Bobby Zimmerman never intended to take over his dad’s appliance business and join the Hibbing Jaycees. People were sick of government, of process and tradition and all that mickeymouse. He played screaming guitar solos though he never touched a string. He never was an accompanist, he was himself, a star and genius, a winner, a hero. The guitar took over during the Eisenhower administration but Ike was a general, not a guitarist, but a half-century later a loner with rock ’n’ roll hair put together a slim majority of alienated voters despite persecution by witch hunts and media conspiracies, and he was adored by enormous crowds and he was golden in their adoration. Lindquist but you went to a junk shop and bought a Sears Silvertone used for $7 and got a Mel Bay chord book and sat in your bedroom and taught yourself to play a G chord and a D7 and then started writing your own songs, about being misunderstood and mistreated and hoping to find a woman to leave this town with and head down the highway. Your parents wanted you to take piano lessons with Mrs. Whereas the guitar became an ax, a weapon. It is an instrument around which people gather. The piano has social standing it belongs in church or school or a barroom. You can’t put it on the back of your motorcycle. It requires a piano tuner and piano movers. Little Richard sat down at the piano in 1955 and tore the joint apart with “Tutti Frutti” (A wop bop a loo bop, a lop bam boom!) and Jerry Lee Lewis did the same with “Great Balls of Fire” but Elvis, who could play piano, picked up a guitar as a prop, and a nice Jewish kid in Hibbing, Minnesota, decided to be an alienated loner cowboy poet and a whole generation of loner heroes with Stratocasters blew in on the wind and there went the ball game. American culture took a sharp turn when the guitar took supremacy over the keyboard.
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