Learning Songs

I can remember the time when i really got bit by the Song learning bug. It was 1991 and i was working shift work, 12-8 in the morning,"Graveyard shift" at BC Transit, The Vancouver Bus company. There was a lot of down time where we would have to wait around for the buses to come out of service. Around this time i got myself a Bob Dylan Songbook. I had my Basses and a couple of Electric guitars, but no Acoustic. So i bought a Pawnshop Acoustic, an Aria, which had terrible action. I took it in to the local Guitar shop called the "Boogie Shop" and the Guitar tech set it up so well, that in his words he said, "It sounds like God!" So every rnight i would take that to work with me and sit on a bus and learn my Bob Dylan Songbook. This was the early 90s when the Internet did not exist yet. If you wanted to learn songs you had to pay for a Songbook, buy a Guitar Magazine, Guitar player or Guitar World or listen to the record and figure out by playing the record or CD over and over. I dug into the Dylan Songbook and still go over it today. Songbooks were really expensive and still are at Music shops, so i would collect them at used Book Stores. I must have over a Thousand now, another passion of mine is Book collecting. But what i love about Songbooks is that you can go back to the Songs you have learned, like the Dylan one and you still have them in your head. The other thing is the Lyrics. Learning the Lyrics is so important when you go to a jam. How many times does the jam grind to a halt because no knows the words? The 90s was a very good time in Music history. Bands like the Nirvana, Alice and Chains, STP, Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, really exploded. Especially in Seattle which was 3 hours away from Vancouver. This was the time when the Internet was just coming into existence. Now you can go to any number of sites and get everything tabbed out and all the lyrics in 2 seconds. It was not that way in the early 90's , you would go and photo copy books from the library and go home with a bunch of copies. But it still comes down to getting that information into your head and down into your fingers. So the basics have not really changed ,it's just so much easier to get the information. But what you do with information is the same. you play Music!