I'll never forget the day I got my first guitar. I went to the Chevrolet dealership downtown
and met my friend Mike Snow, whose dad worked in the body shop. Mike had located a used bass guitar and amp
for me to buy from someone. I can't
remember the brand of either, but since this was the summer of 1968, they were
probably made by Sears. The price was
$125, which was an astronomical sum at the time. I had a little bit of money saved up from
mowing lawns, but I'm sure my dad kicked in most of the purchase price.
As soon as I got home, I set up the bass and amp in the
corner of the living room next to the stereo.
I started to tune the thing up, probably by using a book that had come
along with the bass. Within about five
minutes, I had broken one of the strings by tuning it an octave too high. There must have been a second set of strings
in the case because I had the broken one changed that same day. Fortunately, the broken string clued me into
the fact that I was tuning an octave
too high, so I got the replacement string and its three comrades on the guitar into
the right range without further trouble.
I was ready to go!
For me, "ready to go" meant that I was ready to
start playing along with the first Led Zeppelin album, starting with side one,
track one, the glorious "Communication Breakdown." Who knows how loud I had the amp turned
up? I probably had the tremolo turned
all the way up, too, and even though it did not sound like John Paul Jones'
bass, I'm sure it sounded like heaven to me.
(I'm ashamed to admit that soon after this, I was playing along with
"Crimson and Clover" by Tommy James and the Shondells, a song on
which the tremolo was more appropriate.)
Of course I had asked my parents' permission to embark on
this mission. Even then I think they
knew that music would be my thing. I was
on the football team and played church league basketball, but with my limited
athletic ability, they could surely see I would be spending a lot of time on
the pine as I got older.
I'll never forget what happened that first day when my
mother arrived home and came around the corner into the living room just as I
was wailing along to Led Zep. She took
one look at my guitar and amp and said "You can't entertain your friends
with that!" It turns out that when she gave me her
permission to get a guitar, she envisioned me coming home with a folk
guitar. This would allow me to sit
around the campfire or the living room, singing sensitive songs of the sixties
and causing people to compliment her on how cultured I was. Instead, this was her worst nightmare. I might turn out like the Beatles and get
into all kinds of mischief, both illegal and immoral.
Though I did get into a few kinds of trouble with that first
bass and its subsequent replacement (a powder blue Hagstrom bass with a thin
neck and clear plastic pick guard, and a big bass amp with two fifteen-inch
speakers), Mom finally got her way.
Eighteen months later, she got me a cheap nylon string, six string folk
guitar for Christmas, and I managed to hack my way through the James Taylor
songbook until I could do a passable imitation of "Fire and
Rain." Then she made an offer: she would get me a nice steel string guitar
for my 16th birthday. The
catch? I had to trade in my bass and amp
in order to pay for it. I was hooked and
I went for it. That's when I got my
Martin D-18 from Zender Kahn Music on East High Street downtown, and the rest
is history.
This story came rushing back to me this morning as I took my
daily stroll through the obituaries.
Mike Snow and his wife Lin died last month of injuries sustained from a
motorcycle accident in Arizona. The obit
said that Lin's father had passed away just one day before she and Mike
died. Farewell, old friend, and thanks
for setting me on the path to a life of enjoyment, of both music itself and the
friendships I’ve developed writing and performing it.
