Smelly Cat, Smelly Cat, What Are You Playing Now?
July 2007 In and Around Town - Delta

At the tender age of 41, I got a wild hair to learn the guitar. I’d tried many times over the years to self-teach through various books to no avail. Then last Christmas, my husband asked me what I wanted. I blurted out, “Well, I’ve always wanted to learn guitar.” So we picked up a guitar at a pawn shop, and he got me a couple months worth of lessons at one of the local establishments.

The first thing my 4-year-old daughter wanted me to learn to play was “Smelly Cat” from the long-running hit sitcom, “Friends”. If you know the show, you know the song. Although “Friends” has been off the air for three years, we still watch the reruns – constantly! Sara refers to “Friends” as “The Smelly Cat Show”.

So I started going to guitar lessons each week, trying to learn various notes and chords. After a few months, and having learned about three chords, I felt adventurous enough to attempt “Smelly Cat” for Sara. So like the good geek that I am, I went on the internet and discovered a goldmine called chordie.com. This site has the chords and tabs for every song known to mankind. And it even has new songs. I mean REALLY new. If the teen garage band next door wrote a song last night, chances are it’s on chordie.com today.

Lo and behold, there was “Smelly Cat”. As I suspected, it was pretty easy. Let’s face it – Phoebe Bouffay, the character who plays the song on “Friends”,  is not exactly Eddie Van Halen, and neither am I. So I started looking for other songs that I thought might be easy, such as “Wild Thing” by the Troggs. FYI,  same three chords as “Smelly Cat”; in fact, there are about 3,000 songs that can be played with those same three chords. I found a lot more songs that were much simpler than I thought. Then there were others that sounded simple, but turned out to be way too complex for me. As far as I could tell, the artist invented chords that involve having six fingers on one hand, like the villain in “The Princess Bride”.

Even if you don’t have a burning desire to learn guitar, Chordie.com is great for finding lyrics. You know those nights when you’re lying in bed awake at night wondering what the words are to “Louie, Louie”? Sure you do. Well, wonder no more! Despite what your drunk friends tell you, they’re not, “Blehhh, blah bleh do, blah bleh do blah blehhh.”

So I’m finding I can actually play a few songs. No, my husband doesn’t recognize them unless I’m singing them. Then again, with my voice, he doesn’t recognize them when I AM singing them. Maybe at some point, I’ll get adventurous enough to bring my guitar on a group camping trip. That is, if the group doesn’t mind hearing “Smelly Cat” and “Wild Thing” over and over.