Me & My Guitar, December 1978
Originally uploaded by grabbingsand.

Twenty-nine years later, I still can’t play guitar.

I took rather good care of that first guitar, the one with the red sunburst and a white pickguard. It had no case, but instead a sturdy, triangular long-box made out of corrugated cardboard. What it was packed and shipped in, obviously. Dutifully, yet aimlessly, I would drag the box out from under my bed — best place to keep it — and strum with purpose, if nothing else. I remember how it smelled, like freshly-cut plywood with a little cedar.

Earlier this evening, after I got home from another fine rehearsal, I pulled my most recent guitar from the corner of our living room.

It is an Alvarez that my Dad bought for himself when the two of us took guitar lessons together for a few months. I still think it is quite something to see, all a dark, rich reddish-brown through the body and neck. Mine at the time was black, shiny and prone to collecting fingerprints. This was back when I was living at home, before high school graduation. Once a week, the two of us would ride over to this fellow’s house. Gary, I think. He didn’t teach from a book like my piano teachers had tried to do. Instead, he’d ask us to bring in a cassette of something we wanted to learn. He’d play it, play it again, then pick out the chord progression and write out his interpreted tabulation for us to practice. All in all, I don’t believe this technique was very effective. I learned most of “Here Comes The Sun,” but that was about it.

We sold my black acoustic after I decided to take up bass guitar instead. I started with my cousin Tim’s old Epiphone solid-body. A decent bass, yellow-on-black sunburst, even if the pickups did have a tendency to shock me with an unsettling lack of predictability. This risk was eliminated by replacing “Sparky” with another Epiphone, a red hollow-bodied bass with s-shaped cut-outs. I miss that guitar, even if its size did make it a bit unwieldy, particularly when I started practicing with my first garage band. There were two. Garage bands.

The first, we called ourselves XLR8. No, not my idea. A pair of twins (keyboard and guitar), an okay lead guitarist and two bass players. Why two bass players? Kevin, my rival, was quite confident in the notion that since his bass was a short-necked bass and mine was a long-necked bass, that we were dealing with two entirely different instruments.

XLR8 evolved mercifully over time into an all-together different band. The guitar-playing twin remained, as did the other lead. I stuck around. And rounding out our number was an older guy who would become our drummer. He was 21. We were juniors, seniors in high school. Not only did he have his own drum set, complete with double bass drums (and the Metallica-style kick-pedals to match), but he had his own place in which to practice. In other words, we had arrived. Our name? Black Dahlia.

(Why, yes, as a matter of fact, I had been reading a particular James Ellroy paperback at the time …)

We practiced much. Maybe too much. But for all of our work, we had only one real gig. We played a junior high talent show. We weren’t contestants. Instead, we were the mid-contest entertainment. We knew only three songs, really. So we played them all. “Johnny B. Goode.” “Here I Go Again.” And something that we believed in our heart of hearts was Led Zeppelin’s “Rock & Roll.” And it was awesome.

We signed autographs. We had fans, even if most of them forgot us soon after.

It was shortly after that gig that I was giving my walking papers from the band. It was determined that I wasn’t devoting enough energy to Black Dahlia. In retrospect, I should’ve put up a fight to maintain the name as my own. After all, I was the “reader” of the group …

I didn’t play much through college. I got another bass to replace the hollow-body. This one was black, solid, something of a P-bass configuration with less dangerous pickups. But I did little with it. I sold it in ’96 or ’97 because I needed the room.

When I moved out into the real world in 1995, my dad gave me the Alvarez. He’d found a Martin classical guitar that suited him better, anyway. Since then, the strings have been snapping one after another. A bridge peg broke some time ago. I love the guitar, but I don’t play it. Others do, when they come over. But entropy was taking over too much for anything resembling a chord.

So this evening, I did something about it.

And now, she has all new bridge pegs. Ebony ones. And shiny new Martin strings. The ones I replaced were rusty and left marks on my fingers. And though it will take a day or two to readjust, the brief moments of being in tune sound better than I remember. In other words, it has a new life.

(And I suppose I’ve another 29 years or more to learn how best to use it.)