I started playing the guitar ‘seriously’ the summer I was 15. The family drove across country to visit relatives and I took Dad’s (it wasn’t officially mine at that point) guitar with us in the van.
I didn’t really have a plan. I was just bashing away at it at odd times. It was what Bruce and I had been doing for the previous few months but taking on a trip was a new level of seriousness.
I’ve been trying to remember the order I did things. I had taken trumpet lessons in 5th grade so I knew how to read music but I didn’t know how to translate that to the guitar.
At some point, I went down to Moyer Music, which was within walking distance at the Food Villa chopping Center, and took some lessons from a guy named Terry. He had me buy the Mickey Baker book and showed me how to play ‘Corcovado’ and ‘The Shadow Of Your Smile’ in chord melody style. It meant very little to me then but it stood me in good stead later. I still have the Mickey Baker books. Two of them!
Despite all that, I never felt that being able to play anything that we heard on our records was attainable. Jimi Hendrix especially, but also Jerry, Jorma, Eric and the rest seemed other worldly. I remember being at a battle of bands and I heard a local guy play some great riff and I was gobsmacked. What mere mortal can do that??
I bought a book on blues guitar and worked up the Eric Clapton version of Freddie King’s ‘Hideaway’. I still can’t play the turnaround right though. I could get the first three notes of ‘Crosscut Saw’ but that was about it.
Nowadays, everybody talks incessantly about tone. For us, there was no idea that you could put some kind of tone modifying device between your guitar and your amp. Well, Hendrix had the wah-wah pedal. We all thought he just had his Marshall stack dimed for that great distorted sound.
It turned out he did anyway but he also had a distortion pedal. PAs were little in those days so the amp had to do a lot of work.
When I finally got a little money, I bought a Fender Twin Reverb because that was what Jerry Garcia used. I never had the courage to turn it up enough to get serious distortion out of it. (Of course, that’s what I wanted!) Nobody told me there were smaller amps that could do what I wanted. Pretty much all of our sources of information were word of mouth, which for me meant Bruce. No Internet, kids!
I had a Gibson ES-335 because Bob Weir and Boz Scaggs had one. It had a crack in the neck so I had it worked on by a shop in San Francisco. I think they ripped me off and didn’t really do anything except add a little bit of lacquer. I’m sure there were people who knew what they were doing, but I couldn’t find them. The guitar wasn’t great but it was nicer than I deserved.
Well, we had fun and made a little money. That stuff is all gone now and no regrets. I’ve got decent gear that does what I need. I can play a lot better now. I’ve taken a few lessons over the years and actually learned some things. Tone is still kind of mysterious though.