Joseph Santorelli—who insisted as soon as Harry and Severus met him at the door that he should only be called 'Joe'—was, at first blush, just about the weirdest individual that Harry imagined he'd ever met in his short life.
He actually considered that to be saying rather a lot, given that he knew Severus (himself a strange character), the certifiable oddball that was Headmaster Albus Dumbledore, and actual, honest-to-goodness witches and wizards.
Somehow, Joe topped them all.
Worse, Severus basically abandoned Harry to it with a bracing pat on the back and a slight push into Joe's shadowy house (a leased accommodation which he evidently shared with a scrawny fellow called Eric; or so Tabby had told Severus).
Well... perhaps that wasn't being entirely honest. Of course Severus had sized the man up first, taking a sweeping look at his counterpart from the toes of his black-canvas-plimsole-covered feet, up his skinny, black-jean-clad legs, over his diminutive torso—similarly attired in a featureless, black t-shirt—and attempting to stare into the other man's eyes: a feat which proved impossible because of the presence of a pair of totally opaque sunglasses that Harry's new teacher had evidently been wearing even while inside his home.
The guitarist allowed this without any indication that he found Snape's undue attention on his person rude in the slightest.
Perhaps he was blind, Harry considered, only to be proven wrong when Severus made to hand Joseph Santorelli a dark green bottle he'd acquired from the proprietor of Slug & Jiggers only days before. Joe's hand shot out to receive it without any indication that he'd not seen what Snape was doing, and he uncorked the bottle to take a sniff at the dry contents with a satisfied smile.
Harry felt himself bristle a bit. Hadn't Severus just expended a great deal of air attempting to impress upon him the illegality of furnishing magical implements and substances to unwitting muggles? This had come from the apothecary, and Santorelli didn't seem magical at all.
And Snape probably knew that Harry couldn't exactly say anything about it in front of a muggle if he wanted to call his kuya out on it...
It was all a bit fishy. Or more accurately, whatever it was that the bottle held was emitting a fragrance sort of like the odour gland that Snape had once prepared for a complicated gastritis cure. He'd had to import the skunk parts from Canada as they weren't native to the United Kingdom.
It couldn't have been that that's what he'd brought Harry's guitar teacher... it had absolutely reeked! If Harry had pressed his nose into the container housing the skunk gland he'd have been bowled over from the stench, whereas whatever it was that Joe was sniffing was apparently bringing a grim, restrained smile to the guitarist's otherwise impassive face.
"This is good."
Snape shrugged. "Maybe," he allowed.
"You don't know?"
"I'm not predisposed toward such indulgences. I only ask that you don't use it around the boy."
Joe shoved it into a back pocket. "Of course not. That would be a wasted afternoon."
Shortly after, apparently having finished his business and approved the man Harry was to be entrusted to for the hour, Severus departed back for the auto shop.
Harry stood petrified in the entrance while the door snicked closed behind him, clutching at his guitar case with bloodless fingers.
The man chosen to be Harry's guitar instructor hadn't moved from where he'd retreated into the tight living space, merely staring at the tiny boy before him with an inscrutable expression (which was not only inscrutable because he was wearing a pair of darkly shaded sunglasses inside the house, but also because the muscles of his face hadn't even twitched once to give any indication of how he might have been feeling).
Clothed entirely in black—much like Severus—his head was completely bald and his face nondescript and blank of all expression. Either he was being careful to mask his emotions and reactions or he simply had none.
Possibly he had clipped all of the hair off of his head and had glued it to his arms, Harry privately thought. Crossed as they were above his chest over his too-tight, black t-shirt, Harry could readily see that whatever Santorelli had been spared up top, in the way of hair, he'd been compensated for by way of copious amounts of blond-brown fur covering him from elbow to wrist.
Harry's distinct first impression was that the man standing before him reminded him very much of a turtle, with the way his upper lip seemed to come to a point in the middle, his bare scalp, and utterly placid features.
"What's in the case?"
