Daddy cool: Playing music with your son

“You did what?” my wife asked, her voice rising and her eyes widening with suspicion. For months I'd been dropping in at a music shop. I usually backed away in panic when anyone enquired if I wanted to play a bit. "No, just looking," I kept saying until, rather to my surprise, I walked home one day carrying a brand-new Fender Stratocaster.

Why did I buy it? Would "because I liked the look of it" help explain things? My wife thought not. She was not at all amused when I said I needed a hobby to occupy the time I spent jangling the car keys at the front door while waiting for her to go out.

Would "because I'd noticed that I was listening repeatedly to my pre-1966 Rolling Stones albums" sound reasonable? I didn't think so.

So, I'll grant you ridiculous. That's how it must have looked to anyone standing at Ring Music that day. Any observer would have jumped to the most obvious conclusion: midlife crisis, Peter Pan syndrome, diminishing virility and general male silliness. And I wouldn't have argued. Affairs, motorcycles, tooth whiteners—looking ridiculous seems to come with the territory of turning 50.

A little more than eight months later, magazine editor John Macfarlane (a friend, not a relative) heard I was fooling around on electric guitar. This struck a chord with him (E is my guess) and he wanted to form a band.

The idea seemed quixotic. In my quest to master the electric guitar, I'd concluded that on a scale of pop-musical prowess, with Jimi Hendrix at one end and my father's tuneless whistling of "Row, Row, Row Your Boat" at the other, I was somewhere in the middle.

But soon three others joined us: a keyboardist called Dave Wilson, Douglas Cameron, who owned a cool old Fender Duo-Sonic guitar, and David Hayes. He'd played bass guitar professionally and his shaved head, black jeans and state-of-the-art trainers brought coolness to the table.

Thus our garage band, the Three Chord Johnny, was born. But we faced the quandary of all nascent bands: where do we practise? And who'll be on drums? For obvious reasons, these two questions tend to go hand in hand. Whoever has the drum kit gets the band.

"My son's a drummer," I volunteered. And so, unbeknownst to Blake, who at that hour was in a maths class, he was hired on the spot.

We had the bodies. We had the place—my basement. We had the instruments. But things did not look promising. We had two self-described duffers on guitar, both of whom would quickly run out of familiar chords.

And we had a 13-year-old drummer, a devotee of Moby who was facing the prospect of playing with his dad. Blake had agreed to give it a shot, but clearly there were Rubicons of ridiculousness he wouldn't cross. Singing "Tears of a Clown" with me was one of them. I also knew that if I turned up in red baseball boots and a silk scarf, he'd be gone. Really fast.

On the other hand, there were a couple of auspicious signs. While speaking with an elderly couple in the adjoining house, I got the distinct impression both were going deaf. Also, my wife liked "the boys" showing up on Sundays for band practice. She'd call upstairs—again—for the drummer to get out of bed.

In the beginning, when we sounded better muted by floorboards, she was our first encouraging audience. Janice came down when we managed to play the sweet 1966 Johnny Rivers song "Poor Side of Town". "Hey," she said, "that was kind of good."

Kind of good had never occurred to me as a possibility. It seemed wildly ambitious. But some key decisions brought it within our range. Searching for something to keep both musicians and duffers happy, we decided to stick to basic R&B and early rock 'n' roll. This plugged us into some fantastic music: Jimmy Reed, Junior Parker, Sam Cooke.

We also decided not to do songs familiar to absolutely everybody on the planet. No matter how good your chops, if you do "Brown Sugar" you're going to be compared with you-know-who.

This was a wise decision. I still cringe at some of the songs I suggested, such as The Left Banke's "Walk Away Renee". Employing the kindly patience of a parent dealing with an over-eager child, Dave Wilson said, "Pretty song. Which one of us should play the cello?"

After our rocky outset, we had a revelation. Maybe it was the day our oohs on the chorus of "Poor Side" were actually in tune. Perhaps it was the morning we noticed Blake, whose thick hair and cherubic face make him look like a Caravaggio subject, was driving us through "Look Over Yonders Wall".

Or it may have been the time that John and I caught each other grinning like idiots in the middle of "In the Midnight Hour". There we were, having the time of our lives. And whatever flicked the switch, we remembered that with the exception of our drummer, we were grown-ups, with jobs and bank accounts. We realised we could get more equipment without borrowing money from our parents or getting paper rounds.

So we did. New floor monitors, a mixer and microphones, however, allow you to hear yourself. This can be a brutal shock. The first time I sidled up to the mic, it wasn't Smokey Robinson's voice that came out. It was my own, quavering and tentative and weak. I had the unfortunate fatherly experience of watching my son bite his lip, trying to hold back laughter.

Still, two things about this little basement band make the risk of appearing ridiculous seem trivial. The first is friendship. At our age, it's not easy to make new friends or to shift old friendships into some new and unexpected gear, but that's what has happened. When Dave Wilson starts noodling around with "Shake, Rattle and Roll" and then, as if by magic, we're all in, playing a song we've never done before, I laugh at the giddy pleasure of it all.

The other delight, of course, is playing with my son. Unlike his old man, he has real talent. But even if he didn't, I'd consider all this a great stroke of paternal luck. "A gift," as John Macfarlane puts it. It's not always easy for a father and son to find common ground. But once a week, we do.

I've never had more fun. When someone asks who plays with me, I say, "Just some good friends." None of whom laugh anymore when I sing.