The boys in the band were older by what—two or three years? Four at the most, but an eternity back then. And cool? Dear God. Their longish, shiny hair was slicked back on the sides, their pompadours somehow dangling down over their foreheads and swaying to the music’s urgent beat. They wore white shirts and narrow ties, dark jackets and tight “pegged” pants. When they stepped up to the microphone to sing “Baby, Wha’d I Say,” they seemed almost to whisper into the mics, but their voices boomed and echoed off the walls, pulses and crackles of their low-slung Fender guitars seeming disconnected from both the fingers of their left hands, which flew over the frets, and their barely moving right hands, as they picked and strummed. The songs themselves weren’t “perfect,” like the more polished and heavily orchestrated versions played on the radio, but to me they were so much better. Hearing the former, you’d smile and nod your head. In the gym—never mind the wafting aroma of dirty socks and sour jockstraps—you could sense in every ringing, echoing note the thrilling proximity of something you couldn’t name or even describe. Freedom was part of it, but, more than that, power. Music played this loud by tall, lean boys showed even the school’s thick-necked bullies what mattered and what didn’t. Though trying to look nonchalant, they hung on every note as hungrily as dweebs like me. The boys behind those roaring sunburst guitars altered our world and in the same instant ruled it. It would be decades before I’d want anything as much as I did to be one of them. Before that eighth-grade moment my most fervent wish had been that my father, long banished, might return to the house my mother and I shared with my grandparents in an upstate New York mill town. Afterward, there were things I needed more than him and an intact family. A guitar. An amp. A mic.

What do you do with such visceral yearning?

If all you have is a cheap acoustic guitar, you start saving the money from your after-school job for a cheap electric one, and after that you somehow manage to buy a secondhand amplifier about a quarter of the size of those in the gym. Everything that comes out of it sounds fuzzy because some other boy with a need identical to yours has blown one of its two tiny speakers. Next, you join forces with a kid who dreams of being a drummer and whose parents have promised him a set for Christmas, and another boy who also plays guitar—his is better than yours—and has a decent amp. When the drummer gets his drums, his parents let you practice in their basement. Somehow, somewhere, you locate a couple microphones, which means both mics and guitars are now plugged into your good amp. It takes you forever to find the setting that doesn’t result in earsplitting feedback. Your drummer doesn’t think of the band as a collaboration so much as a competition between members. He wants to bang, so bang he does. The song he’s beating out is only tangentially related to the one the guitars are playing. He works himself into a frenzy of wallops that don’t take into consideration where you are in the song, its slow build toward climax. Sometimes he doesn’t even notice when you stop playing, just keeps pounding until he’s spent. He hates ballads because he’s not permitted to work himself into his preferred ecstatic state.

You suck, but you keep practicing. The drummer takes lessons, improves. You all do, though it’s hard to tell how much because your needs—better instruments, amps and mics—are so great, so far beyond your economic reach. Also, you need an audience. You need feedback and not the sort that comes out of your amplifier when you turn up the guitars and the mics so you can be heard over the drums. One of the few things you need that doesn’t cost money is a name for the band, so you obsess about that as if it were your most pressing concern. You go through the list of car names, most of which have been taken. Have you arrived on the scene too late? You need to look like a band, which means clothes. You can’t afford the skinny black suits those other boys had, and even if you could your parents would never let you out of the house looking like that. They understand you’re in the grip of something powerful, though, so they confer and buy you matching fuzzy sweaters, powder blue.

Even though it costs money to enter, you sign up for a countywide Battle of the Bands to be waged at the old armory, where three or four hundred kids will hear you. Even as you set up your equipment, long before the first note is struck, you can tell the other four bands will be better. With your two small amps you won’t be heard above the ambient noise of the crowd, and the tiny part of you that’s tethered to reality whispers in your ear that this may be a blessing in disguise. You’re up first. People are still arriving when you play your two-song set, which only people standing next to you can hear. Later your friends drift over and ask when you’re going on, and you have to explain that you already did. No surprise, you finish last. Fifth out of five. Nor, as it turns out, is this the worst humiliation of the evening. In the armory parking lot, you watch the boys in the other bands load their instruments into an armada of vehicles—pickup trucks, vans, rented U-Haul trailers; the winning band has a repurposed hearse. Yours is the only band whose equipment fits, with room to spare, into one rig, the back of the drummer’s parents’ pathetically uncool Nash Rambler station wagon.

Monday, after school, you do a postmortem. You tell yourself you’d sound better with better equipment, but in your heart of hearts you know you’d only sound louder. At the end of the week, your other guitarist announces he’s quitting and taking with him the only good amp. Face it, you’re a joke. You and the drummer, sick at heart, look for another guitarist. You hear about a Jewish kid who’s supposed to be good, so you give him a try, and he is good. He’s been studying classical guitar for several years and seems not even to have heard of rock and roll. You invite him to join the band anyway because there’s nobody else. You tell him where his parents can buy the requisite powder-blue sweater.