Harry started at the question, not least of all because it didn't at all sound like a question but more like a statement.
Instead of staring at the oddity before him, his eyes made a circuit of the room, looking for just about anywhere they could rest and not be made uncomfortable. Between the airless, musty quality of the small sitting room, the faded, orange, floral motif on the sofa, and the bright, eye-wateringly overwhelming psychedelic artwork framed on every available inch of wall-space, there was nothing in Joe Santorelli's house that proved comforting or familiar.
At the very least, there were guitars displayed in all the corners of the room, which, if nothing else, reassured Harry that he was in the right place.
"It's a... er... it's called a G&L Legacy... a guitar—" Harry specified needlessly, hoping that he'd not be tossed out on his ear for bringing in something unsuitable.
"Well? Let's see it then."
Laying the case down on the dull blue, worn-thin carpet between them (which needed a good hoovering), Harry's hands trembled as he struggled to release the latches. He nearly dropped the lid before he managed to open the case all the way. Finally, the tiny ribbon inside—which prevented its falling open entirely—engaged and pulled taut.
"H-here," Harry stammered, lifting the guitar out as though he were a museum curator handling an ancient Grecian relic.
Joe took the guitar from him by the neck, demonstrating no especial deference to the instrument as Harry had. He tested the weight by using his other hand against the bottom of the body and peered down the fretboard as though he were looking along the long sight of a rifle.
"Nicee," he commented, appreciation filling his voice even as his face looked unmoved. "This is a good colour."
"Does... does that matter?"
"Do you like the colour red, Harry?"
Harry frowned and shifted from his crouched position, latching the case back up. He stood again and eyed the guitar which, admittedly, looked more at home in Joe's large hands than it did in Harry's tiny ones.
He thought about the question for a moment.
"Yeah, red's nice."
"Is there a better colour?"
Again, Harry thought, hard.
"No. If I had a car, I'd want a red car," he answered. "Red like that. Not like... like dark red or anything."
Joe nodded, his mouth pursing a bit as he considered this. "Then yeah, the colour matters."
Decisively, he stepped away from the tiny entrance to the house—which was, inside, a mirror image of Severus' own—and toward the orange, floral couch. He indicated that Harry should take a seat and himself sat on a metal folding chair that faced Harry across a low, glass-topped table, having handed the guitar back to Harry in the process.
Silence stretched between them, and it might have lasted five minutes, but probably it was no longer than five seconds. Eventually it was broken by Joe.
"Play me something."
"I... I'm not... I don't know—"
"Pick up that plug," Joe pointed to the ground next to the table leg, "by your foot there, yes, there you go. Plug that long bit into the jack there—it's that silver bit with the hole—at the end of your Legacy."
Harry's instructor leaned over and began to fiddle with the knob on a tiny amplifier that Harry hadn't noticed before, turning the volume up until the sound of buzzing electricity filled the air.
"Play me what you know."
Taking a deep breath, Harry blinked several times, feeling as though sweat from his brow had dripped into his eyes. They stung under the assault, and Harry's anxiety continued to mount. He briefly removed his hand from the neck to wipe his palm on his school trousers before he found the first note that he thought he remembered from Godzilla.
Even though Joe might have twitched as soon as he'd started, he didn't interrupt until Harry had played through the opening eight notes and then repeated them another four times.
It was a novel experience playing with the amp. The strings didn't sound tinny, or plinky, or—for lack of a better word—weak. The notes rang out and shook the very walls, and, with the aid of the amp, Harry could easily hear that—
That the notes he'd been playing were all wrong and likely had been the whole time.
He sagged after his fourth time through. "It sounded better when I practised it at home..."
"Here," Joe said, holding his hand out a second time for the guitar. "It's badly out of tune."
He made quick work of tuning the guitar and handed it back. "Again."
Harry obliged, only wincing at half of the notes this time. Still, it sounded decidedly wrong.
"You're playing Blue Öyster Cult. Why are you playing Blue Öyster Cult?"
