The First Proper Instrument I Ever Owned
There's a particular kind of ownership that doesn't really exist anymore, and I don't think most people under a certain age have ever experienced it.
I started to learn the guitar at the age of 7 and I started off as most people do, with a cheap acoustic from the local music store. My guitar teacher did a deal with me that if I learnt them how to play the tunes he wanted me to ( Mostly Fernando Sor ), for the last 10 minutes of each lesson, he would help me work out how to play the songs that I loved off the radio or Top of the Pops, mainly T Rex and Slade.
Throughout my early teens I made do on what were called catalog guitars copies from the Rose Morris catalog. Indeed, my first was a Zenta Telecaster copy and then my Rose Morris Gibson Les Paul copy. I sweated blood and tears to learn the music that I loved on these instruments and I can still remember even to this day hearing solos for the first time that made an indelible mark upon me. But what I never had was a great instrument that made it easier to play.
At the age of 18, I had a guitar duo with my buddy who lived down the street, and his cousin became our manager. He was a successful businessman and had plans to launch a nightclub in Bolton town centre, which would to all intents and purposes, replicate a nightclub in downtown New Orleans. It would have different kinds of music every night, of which my buddy and I would be at the center. And to start us off, he arranged a short tour of New Orleans lasting about a month
However, there was a small problem. Neither of us had any kind of decent electric guitar. Excitingly though, our new Manager agreed to stump up the cost of a decent guitar as a kind of "signing on" fee.
I'd long coveted a guitar from a local Manchester company called Gordon Smith. In fact, I'll put a link to a video I did for them many years later. Their flagship model was a Gemini. Built around the aesthetic of Brian May's guitar, but with pull-push pots that enabled you to coil tap the pickups, changing the humbuckers into single coils. It was a beautiful looking instrument and I put thousands of hours on stage behind me with that guitar in my hands
It wasn't ownership in the sense of having your name on a receipt. It was ownership in the sense of consequence. You had one instrument. If you were careless with it, there wasn't a second one waiting in a cupboard, or a newer model a click away. Looking after it wasn't a virtue you were taught, it was just survival, because the alternative was having nothing to play at all.
That does something to how you relate to a piece of wood and wire that owning thirty six of them never quite manages to replicate. You learn every mark on it. You know exactly how it responds when the weather changes, exactly which fret buzzes slightly if you're not careful, because you've had the time, and the singular attention, to actually notice. There was nothing to compare it against sitting in the next room, so you got to know it properly instead of constantly wondering if the grass was greener two guitars along.
I think about that a lot now, surrounded, as most of us are, by more gear than any single person needs. Upgrading has become so frictionless that owning something has quietly stopped meaning what it used to mean. You don't sacrifice for it anymore. You just add it to the pile and see how it compares to the others.
That first decent instrument taught me things about patience, and care, and attention, that no amount of subsequent gear ever had to teach me again, because I'd already learned them the hard way, on the only thing I had.
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