMEEN
Thanks for taking the time to do this interview el. I was wondering how you started playing the guitar? I started playing guitar around 1965. My roommate Blake Swan in secondary school (Mt. Hermon School–now called Northfield Mt. Hermon), in Massachusetts, played guitar a lot, and I was inspired to learn. After hearing him sing and play “Sloop John B” approximately a thousand times, however, I did tend to steer away from that song. <:) (He did a nice job on it, by the way.) My mother got me a Gibson allmahogany guitar in 1965 (I believe it cost $50 back then), and I started learning some chords. I played almost exclusively in standard tuning for many years – up until the mid-1980’s. I do remember one song I did play in college, at Harvard, in G tuning, called “Mole’s Moan”, by Geoff Muldaur. I really enjoyed playing that song–by the hour!
In fact, I have a clear recollection of playing that song for a friend from my Freshman Year, 1965–a really talented classical guitarist and brilliant student (and great swimmer) by the name of Marty Chalfie. I’ll drop my friend Marty’s name here, and give him some props, because he later went on to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry: http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/2008/ For many years I played guitar to accompany myself singing. It was not until the mid-to-late 1980’s that I got into the mode of doing guitar instrumentals. That process accelerated after I happened upon the wonderful CGDGAD guitar tuning, which I learned form the arrangements and compositions of the great British guitarist, Dave Evans.