When you fell in Love...

I was four and my dad brought me back a youth guitar from his trip to Madrid. He scored a Paulino Bernabe that sounded so good when he played it. I did not stay with it then; he wanted to teach me flamenco and I wanted to be one of the Beatles. Still loved the instrument and took it up again at 19 when I heard Van Halen. Nowadays I don't play as much as I would like but still love the guitar as much as ever.
 
Back in 1984, I went to see Huey Lewis & the News in Charlotte. He had a young guitslinger named Stevie Ray Vaughan opening for him. SRV totally blew me away, and I knew right then that I had to play the guitar.
 
I was 15 years old when "La Bamba" came out and I was hooked! No joke, all I wanted to be was a kid living in the late 50s/early 60s in California and playing a custom colored Strat. I've said that I was born in the wrong era. While my classmates in high school were going crazy over Poison, Winger, Warrant, Crue...I was dreaming of playing with the Ventures, the Kingsmen, the Beach Boys, and Dick Dale. It all changed when I bought an copy of Guitar World with SRV on the cover in '87 and it had article about Billy Gibbons at some guitar show showing off the current values of various guitars.

I would spend my summers with my grandparents outside DC in Fairfax, VA and have them take me to Southworth Guitars near American University. The coolest guitar I ever saw was a real '62 Tele Custom in a greened LPB with a decal of Barney Rubble under the bridge. I was bitten hard. In fact in '88, I bought a lefty Strat bridge from my pal Brian Meader at Abbey Music in VA Beach and gutted my '87 Squier Strat! Then I began the "aging" process...I did terrible things to that guitar to make it look like it had been played for YEARS - this was all pre-Relic time. I scratched, scraped, rusted, sanded, and burned that thang to a kinda cool looking "fine aged" instrument. Sadly, about five years ago I tried to refinish the old girl and left her outside for just a little too long while applying the stripper and the body popped apart at the glue seems...sad.

Yeah, its been years of suffering from the guitar-bug.
 
I don't have any great "awezome moment" story I'm afraid :(
I wanted to start to play guitar because I was really bullied in middle school and thought
that if I could play guitar like the "cool rock kids" things would turn around, so I picked the guitar up at age 15.
On the flip side though, once I got that guitar, I had the incentive and drive to practice my ass off for years
to come, and noticed I easily learned techniques quite naturally.
Over the first 2 years though, I realized I gradually began playing and practising less for for some notion of improved self-worth,
and more for the love of actually playing the instrument and writing my own music. So around age 17-18 when my technique was good enough to
play what I wanted to play (and my "self-worth" or whatever you want to call had also solidified) I might say that my true "love-affair" started.
Moving from my hometown at age 16, and "starting fresh" at a new school, but still having that "itch" to prove myself helped out too!
 
My dad caught me jumping off my bed wielding my newly constructed Gibson Explorer. It was a copy of Matthias Jabbs' white-with-black stripes, done in cardboard, with a genuine scrapwood neck, real string strings, and 1 V 1 T with knobs from an old TV. I thought he was going to smack me, but he asked me if I wanted to take guitar lessons, and the next day I was the proud owner of a Hondo strat copy and a Fender Sidekick 10. When I figured out how to overdrive the little bugger, I just kept wailing on the low "E" string and laughing. Wonder they didn't kill me then.

FYI was visiting the folks this past weekend, many things are still intact in my old room, including the old fake-splorer in the corner. It apparently suffered a headstock break over the years...maybe something the PTC could look into ;)...but still looks good.
 
When i got my first guitar from mother in 84,a japanese strat copy called Legend plus a battery driven amp called Smash.Hearing Dio-Holy diver,Ozzy-Diary of a madman,Kiss-Alive 2 and Fools by Van Halen helped too.Still a love affair,the best meditation and relaxation i can ask for.
 
I was a keyboard player in high school and college bands. But I doubled on guitar, though I was only mildly interested in it.

In college, I saw that it'd be a lot of fun to be able to take an instrument with me to parties, or to hang out with friends who played. Couldn't shlep a B-3 around.

So I got a D-18. That's when I really fell in love with the instrument. I'm guessing this was about 1970.
 
My wife has been singing her whole life. She loves to sing with an acoustic guitar accompanist. Well after we were married I went to a coffee house set she was doing and I noticed that I didn't like how intimate it seemed on stage (so jealousy). So, the coffee shop also sold guitars. When the set was over I went to the wall, got down an Epiphone acoustic and bought it. I taught myself to play because I wanted that intimacy of music between my wife and I. I had no idea how much in love I would fall with the guitar itself......we still play and sing together all the time and it is awesome.
 
