Postscript: Photographic evidence

After posting yesterday, I remembered that the second photo below was squirreled away in our basement; the first one also turned up in the same box. Both are from the summer of 1995.

Exhibit A: Avant Garage performing at Hartwick College in Oneonta, NY. 

The photo is poorly lit, which accurately reflects conditions on the ground. (I'm in the shadows at far left, with the Gibson ES-335.)

The glaring inaccuracy of this image is the impression that lots of young people are having a good time while we play; the photo must've been snapped very early in the evening, before our audience figured out that they would better enjoy hanging around outdoors in the sweltering heat, rather than staying inside and enduring our music in air-conditioned comfort.

 

Exhibit B: Avant Garage performing at New Paltz, NY.

This was a wedding celebration for the families of our lead-singer/accordionist's brother and his bride, who had tied the knot earlier that year in the Caribbean. We were one of numerous bands that performed throughout the afternoon and evening.

When I first saw this image, I thought, how charming that those two little girls are sitting there listening to us play. Then I realized that my only turn on lead vocals at that gig was my "Body-Piercing Blues," in which the narrator is trying to bed "the sweetest hippie chick that you ever seen / A tie-dye shirt and peasant skirt and Birkenstock queen," who insists that he's too vanilla and really ought to get a body piercing. Subsequent verses work their way down from eyebrow to nostril to lip to nipple, culminating at the groin. (Our shocked protagonist cowardly refuses all.) Yes, that's what those two little girls are sitting there listening to.

Once more, yadda yadda redux: In search of the right guitar (1)

 Yow! Six years? Six years?!?

As the kids say today, it's been a minute.

And I'm in much the same sitch as back then, viz., needing to get back in the saddle of stringing words together in meaningful (and, if the stars align, occasionally elegant?) ways.

No, I'm not even going to try to recap everything going back six years (?!?). Rather, I'm going to go back almost half a century, because I've spent the past three months obsessing about six-string electric guitars, and my better half suggested that I really ought to share my observations in blog posts. (Of course, this is her tactful way of telling me that she'd rather not hear all the gory details of my current journey.)

So, here begins a series of posts, in which I try 1) to get my prose-mojo groove back, and 2) survey my personal guitar odyssey, culminating in my current psychodrama (spoiler alert: I want something so niche that Guitar Center stores prefer not to stock it).

1970s

I don't recall when, exactly, I first felt a yen to play guitar, but it was sometime in the mid-1970s. I made my parents aware, but they were slightly older than most of my peers' parents — and crucially, my father didn't much care for any musical styles that used the electric guitar. So, for my first 16 years (give or take) as a guitarist, the only guitar I played was a classical guitar.

(Okay, that's not counting the electric bass I played as a teenager, but again, I'm trying to stick to the six-string plotline.) 

 1990

At the end of my first year of grad school, I decided to take the plunge and buy myself an electric guitar. Most of my favorite guitarists (Steve Howe, John McLaughlin, Jimmy Page) played Gibson guitars, and on the occasions in my youth that I'd picked up a Fender guitar, the spacing of strings and frets always felt alien to me.

So, my choice at the Ithaca Guitar Works in (April? May?) of 1990 boiled down to two instruments in my price range, both Gibsons, and both previously owned: an ES-335 and a Les Paul Studio. Mind you, at this point I knew very, very little about electric guitars and their components, so my decision hinged on how the instrument felt in my hands ... and after a decade-and-a-half of playing classical guitar, the Les Paul body felt too small, but the larger ES-335 body felt more comfortable ... so, that's what I bought.

I played that guitar for a decade or so. (If you saw me perform in the band Avant Garage in 1995, that's what I played.) It mostly suited me; my only complaints were 1) it wasn't much to look at (plain top with a dark brown finish ... so dark that it looked black under ordinary lighting conditions), but more importantly, 2) it had a trapeze tailpiece, and in my search for maximum sustain I learned that I really wanted a stopbar tailpiece. And weirdly, sometime around the turn of the century, I realized that it was starting to feel awkward, and that maybe I should switch to an instrument with a smaller body.

So, right around the time I moved from Ithaca, NY to Cambridge, MA, I sold it ...

 2002

... and replaced it with an Epiphone Les Paul, thus ending my initial Semi-Hollow chapter and kicking off my Solidbody Era.

(per the parenthetical numeral in this post's title, there's more to come ... SO. MUCH. MORE.)