Best Way To Learn Guitar

Why did right-handed Ernie Isley, already a rock-guitar legend for the Isley Brothers’ 1973 hit “Who’s That Lady?”, spend eight hours a day learning to play left-handed as well? Common-sense answer: he’s a ham. “If the game’s on the line for the Chicago Bulls,” says Isley, 38, who first performed (on drums) with his famous family at 14, “the ball’s going to Michael Jordan.

With the Isley Brothers, I wanted to be the one.” Mystical answer: a dream of sainted southpaw Jimi Hendrix. “He reaches down into, like, a cloud bank,” Isley recalls, “and pulls out his left-handed guitar. He hands it to me–and I’m playing it, left-handed! He said, `That right-handed-let-handed thing doesn’t matter where we are’.”

Now that might be weird if you dreamed it. But when Ernie Isley was 12, Hendrix, then guitarist with the Isley Brothers, actually lived at the family house in New Jersey. Last month Isley released his first solo album, the appropriately titled “High Wire” (“Take a look at me!” he boasts on the title cut), on which he sings and plays most of the instruments. To show off for studio engineers, he played left-handed rhythm guitar on one song. (“They took note,” he says.) But it’s the shapely shriek of Isley’s lead guitar–played right-handed for convenience–tightrope-dancing above his bass and drum tracks that carries the record.

Nobody ever knew how to peg the Isley Brothers. Were they rock (“Twist and Shout”), soul (“It’s Your Thing”) or funk (“Who’s That Lady?”)? Brother Ernie will have the same trouble when radio programmers start fretting over “High Wire.” “Stations that play this but can’t play that–please,” he says. “If you’re trying to be musical, you include.” It seems silly to get in a dither about whether rock guitar belongs with funk bass and soul harmonies once you’ve journeyed where right-handed and left-handed don’t matter.