Why do I teach guitar?

It isn't just for the money.

I grew up believing that if you worked hard, you would earn a paycheck, and you would live a comfortable life. In the 1980's. I worked at a bakery in Wisconsin for nearly eight years. It was steady work, and I got paid well. By 1987, I desperately needed to change my life. I moved to Florida in 1988 and began working in the airline industry. By 1989, I was making more money than I had ever seen before. Then, the airline industry changed dramatically in 1990 during the Persian Gulf war. It was the beginning of strict security policies and implementations. Over the next few years, the appeal of working for tips as a skycap began to wane. I found myself again, wanting something different in my life.

In 1995, I worked part time at the airport. I needed to supplement my income, so I began teaching guitar lessons to anyone who wanted to take lessons with me. Back then, friends, neighbors paid me $20 cash for an hour of guitar lessons. If I did three or four lessons each week, it was some nice, extra cash in my pocket. My good friend, bandmate and fellow guitar teacher, Mike, suggested I stop by the (then) Thoroughbred Music store in the Lee shopping center to see if I might be interested in teaching guitar lessons there. So, I picked up a couple of afternoons at the music store. It was a whole new world for me, and I loved it!

Then, in February 1996, I learned that by the end of the month, I would no longer have my job at the airport because our contract had not been renewed. I was burned out from the airline industry. Eight years and four different jobs later, it was time for me to get out of the airline industry for good. I told the manager at the music store that I was available full time. She helped me get more students. By 1998, I had about fifteen students a week. At $20-25/hour, this was not enough to live on. I was living with my roommate, Frank and his girlfriend. I began living on credit cards. I started doing in-home lessons for my students who didn't want to come to the music store, but it still wasn't enough. In 1999, Frank and his girlfriend moved to the east coast of Florida and I moved back to my former apartment complex. By that summer, I tried to go back to the airport as a skycap, but it only lasted two weeks. I ended up filing for bankruptcy and was given a fresh start.

I slowly began to build up my student roster. Things were finally going well. Between 1999 and 2001, I was playing bass guitar in six different bands. This was the life I had wanted all along. I had always dreamed of being a working musician. People are paying me to teach them how to play their guitar, and I'm playing in rock bands and traveling, doing gigs and enjoying the beach on my days off. Life was good once again.

Then in 2004, three hurricanes hit central Florida. I lost more than half of my roster of students. They had to choose between paying for guitar lessons or putting a new roof on their house. Guess which one they all chose. So, I fell into living on credit cards again. I slowly built my student roster, and things started to get a little bit better. I struggled for the next several years, but somehow managed to do okay. 

By 2017. I was barely scraping by. I had to make the critical decision to walk away from guitar lessons and go back to the airport to work a low-paying graveyard shift part time job. It was a devastating decision. I had been my own boss for twenty-one years. How could I walk away from that? At the end of 2017, I got another job at the airport working full time as a security officer. The money was just barely enough for me to start catching up. By 2018, I was promoted, and things were once again going well. 

Then one day in March 2019, my entire life came to a grinding screeching halt. I woke up in a hospital bed. I had survived a stroke, a heart attack and a seizure all in one episode. For some reason, I didn't die. Ten months later, I came back to my job at the airport and tried to pick up where I left off. It was obvious within the first few months that what used to be, was no more. My health was now my number one priority. It wasn't about the money I was making, which wasn't much to begin with - it was about me wasting my precious time working a mind-numbing, tedious boring job. I had to change my life and try to find my real purpose again.

I decided in August 2021 to walk away from the airport again and go back to doing what I do best. I love teaching guitar lessons. My students enjoy their lessons. This is what I am meant to do. In a perfect world, I would be getting paid the same as a doctor or a lawyer. However, the antithesis is more accurate in my case. I have been a guitar instructor on and off for over 27 years. I am good at what I do. The unfortunate reality is that we now live in a world where more people are less interested in learning the art of how to play music. The generational gap is beginning to become more blindingly apparent. I do have the occasional teenage student who "gets it". They are old souls inhabiting younger bodies. My older students know the old music, and they understand the art of music because they remember a world before the internet, cell phones or social media. 

Mine is a slowly dying art. Learning how to play the guitar is an art form. It is a life choice. I made that choice when I was 13 years old. I am now 60 years old. The guitar is the air that I breathe. To stop playing the guitar would be like not being able to breathe. I don't teach music for the money. I do it because it is my purpose in life. I get paid because I have bills to pay. I have said for many years that if I ever came into the kind of money where I would never again have to work in order to live, I would still teach music and I would do it for free.