The Homestead Pickin’ Parlor is closing for good, and a lot of folks here in Dylan country are having a hard time with it.
Around the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro, the Pickin’ Parlor has long been an essential hub around which acoustic music — especially folk and bluegrass — has revolved.
It’s a center for music lessons, a seller of acoustic instruments, sheet music, instruction books, records, tapes, and CDs. They also handle repairs — they installed a couple railroad spikes on my open-back. They did a great job, cheap and fast.
When I first visited the grave of Sammy Markus — the long-time manager of the Victoria Cafe (see “Moonshiner’s Dance” on the Anthology of American Folk Music) — I was stunned to find he was just a couple blocks south of the Pickin’ Parlor.
I have long used the Pickin Parlor as a key landmark in my mental map of the metro I’ve chosen to be my home and, to an extent, in my map of my own personal universe.
***
I’ve always wanted to tell a story here at the Monochord, and I guess it’s now or never.
Round-about 2002, I guess, I took a lot of banjo lessons through the Homestead Pickin’ Parlor. Before each lesson, you’d check in at the counter, staffed at the time by a goofball named something like Bruce (or Walter?). He’d always have a corny joke, usually about oldtime banjo players vs. bluegrass banjo players — that sort of thing.
My instructor, Rachel Nelson, was a great teacher. I was eventually able to pretty much play a musical instrument for the first and only time in my life. It was a magical and mind-expanding experience.
Still, I was a mediocre student. I didn’t practice enough and when I did, I was frustrated that I didn’t make as much progress as I wanted. I was afraid of sounding bad, which you always do when you don’t practice enough. It’s kind of a vicious circle.
Around this time, I told my oldest brother about my banjo lessons. As with his 1960’s counter-cultural cohorts, music meant a lot to my brother. I knew he’d understand my strangely transformative experience, and what it meant to my relationship with music, my mind, my body, and my potential to … well, to become somebody new.
And he certainly did understand. In fact, he instantly told me a very vivid and important story. I wish I had all of the details right, but at least you’ll get the drift. Here’s how I remember it.
***
My brother said he’d studied at a mountaintop Zen Buddhist monastery in the western United States. Its leader was a roshi who had taught Leonard Cohen.
On their first private meeting, the roshi gave each student their own koan — a simple story, concept, or question upon which to meditate throughout the weeks or months they studied there. At their weekly audience with the roshi, each student would sit in the lotus position, almost knee-to-knee with their Zen master while the student reported any progress they’d made on their assigned koan.
My brother was assigned the question, “How are you born?”
How are you born? For hundreds of hours during long days and nights over many weeks on the mountaintop monastery, he meditated on the question. How are you born? At every weekly audience, he’d report his insights to the roshi.
How are you born? “Oh well, you come into your first light, full of wonder and begin your journey into …” The roshi looked at him in despair. His student was an idiot.
How are you born? “Roshi, it is a frightening world that you cannot comprehend, but by practice alone can you …” The roshi seemed so frustrated my brother wondered if he’d be kicked off the mountain.
After another such attempt, the roshi sighed heavily, looking around at the younger monks living with him. All these kids — these children, heads shaved like boot camp draftees — were just as clueless as the hippies who paid to stay a few weeks and then wander off. He was an old man, near death, and who among them could ever take his place here on the mountaintop?
Finally, at my brother’s last meeting with the roshi, my brother tried again. “Roshi, you are born naked without your monkish robes, but once you …”
Finally, in a savage rage, the elderly roshi sprang out of the lotus position — in one gesture, as if spring-loaded — into a standing wrestler’s stance. Now my brother had an angry old authority figure hovering directly over him, wild eyed and red faced. The roshi barked “HAH!”
He repeated, shouting “HAH! With a NOISE! That is how you are born! Screaming! WITH A NOISE!!!!”
——
I understood. My brother told me this story to help me understand my banjo lessons. I was overthinking my playing. I needed to forget that I was learning a skill for a while, and remember that my banjo was MY banjo. I was playing —PLAYING like a child — and playing to be heard. Just go at it, kid. Make a noise!
A few days later, I walked into the Homestead Picking Parlor for my lesson with Rachel, thinking about that conversation with my brother.
Lost in deep contemplation, I went to check in at the Pickin Parlor’s counter. There was Bruce. Without saying hello, he looked me right in the eye and asked, “What’s the first thing you know?”
Holy shit — not again! And here, I didn’t have weeks to meditate, seeking the answer in vain. But this was Bruce. He had no power over me. I was paying, so I just demanded the answer.
“I don’t know, Bruce. What’s the first thing you know?”
Bruce answered, “Old Jed’s a millionaire.”