The Best Advice in the History of Advice

From Dallas Doctor’s “World Without Love ~ A Collection of Short Stories that Together Tell a Story” (pages 50-51):

The Best Advice
in the
History of Advice
by Dallas Doctor

(Spring 1964)

I was still just learning to play guitar, blisters and all, when we started talking about forming our first group (that’s what we called them in 1964).

Roger’s dad said we could use his garage and Twinkie’s parents agreed to buy him a drum set.  We didn’t have microphones, or a PA system, so we commandeered the mouthpieces off a couple old telephones and wired them into cables and plugged them into our guitar amps.  It totally worked. (The distortion was horrendous, but we didn’t care.) 

The guys wanted me to play organ, because I’d had three years of piano lessons already and I played piano and organ at church.  Plus, Ronny’s mom had an old Hammond she’d let us use, as long as promised to be careful hauling it around.  (And besides, Ronny was way, way, way better at guitar than I was.)

I wanted to be in the group so bad that I agreed to become our organ player – at first. 

But I got lucky.

We were all so excited about the group, and we talked about it so incessantly to anyone who would listen, that long before we ever played a single show, we were taken under wing by an actual professional theatrical agent, who just happened to be a friend of Roger’s dad. 

When the agent-man heard I was slated to play organ, he took me aside, shook his head, and said:

“You don’t want to play keyboards.  You want to play guitar.  You should stand up front and sing.  Girls like guitar players.”

It was the one and only nugget of real-life-advice I ever got from any adult that turned out to be true.