His fingers drummed on the neck, surprising him as they let out a peel of sound from the amp, even without him strumming over the pickguard. "I dunno, I thought that song sounded easy... I would have wanted to learn Summer Nights but I couldn't even figure out the first note..."
Unexpectedly, Joe laughed, his right hand coming up to rub at one eye underneath his sunglasses. The sound was startling and not at all reassuring, though neither was it in any way intimidating or malicious as the laughter of Dudley, or his Uncle Vernon, or Yaxley had been.
"You want to be Eddie, too? You and every other boy who comes by for lessons." He pulled his hand away and examined his fingertip, rubbing away what looked to be an eyelash.
Harry's face fell and he wished he could hide behind his guitar. "I don't wanna be Eddie," he muttered, upset that his aspiration could be misconstrued in such a way.
"Hmmm, you don't?" Joe actually sounded mildly surprised. "Why do you want to learn guitar, Harry? What do you want to do with the guitar? Why Summer Nights?"
Harry answered the easiest question first. "Severus likes that song."
"Does Severus also like Godzilla?"
Harry hesitated, feeling uncertain. "Er... yeah? Yeah, he does."
Joe nodded, smirking a bit, although not unkindly as Snape so often did when he was using the expression to signal that he felt he'd won at something (usually some game that Harry hadn't even known they'd been playing).
"So. Guitar. Why?"
With sudden clarity, Harry remembered that day in mid-December where he'd been mocked in stereo by Nicky and Snowdrop both over his desire to be a rock star. Was that the sort of reaction that Joe would give him too? He'd chuckled when he'd thought that Harry had wanted to play like Eddie Van Halen...
"Is there something about the guitar in particular that you like? Better than drums? Better than bass? Better than, say, piano?"
Joe was trying to help him along, Harry realised. He depressed a few more strings with his fingers, the slightest flutter of his fingertips against the neck creating sound through the amp sitting off to the side of the table.
"It sparkles, and it... it... 'weeeeuurrrhhhhhnnn'" Harry attempted, incapable of putting words to the noises the guitar made. He shrugged helplessly. "It's fast, and... and in every song you hear the guitar, right? But not always the drums, or the bass. Or, I dunno, maybe you hear them, but I don't hear them the same—"
"You don't think you'd mind being the centre of attention?" Joe grinned, his expression easy, but still hard to gauge because of his obscured eyes and eyebrows. "All eyes on you? If you mess up, everyone will know."
"I'm not gonna mess up!" Harry argued hotly, glaring down at where his thumb wrapped over the top of the neck. "I'm gonna be the best. I'm gonna be better than Eddie and Angus. And everyone's gonna cheer because I'll be singing better than Sebastian Bach and Sammy Hagar—"
"Better than David Lee Roth?"
Harry actually paused and felt himself colouring. "No one is better than David Lee Roth."
Joe actually snorted at this, his fingers laced around his knee as he rested his ankle on his opposite leg. "If you say so."
He took a look at his fingernails, which were cut to the quick, and pursed his lips. "How do you plan to be the best guitarist the world's ever seen by playing Godzilla?"
"'Cause if I can learn Godzilla, then I can learn the other stuff too—"
"So you can play all of the songs by all of the other bands. Yes. That's standard. Nothing wrong with that."
Harry bristled. "What else am I supposed to do? I gotta play songs so I can learn—"
"Learning music is not learning songs, Harry. Edward Van Halen did not write Eruption by piecing it together from songs already written by Allan Holdsworth and Jeff Beck. He borrowed techniques, sure, but he had a vision of the music that he—Eddie Van Halen—wanted to make."
"I don't... what if I can't do that? If I think of music, it's all music I heard already," Harry answered finally feeling a bit small. He'd not thought of how new music was created, but he supposed it was true: Angus Young wasn't Angus Young because he sat around playing songs written by Tony Iommi of Black Sabbath. Only AC/DC sounded like AC/DC.
"You become aware of the possibilities for new music by training your ear, your mind, and your hands there," Joe pointed, "at recognising all of the ways that music could go, and how it sounds best to go, and then sometimes, if you're really good, you break the rules."