My mom and dad played an old Martin and I grew up listening to them. When I was old enough to hold it I learned 3 chords and started playing the same old folk songs. It just went on from there. I still have Mom's old Martin.
TheFamily-1.jpg
 
Mom and Dad singing and playing around Campfires. Something I just looked forward to as a kid. Funny thing is that I tried Piano first, but I couldn't get into it. But I grabbed a guitar one day and just caught on instantly.
 
I first picked up a guitar at the age of 8. Battered acoustic with high action, couldn't intonate and I would play "I'm a believer" and "I'm not your stepping stone" on it.

Graduated to a POS electric that I bought for $25 at the age of 13....If I had another $250 I could have bought the NOS 1968 Gibson Les Paul hanging on the rack at Buddy's Music in Brooklyn. This POS lasted for 5 years, and allowed me to further de-volve my (lack of) skill.

Continued playing various POS's until my 40th B-day....bought an American Standard Strat in 1995....and that's when I realized that a guitar could actually sound good. Played through a decent amp...it sounded even better.

First fell in love with a guitar in 2004...that's when I first traded up to my '00 CU24 with birds and ten top. That's when I first realized that I could play leads to songs like "Reelin' in the years" that sounded something like the actual version.

the rest is history. I sublimated all my hobbies and collecting into guitars, and since then well over 100 PRSi have moved through my hands, with at least 3 dozen taking up "permanant residence" in my collection.
 
4th grade came and all the kids had to pick an instrument to learn. Most never practiced and gave up at end of the year. I picked the flute after seeing a clip of Jethro Tull on somewhere on TV. I thought Jethro (I was 9 and didn't know his name was Ian Anderson) could rock out on a flute!

Another student, a girl, also picked flute since she had learned to play a bit from her mother. So the teacher focused on her since she already had some skill... me, I suffered from dizzy headaches since the dork didn't bother to teach me to breath correctly. After 3 weeks of complaining about my head, he finally took the flute away and handed me a guitar saying "try this, you won't have to breath so much". Took me another 5 years of whining to convince my mother I was serious about learning to play more than the couple of chords I learned that year. Got my first junk guitar at 15 and think my current guitar addiction is due to the suffering I went through in those early years.
 
I've played drums since 3rd grade (I'm now 57) . But during junior high, my brother was in a band. The guitarist was a nice guy and he was the only person I knew in my circle of friends that did play guitar. I asked him if it was hard to play. He looked at my fingers, at my nails, and said "you'll never play guitar, your nails are too soft."

What did I know? I played drums and he was actually in a band and playing guitar. So, I never pursued it very hard. I did managed to get a cheap Fender 12 string acoustic before I went off to college. I'd play at playing it for a while until my fingers got sore and then I'd put it down for weeks. That was a good recipe for not getting anywhere... Friends don't let friends start playing guitar for the very first time on 12 string acoustics...

Then, when I was 48 I went to a guitar center. I had heard somewhere along the way that electrics were easier to play. I decided that if I could play on an electric (what little I could play at that point ) for more than 15 minutes without my fingers hurting, I'd buy it. It was a Mexican Strat and I played at playing it for almost 2 hours! The sales staff was indulgent - it was obvious that I could not play, but I stuck at it for so long, I think they were actually rooting for me..

I bought that Strat that day, December 7, 2002, and never looked back. A friend found out that I had just bought a guitar and he said, "you have to go look at PRS guitars."

Since then, I have been in lessons more on than off and my guitar collection is somewhere over 50, half of them being PRS. In a month or so, I will finish the music studio in the basement and I plan to be playing at playing for a long time to come.
 
John, Paul, George, and Ringo on The Ed Sullivan Show.

Anything that made teenage girls scream like that was something I had to have.

Later I learned it could do other cool things too. Like make music. And change the world.
 
In about '72/'73, when I was about 3 or so, our Dad bought a "Best of the '50s" 8 track tape and played it non-stop. I very distinctly remember how the solo on Buddy Knox's "Party Doll" made me feel. I knew it was the guitar, and even tho I know nothing about them, I knew I wanted to play one. I didn't actually get one and start playing till '79, but have pretty much played since then......and have no intentions of ever quitting.
 
Back
Top