Since you’re fourteen, you don’t understand that far worse than not having what you need is not knowing what you need. That you need so much—better instruments, a sound system that’s separate from your guitar amplifier, the means to get to gigs in the unlikely event that anyone hires you—obscures the fact that what you need most, which renders your other needs irrelevant, is to get good. Right now all you’ve really got is this terrible, relentless hunger to strap on a Fender Stratocaster, plug it into a killer amp, step up to the mic and make the kind of music that doubles as a sledgehammer. Nothing else matters.

Hunger has no business preceding ability, but it always does, with no exceptions.

The principal tools of a guild-trained glove cutter were a good pair of shears and his imagination. He didn’t need to be told how big a size 6 pair of ladies’ gloves were. That knowledge was in his hands, and the shears he was holding were an extension of those hands. Imagination was required, because each skin was riddled with blemishes that could be minimized but not eliminated. The trick, my grandfather explained to me as a boy, was to maneuver the skin in such a way that its imperfections would be hidden in the stitching and the narrow fingers, and kept out of plain view in the broad palm and the long stretch of wrist and forearm. A lesser craftsman wouldn’t worry about these subtleties; he just got as many gloves as possible out of the skin. But to men like my grandfather, each skin was a puzzle. You studied it for a good long while, mulling over its challenges, planning your strategy to diminish their impact, before you ever picked up your shears.

Not every craft rises to the level of art, at least not in the traditional sense, but arts and crafts are often linked and for good reason. Speed is the enemy of both, and neither can abide carelessness. Central to both enterprises is a species of optimism, a faith that the task is feasible and worth accomplishing. Both require a plan, as well as the wisdom to abandon that plan should doing so become necessary. The director Fred Schepisi tells a story about the time he invited an oral surgeon to his film class. Dimming the lights, the man tacked to the wall a group of backlit X-rays, different shots of the same mouth, which anyone could see, even in these ghostly representations, was a complete clusterfuck. Some teeth needed to be pulled, some rotated, others pushed back or forward or sideways. Nor could everything be done at once. Proper sequencing was essential. B had to follow A, because it was going to cause C, which would determine whether you needed to address D or could skip right to E. It took the oral surgeon the full class period to map out his complex strategy for rectifying nature’s botched job.

When the lights came up, one of Fred’s puzzled students asked the obvious question: What did dentistry have to do with making movies? “More than you’d think,” Fred told him. Most complex human endeavors, he explained, require skill and intelligence, and talent always helps, but in addition to these you’ll also need intuition—the ability to recognize what’s related to what, as well as what at first glance appears related but actually isn’t. Your strategy should be flexible enough to take into account not just the difficulties you’ve anticipated but also those you haven’t, because things will go wrong. In every movie you’ll make at least one costly casting mistake. And then there’s serendipity. On the day you most need the sun to come out, it won’t, or if it does, it’ll go behind the only cloud in the sky at precisely the wrong moment, ruining your most important shot. The actor you’ve got for only three weeks—who’s committed to four other films after yours—will break his foot stepping out of the limo. You think this guy’s mouth is a clusterfuck? Just you wait.

Indeed, a good hint that you’ve entered the realm of Art is that you immediately feel like giving up. You become overwhelmed by the astonishing complexity of the task, the sheer number of moving parts over which you have less-than-perfect control, the perversity of happenstance, the impossibility of predicting outcomes. In Life on the Mississippi Twain describes learning to pilot a steamboat as an art because the river you steam up this week isn’t the same one you’ll navigate after a week of rains on your return trip. It’s still the Mississippi and eventually you’ll end up in New Orleans, not some unexpected city, but each trip is different because the river is. You have to know everything about it, know it without having to think, and be certain of your judgments, which will have to be made quickly on the basis of incomplete information, and at night you’ll have to do all this and more by feel. It would be nice if the river were a science because in the sciences there are controls, and if you’ve been careful your results can be replicated. What worked on Tuesday will work on Thursday, a claim that cannot always be made when what you hold in your hand is a paintbrush or a camera or a pen. What was exactly right for your last painting will be completely wrong for this one. Creative people love to claim they know what works, but in reality all they know is what worked. Fortunes are lost and hearts broken in that shift of tense.

As I say, I don’t know if my grandfather thought of himself as an artist, but I’m convinced that in explaining his craft he was giving me my first valuable lesson in art, and I’ve remembered it often when contemplating the flaws in whatever narrative I happened to be working on, as well as any defects (at least the ones I’m aware of) in my own character, those gifts that keep on giving.