Gasping and surging forward, Harry felt his eyes widen as Joe voiced exactly what he wanted out of playing guitar and becoming 'better than.'
"I wanna break the rules!"
"Everyone wants to break the rules," Joe scoffed. "Only someone who knows the rules backwards and forwards can break the rules and have it sound good. The rules work for a reason, and most of the time, you should want to follow them, so that when you do break them, it is unexpected but also...enjoyable... and only then are you gonna really blow people's minds."
"What are... what are the rules?" Harry asked, feeling breathless. If he was to know them backwards and forwards, he figured he may as well learn them by heart.
"Tether your wild horses, little man: it's not a list like the ten commandments!" Joe stroked his hairless face for a moment. It might have been that he was considering something deeply, but it was hard to say. However, his brow did seem to wrinkle the slightest bit...
"Tabby's your teacher at Rowky, isn't she?"
"We call her Ms. Tibbons," Harry corrected, but then, feeling wicked, he couldn't help but to add: "Severus calls her Tabby, though."
Joe appeared unimpressed by this information. "Do you know the way a scale operates? Has she taught your class that?"
"There are seven notes in a scale—"
"Not quite," Joe interrupted, his voice even but decisive. "There's anywhere from five to twelve notes in a scale. Granted, seven is common."
Harry frowned and counted on his fingers, shaking his head. "Then why don't the notes go to L?"
Joe frowned, this Harry could tell because his forehead definitely wrinkled this time.
"That I don't know, but the simple answer is that half-step flats and sharps were added between the original notes over time. But the history of the chromatic scale won't help you play the guitar. You can look that up in your own time. The rules I'm speaking of are about how to use your instrument and knowing what the possibilities are with regards to whatever you're gonna pick up to play."
"Oh..." Harry felt a bit disappointed that his instructor couldn't tell him why he couldn't play to L, but apparently what Harry felt certain should have been the case had little bearing on what actually was the case.
"For example, you assumed there were seven notes because there are seven that are named after letters of the alphabet, but there are six strings on your guitar. What are they?"
Harry peered down at the strings, his heart hammering as he realised he had no idea. Why was one missing?! He almost felt as though they were now swimming in his vision, becoming twelve and then six again as he panicked.
"Er..." Harry touched the bottom string, the thinnest. "A, B, C, D, E, F—?"
"Not even close. At the bottom is your high E. That's the first string. Next—the second to the bottom—is B, then third is G, fourth D, fifth A, and last—"
"F."
"No. E again. Low E this time."
Harry groaned, resting his forehead against the red polished body of his guitar where it sat propped up in his lap.
"Why!?"
"That doesn't really matter, and if I get too far into the weeds I'll confuse you too much. Once you travel down that path, you'll soon realise that there are no real answers besides that many musical geniuses tried different ways and eventually came to the conclusion that this way worked best and was easiest. But you know what, Harry? You're thinking on the right track. Do you know the real reason your guitar is usually going to be tuned EADGBE?"
"N-no?" Harry plucked the low E for something to do. It rang out loudly through the air, the amp causing the note to linger longer than it would have had he played it at home.
"It's because that's the way I'm gonna teach you to tune your guitar and that's how it'll be tuned while you're taking lessons with me. Once you've memorised every bloody note on that neck on every bloody string, you'll know what I consider to be the first rule."
Harry couldn't help but to gawp. Memorise every note!? On every string!?
"In a few weeks, I'll say: 'Give me a G sharp on your D string,' and if you can't do that, then we're gonna have some problems, because if you don't know your notes, you don't know shite," Joe pronounced, looking utterly unapologetic about his cursing in front of a child.
"What if... what if I forget?" Harry asked, still flabbergasted. He was going to fail. He couldn't do this!
