My first guitar lessons came from an interesting New York creature named Dan Smith. He was giving lessons on the down-low in his apartment, so you couldn’t bring your own guitar and you weren’t supposed to hang around before/after your lesson.
Dan was great. We learned by just playing songs and he navigated in-and-out of teaching genres. My first song was “What I Got” by Sublime. Pretty much after each lesson I made a beeline to HMV (the now defunct mega record store) to pick up a new CD to play along with. My favorite run was a patch of beach music songs we did — Pipeline by The Chantays kept me up until two in the morning for weeks.
Back in the day before the internet, Dan was great at lead gen, and his handbills were up everywhere. This one is from a few years ago:
He was so ubiquitous that people began to report sightings of him putting up posters, Jon Stewart did a parody
As I wander around Manhattan on Valentine’s Day, I ducked in for a slice and once again saw the face of my old friend:
He’s upgraded from handbill with tear off phone numbers to a website.