Michael W. Dean emailed me this story, and he gave me permission to share it.
My friend Lydia Lam stumbled across this link, it’s a 1999 Ira Glass NPR “This American Life” show with Spalding Grey. In the intro to the story Ira reads a poster I put up in San Francisco (in 1989, as I recall) offering “Guitar LESSON, not lessons. I only teach you one lesson. I will teach you three chords for five dollars.” (This pre-dates Found Magazine, but really reminds me of Found Magazine a lot somehow.)
In some way, I think that the poster eventually morphed into my “$30 School” book series.
There’s a funny story with this. When I put up the posters, I fancied that I’d be inundated with students, but only got one. He was a dimwitted 15-year-old Nazi skinhead dude. His hippie mother dropped him off, paid me the five bucks and left. The kid had brought his mom’s 12-string acoustic guitar and wanted me to teach him to play punk rock.
I had been up all night tripping on LSD, was trying to drink myself to sleep and had completely forgotten he was coming.
I was living with and sleeping with two women. We all three lived in a big kitty pile in one hippie room. The fat little skinhead didn’t like that at all. And I didn’t like that he was a Nazi, and kept laughing at him out loud about it. My lysergic mind was finding the idea of Nazis and skinheads not threatening, but unbelievably utterly ridiculous and farcical. And even funnier was the fact that this farking cartoon character was in my home for some reason.
But, being a man of my word, I tried to give the lesson anyway.
I was bragging to the kid about my alleged punk rock cred because he kept calling me a fucking hippie. It’s embarrassing now, because it’s so trite, but, I tried to impress him by telling him I knew Ian MacKaye. The kid didn’t believe me. I called Ian on the phone, so Ian could tell the kid what time it was. I said, “Hey Ian, I’m tripping on LSD and trying to teach some kid to play guitar, and he doesn’t believe I know you. Will you talk to him?” Ian said, “Michael, don’t waste my time with bullshit like this” and hung up. (The fact that Ian never brought up this incident again is a testament to how cool and reasonable a man he is.)
I was getting drunker and drunker and could only teach the kid two chords before passing out. Doug Hilsinger, the guitar player in my band “Bomb”, showed up to drop off some tapes to me, and ended up teaching the kid the third chord.
Doug wanted one third of the five bucks, which I think I still owe him to this day.