"If you were older I'd send you home from your lesson, but given that you're... what? What are you? You talk like you're—I don't know—twelve, but you look tiny." Suddenly, Joe's brow furrowed enough to show that he was puzzled and his mouth twisted just enough to show how very uncertain he was. "You can't be five... if you were that young then you'd be in nursery or something—"
Harry glowered, finally recovering himself enough from his stupor to grow appropriately irritated. "I'm eight!"
"To young for that, then. But your homework is still to memorise every note on that pretty, red number you're holding. If you forget in your lesson, then we go back to square one, and I'll tell you where to start, and you'll do nothing better or more fun than to play through and name each note you're playing on each string."
Harry couldn't help the groan that emerged. What about playing Black Diamond? What about playing anything? Playing every note in order didn't make a song. He was reasonably sure that it wasn't music at all.
Apparently he'd said that aloud, because Joe scoffed and adopted a superior look as he sat back with his arms crossed over his chest. "Music comes well before arrangement. Music is what allows arrangement to happen. In a song, each note is 'arranged' into an order that people will like and want to hear, (or that people will hate, if I'm being honest, but that's why there are different genres to choose from). Music isn't the end product; it's the rules themselves that allow soundand noise to change from something annoying to something beautiful.
"First comes sound: that's your notes you're memorising. Then music. Then arrangement," Joe lectured with a tilt of his expressionless face. "If you want to be better than Eddie Van Halen, you have to at least know all your sounds. How else will you know what it's possible to do or not do?
"Someday, if you know all your sounds—all your notes, that is—and all the other rules that it's helpful to know, then you can tune your guitar strings to something besides EAGDBE. Anything you want. And you'll know what to do with that. That's one of the ways some guys like to break the rules."
With that carrot dangling before his eyes, Harry nodded readily, already greedy to begin his assignment. "How do I know what notes are which to memorise...?"
"I'm gonna write them down for you," Joe answered.
Joe was as good as his word. The rest of the session, he stooped over Harry's school notebook and drew a rudimentary fretboard in a table and labeled each string and each note, which took a considerable amount of time. Harry tested each note as it was labeled on the neck of his guitar.
Before long, Severus' knock on the front door could be heard, and Harry put his precious Legacy away while Joe let his custodian into the warmth of the entryway.
Severus was clearly in a rush as the shop hadn't yet closed for the evening, and his father had been left there to his own devices, but Harry still couldn't help once they were on the stoop to turn back and ask at least one more question.
"Joe... why is this red a good colour?"
The door had nearly shut, but it swung open a bit more and the turtle-esque head of Harry's guitar teacher poked out, as if emerging from its shell.
"Because it's your favourite colour," he answered as though that should be completely obvious.
"The best guitar in the world is the guitar that inspires you to play; not the most expensive or rarest model. You'll only get good at whatever you pick up to practice regularly."
A/N: So, a lot of fun trivia in this chapter: Joe is based off of Joe (Satch) Satriani, the famous guitar teacher who taught Steve Vai, Kirk Hammett (of Metallica), and, amongst others: the guitarists for Third Eye Blind, The Counting Crows, and Primus. His roommate Eric is an allusion to Eric Johnson, another virtuoso guitarist who famously toured with Joe Satriani and Steve Vai in a super-group known as G3.
Also, I have no clue if Joe Satriani is this much of an oddball irl. I have certain impressions of him as being a bit peculiar, but that easily could all be a cultivated persona. I obviously took enormous liberties in lampooning him here. Mea Culpa, Joe.
Some of Joe's teaching techniques have been adapted from interviews I've watched with him and are conveyed in close to his own words. The "if you don't know your notes you don't know shit" thing is nearly exactly what he actually said to Steve Vai when he was teaching him. So, I can't claim that all of this is coming from my own imagination, this was one of his real teaching techniques.
Tomorrow, look forward to the posting of Chapter 3 of The Men Who Glare at Goats.
Also, shot in the dark (and I know I've plugged this before and may yet plug it again later), but if anyone here is interested in guitar techniques, repair, lore, etc—my husband has a Youtube channel called BigJake Music you may want to check out. Right. Mothy out!