There have been a lot of ups and downs in Jimmy Kay's life.
Wives have come and gone. Friends and associates have died. Age and diabetes have taken their toll.
Not music.
He's been good to it, and it's been good to him.
The man born James Robert Kayanjian, in Kingsburg, has spent a life devoted to music, and it shows.
The 60-year-old doesn't just talk about music. He gives a whole history.
Kay is not the average guitar hobbyist who strums a few chords every once in a while.
He relies on it for his livelihood.
Watch him demo for customers at downtown Hanford's Independent Music, where he does double duty as store manager and guitar instructor.
His thick fingers guide effortlessly through complicated chords. The sound emerges with a brilliant clarity and rhythm non-musicians can only envy and admire.
And enjoy.
Since he was 12, the self-taught Kay has parlayed a talent for instantly learning popular songs into an occupation.
"It's an ability I can't explain," he said.
That knack has taken him from Kingsburg, around the world, and back again. He's performed in Vietnam for servicemen.
He briefly played with Elvis Presley at his Caesar's Palace shows in the 1970s. He's strummed with Neil Diamond, Richie Valens and Richard and Karen Carpenter.
He's seen the pleasure of giving teenagers and adults doses of "good, clean fun" - his term for rock 'n' roll in its 1960s heyday.
But he also talks of the dark side of the business - the huge amounts of money, the drug use, the moochers and hangers-on who try to take advantage of success.
Not that Kay ever became rich. He said he broke $100,000 a year a few times.
But it didn't do him any good. Kay saw the temptations coming and shied away from the destructive tendencies of some of his musical brethren.
If he felt like things were getting out-of-hand, he'd fly home from gigs in Vegas and do some work on the family farm near Burris Park.
Incidentally, that's where he still lives.
"All these people I worked with, they're now dead. What does that tell you?" he said.
Sure, he smoked a doobie every now and then. It just never got a grip on him. The thing that lit Kay's lantern was connecting with audiences.
He doesn't have a shred of artistic snobbery.
Kay makes no bones of the fact that he is an expert copycat, a gifted mimic of charttoppers others have written.
"I was more of an entertainer than a recording artist," he said.
From an early age, he played stuff people wanted to hear. In the mid-60s, he was packing a Fresno nightclub called the Crimson Castle with hundreds of teens eager to experience the new music some said was from the devil.
Like the early Beatles, Kay and his band, The Lively Affair, played it conservatively, wearing suits and avoiding anything too avant-garde.
They took that model wherever they went, from Hanford nightclubs to big venues in Vegas.
Their blended style and broad appeal caught the attention of a USO recruiter who signed them up for overseas tours in the late 1960s.
Kay and his local bandmates toured most of the bases in Vietnam and many in the Philippines, Guam, Thailand and Korea.
They got paid fairly well, but Kay said he would have done it for free.
"We were so involved in pleasing the crowd," he said.
These days, lessons are the focal point of his musical life. The gig opportunities - an exhausting way to make money even in the glory days - have dried up to a few Friday and Saturday jams in Hanford.
The tours are a thing of the past.
Not that Kay minds much. The regular hours give him time for his wife and 13-year-old daughter. And Kay clearly enjoys teaching the craft to others, no matter how musically inept they might be.
Kay claims he can get anybody to play Eric Clapton "in 10 minutes."
He also does school assemblies where he tries to get children to recognize quality sound.
"Hopefully, they will walk away with a delight at hearing music," he said.
Kay might soon lose the ability to walk, if not the pleasure he gets from playing. His feet are starting to tingle and go numb from diabetes. A wheelchair may be just around the corner.
But drop his life's work? Not on your life. He's already designed a wheelchair with an arm that swivels free to make room for a guitar.
"As long as you can draw breath and sit, you can pretty much play and teach," he said.
(The reporter may be reached by e-mail at:
snidever@pulitzer.net)
(June 19, 2005)