Was the system just? I doubt it. Given how tough it’s always been for artists to make ends meet, I have to assume the guild system that produced Vermeer and Rembrandt must’ve been brutally competitive, and in any system there are injustices. There must’ve been talented men who couldn’t afford the fee, rendering their talent moot. And what if a man (and we are talking about men here, both in seventeenth-century Delft and in Gloversville, New York, circa 1920) came up with the necessary fee and then, early on, showed no talent, or not enough? Was there some slow-learner version of Rembrandt cut adrift before he could flower? It happens. In graduate school I watched more than one apprentice writer make the same mistakes story after story, seemingly unable to grasp what was going wrong, until one day, sometimes years later, the light would come on, and the work would take a quantum leap forward. That doesn’t do you much good if you’ve already been judged and found wanting.

What was the mission of the Renaissance guilds? You might imagine it would be the protection of its members, and you’d be partly right. There’s always been both safety and power in numbers, and guild members undoubtedly benefited from their association. But the guild’s mission was also to protect and defend Art itself, to prevent it from being cheapened. The relationship of guildsmen to their craft was proprietary. Put differently, they had little use for hacks. They didn’t hate them, or publicly ridicule them, or burn them at the stake. But they would’ve been horrified by the kind of egalitarianism that Maria Semple skewers in her satirical novel Where’d You Go, Bernadette?: “Everyone is equal. Joni Mitchell is interchangeable with the secretary at open mic night … John Candy is no funnier than Uncle Lou when he gets a couple beers in him.” Central to the mind-set of the Renaissance guildsman was the responsibility of making value judgments. Not everything is art. Not everyone is talented. Therefore, not everyone can join.

Of course some modern unions are also notoriously difficult to join. The reason, though, usually has less to do with art than with commerce. Higher-wage union jobs are (or used to be) much sought after, and because union workers can be hard to fire, so membership becomes a kind of sinecure. Many of the union guys I’ve worked with over the years took great pride in being good at what they did, and when I was growing up there was a general perception that a union plumber, carpenter or electrician was probably a cut above his nonunion competition. But modern unions came into being to keep workers from being exploited, to make certain that workplaces were safe, that workers—many of them unskilled, uneducated and therefore easily taken advantage of—made a living wage and that the lion’s share of the profits didn’t disappear into the employers’ pockets. While it may be true that most workers would prefer to do good work to shoddy work, a union’s primary mission isn’t to guarantee quality but rather to ensure its members are treated fairly. Unlike guilds, unions negotiate contracts and make certain they’re honored. The equation is economic, not proprietary, at least not in the Renaissance sense. Union electricians don’t worry inordinately about the integrity, health and overall well-being of electricity.

I’m certain my grandfather understood this distinction and felt the ideological conflict. A guild man, he nevertheless helped his fellow glove cutters, many of them unskilled and marginally literate, to unionize. Tanneries and glove shops were dangerous places, and before workers organized, their wages were depressed, their safety concerns largely ignored. The union helped, though its victories, at least according to my grandfather, were pretty modest. Its members were, to use one of my old man’s favorite expressions, shoveling shit against the tide. Every year more and more jobs went overseas, where labor was cheap and the industry unregulated. Both the guys who worked in the glove shops and the women who sewed gloves at home understood all too well that the weak hand they’d been dealt was only getting weaker. Many placed their faith in the disruptive new technology that was undermining their craft. Pattern cutting—where a size-6 paper pattern was affixed to the skin and cut around, and then the skin was stitched up—became the industry norm. Later, even this time-consuming labor was dispensed with. “Clicker-cutting” machines capable of stamping out one pair of size-6 ladies’ gloves after another, as fast as the skin could be stretched beneath those lethal blades, were invented, and any dimwit could pull those levers. Chromium, though lethal, sped up the tanning process. Piecework did the rest. Men anxious to make as much money as possible disabled safety mechanisms while the foremen looked the other way. Speed was officially king, rendering craft irrelevant. Suddenly, throughout the entire ecosystem, nobody seemed to give a shit. Shop owners made it clear that they wanted as many gloves as possible out of each skin, blemishes be damned. Technology was pushing prices down, which made consumers happy. Who cared if the merchandise was shoddy?

Well, my grandfather did, which probably explains why he never prospered in the new system. Used to being held to a higher standard, he never got the hang of the lower one. He must’ve known it would be more advantageous not to care, but he didn’t have it in him. Seeing what was coming at him and recognizing it as the future, he just couldn’t escape. He was like the Mississippi riverboat captains Twain idolized in Life on the Mississippi. They too had been represented by a guild, a powerful one; it disappeared when they did, almost overnight.