An Epiphany on my Epiphone

Why be good when you can be loud?

By Zach Hively

You all, I’ve just had an epiphany on my Epiphone.

​I shouldn’t be surprised. My old man had an Epiphone guitar when I was growing up. That guitar taught me a lot about reading. For instance, I couldn’t figure out for years and years how to pronounce what looked to me, as much as anything, like a backwards number three.

“Three-piphone” didn’t make a whole lot of sense, but then again, nothing else about that letter made sense either. It didn’t look like any letter I knew, and I was a precocious reader: I saw letters EVERYWHERE.

I figured out that this was a stylized E probably right around the same time my kindergarten class went on a field trip to the church next door to the school. I, sat in a pew, asked my teacher why they had a large lowercase T on the wall. You can extrapolate that Pops didn’t play a lot of hymns on that Epiphone. I didn’t know the word “heathen” yet, but it sure has an accompanying facial expression that I could read all over my teacher’s attempts at playing it cool.

Nor did I know the word “epiphany.” I don’t know when I heard that word for the first time, but I’m confident it was not the same day I learned that Jesus Christ Our Lord and Savior died for my sins by being stapled to a lowercase T on the wall. (I might have been shorted on the context clues.)

But naturally, when I heard of an epiphany, I put backwards-three and backwards-three together and deduced that this new word made as much sense as anything else for a brand name for a guitar. It was also a reasonable pronunciation of E-P-I-P-H-O-N-E and sure sounded like it might start with a stylized letter E.

The truth is quite possibly that I carried this spelling/pronunciation combination with me until I purchased my own electric epiphany at age eighteen and said something about it, out loud, with my face, to a music store employee.

Anyway! With pronunciations sorted, I had this actual epiphany while playing my Epiphone. I hadn’t played it in a long time. Years, really.

There are reasons for that. Not least among them is that not playing makes it daunting to play. Everyone (by which I mean both me and the guitar) will use the occasion of me playing to point out all the times I didn’t play, so it’s easier and cleaner for us all if I just pretend none of this exists.

But then, something stupid and minor happened—so stupid and so minor that it’s not worth the not-ink to tell you just how stupid and how minor—and I needed to burn off the excess stupid and minor energy. I needed to play some music. And I needed to play it loud.

The Epiphone, once I scraped the dust off its case, was ready, waiting, and close enough to in tune for me.

​And this was the epiphany, written in stylized Dantean letters but without abandoning much hope:

NOT EVERYTHING NEEDS TO BE FINISHED TO BE WORTHY, YOU KNUCKLEHEAD.

Does the guitar actually care that I abandoned it? No. Would I be a virtuoso if I had played every day in the interim? Heck no. Will my fingertips hurt tomorrow? You bet. But will that feel good? No. And also yes.

For once, I didn’t get caught up in something I did needing to Be Good. Fit for Public Consumption. Not an Embarrassment to All My Ancestors (In Case They Really Are Up There Chillin’ with Jesus).

This freedom made guitar-playing fun again. More importantly, it made it loud again.

I need more of this letting-go-of-results business. To let go of expecting perfect conclusions from everything I do.

​Including the end of this piece.