Saturday, Dec.3, 2011.
I'd wanted a guitar for years. Ever since I was 3 or 4 actually. I remember sitting on the freezer in my grandparents little country store, a tiny transistor AM radio held to my ear when I heard the song that was to mean so much to my life:
I want to hold your hand. I was a Beatles fan instantaneously, as were many other people. I watched them on the
Ed Sullivan show. I scanned the paper for pictures of them and I held my tiny window to the world, that little radio, to my ear until the battery ran out.
I remember walking down to the drug store, two stores down from my grandparents grocery, to get a coke from the cooler. They had
Ticket to Ride if you bought a 6-pack of soda. I only had enough for a bottle.
I grew up and though I asked for a guitar, for some reason my parents never gave me one. I bought a cheapy acoustic in high school and learned a few chords but I was more interested in photography and learning to fly and girls than I was in learning the guitar. Same for college, I was too busy studying and taking pictures. My roommate had 2 acoustics but he had about as much talent on the instrument as I did and we never did get around to playing much on them.
I moved to La Crosse and played on a borrowed acoustic while accompanying my very good roommate on the keyboards. Even wrote a song based on the easy chords of C, D and G. He played it at a wedding reception, which I thought was the coolest thing to ever happen to me.
Fast forward to this summer. My 50th birthday was rapidly approaching. I wanted to get myself something special for the occasion. But with the job I had at the time, I wouldn't be home enough to enjoy it, so I put it on the back burner. A month later, I was to accept a job near my home and the dream came back alive like an unleashed dragon.
I started looking up how-to videos on u-tube. It didn't look that hard, how hard could it be? I went to musical instument shops to look at guitars, hold them and stum the few chords I knew to hear their sound. I tried making my 13-year old son a deal. I would get him a guitar and amp and get one for me too. We;'d take lessons together on the same night, either back-to-back or at the same time from different instructors. "What 13-year old doesn't want to learn to play guitar?" I thought.
Mine. He had not the slightest interest in learning to play.
I drove my poor wife nuts, all I could talk about were guitars and learning to play. "Just go get one, I'm
tired of hearing you talk about it!" she would say. Wait until I start practicing, I thought.
A friend of mine who is an accomplished guitarist, plays in a band, has what he calls Band Camp every Wednesday night out at the airport. After asking him some questions on what was good, what was bad, what to look for, etc., I was invited to attend the informal camp. It was just 3 or 4 guys I know, sitting around, figuring out songs and getting helpful hints from Bill on technique, phrasings and fingerings.
I went to a well-stocked shop one Saturday. I had already placed two guitars on my wishlist on their website. One was a semi-hollow body cherry red, the other a beatiful sapphire blue stratocaster. They had neither in stock. I told the salesman, whom I knew from when he worked at a sandwich shop near the airport, what kind of sound I wanted, that I only had aspirations of playing for myself and gave him some song titles as an example of what I wanted to play.
He turned me over to a friend of his who was very familar with the music and we sat down with two guitars like the ones I had placed on my wish list. We played them both and then he said, "Wait a minute, let me show you this other one. I think you'll like it." With that, he got up, walked across the store and returned with a beautiful dark red guitar. It was gorgeous. It fit my hands perfecctly, I could switch it between a hollow-body or a solid-body with the flick of a switch and most unimportatly, I looked good holding it. The guitar was a Schechter. Prince and Pete Townsend are two of their more notable players.
I bought it, a Vox amp, picks, stand and strap. Now to go home to practice.
