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.)
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