Youth

JM: For years I'd have dreams about getting a guitar and I'd go to a friend's house and he'd have a guitar with like three strings on it. And I'd tune it up—somehow that sounded right to me, wasn't right at all—and I was always mystified by it. And I still am. I wake up in the morning and I look at it and I go, What could possibly happen today? And it never goes away. And I've learned so much by that. Not only as a guitar player, but as a person.

RT: Did you grow up playing along to Clapton discs? The record goes on and you just pull up the guitar and sit on the bed for an hour? 

JM: Yeah, yeah. I would just keep playing the CDs over and over again. And for years I would pretend that guys like, Buddy Guy, or like anybody playing guitar, I would pretend—and I think the other guitar players up here would tell you that we had an amazing ability to forget there was a guitar track on the record we were listening to, and pretending that what we were doing was the only guitar on there.

AS: Thank you. First, tell me about your family's Thanksgiving traditions. Were there certain things you did every year that you still remember?

JM: I remember Thanksgiving based on ambience. I grew up in Fairfield, Conn. There is a certain Northeastern sky. And I don't think I ever remember the weather being different than just milk-white sky; cold, slate gray, you know. I guess my memories are more sort of temporal, color, sort of just vibe, you know. And what's great about it is that you may not still be able to get to sit at the table with the same people that you used to, but you can still look up at that sky and get that same kind of groove going on where, you know, it feels like the Wednesday before Thanksgiving or Thanksgiving morning, you know.

JM: Because I just took off on this other thing. He would do this thing where he would do 15 minutes of book stuff and 15 minutes of, like, you bring a song in and he'll teach you how to play the song. I would bring these blues songs in. He'd teach how to do it. And I'd go, okay, got it. The curriculum gathered really quickly on this blues thing, but we weren't doing the book stuff. And my parents at one point said, I think they were on to it, and if I remember it correctly they were, like, play this, and they put the book in front of me, and I'm like, I can't play that.

CR: At that time, where do you think you were going? I mean, what kind of—

JM: Stevie Ray Vaughan, Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, I wanted to be that guy. I was gonna go do that. That was my calling. And it still is. When I was 13 years old, I remember I thought, got it. I remember the first night I had a guitar. And it was before I had lessons. Which I now tell parents who say, what do I do? I want to give my kid lessons. I say, give them the guitar for two months and don't give them lessons.

CR: Yes.

JM: Let them discover their own nebulous take on things and then fold in the actual theory. So that's what I was able to do. And I found the most distant room from my parents and I played in the middle of the night. And I immediately figured out chords. And I'll never forget looking at—this is not revisionist history—I looked at it and went, Okay. And that okay was so vertical, it went through everything in my life, and I went, This is what I am.

JM: But even more immediate than that. If I really think about it, I wasn't ever doing it to make it eventually. I was doing it to make it that day. Like I was playing music to survive that day. I was playing music at the end of a day to remind myself that I was cool. That I was okay. When you're fourteen years old you don't play music because you want to make it as much—as I think, people talk about—you play because you're trying to undo the voices that have been coming at you all day.

SJ: Right.

JM: I really looked at it like alter-ego. I would go to school, mild-mannered, sleepy kid. Not pictured in the year book. Whatever. Couldn't find a place to sit. But I knew that school was something that had to do to get done so I could get back home and like hang with my heroes. 

So I had this league of superheroes in my mind. I covered my walls in pictures of Stevie Ray Vaughan, Jimi Hendrix, Buddy Guy, Eric Clapton—if there were a book or magazine with pictures in it, I'd buy two of 'em so I could use both sides. If there's a picture on both sides of the page you got to pick the bigger one and you have to buy another one so you can use the photo on the other side.

JM: And I think that I did that, looking back, to drown out the other stuff. So that every one of my sense can be constantly fed with this thing. And also I'm growing up in Fairfield Connecticut where you can't find it. So you have to construct it. It doesn't exist outside of my house. So I built a shrine.

So I wanted to be surrounded by it. I believed in osmosis. And I played along to CDs and ignore the guitar. I found a way to just ignore the guitar that was on the CD and play as if I were the person on the CD. And I play it while I slept thinking that it'd make me better. I remember grabbing a Charlie Parker "Best Of" CD and it had "Now Is the Time" on it. And just putting that on—cause I was like, Okay this is way over my head. And falling asleep to it. Like learning a language. Being like, If I sleep with this playing all night, it will do something to me.

So it was really the only thing I had to remind me of the identity that I wanted to have. Cause the rest of my life was nothing like it. So it was superhero dress up. And it took. I did nothing but learn how to play guitar, how to hold a guitar, how to play—do Robert Cray. Now do Eric Clapton. Now do Stevie Ray Vaughan. Now do Jimi Hendrix. Now do BB King. And that was my life.

And I played—not to make a dream come true—I played so that I wouldn't feel like garbage. Cause when you pick that—it is a blessing and a curse to picking that at thirteen. "Oh I'm going to be something." Knowing what you're going to be can be a tough thing at that age.