No musical skill was included in my inventory at birth. My mother graduated from the University of Washington with a Music degree and was an amazing pianist. She did however spend her childhood chained to a piano; a fact that leaves her conflicted about her achievements, yet she was very good in her day. Music escapes me. I have no aptitude. It is a surprise, even to me, that I have taken up the guitar. Tom takes lessons and is actually pretty good. As a degraded old person I am too embarrassed to take lessons, so I try and teach myself through repetition of bad habits and sheer luck. I liken my experience to an illiterate hunter-gatherer finding a wizard's staff and trying to make it work without an instruction book. What the hunter-gatherer did not have however was Youtube, which is ripe with guitar videos. I can find the random blues riff and , if I practice enough, it can sound close enough to actual music to give the briefest shiver of joy and imagine what the attraction the talented might have to performing.
Guitars, I find are also like my car obsession- I like old and flashy looking useless objects that I only barely know how to fix. They are a Chevy elCamino that make pleasing noise. They are fun to tinker with and customize in a manner that probably makes me look ridiculous. (See aforementioned elCamino). These two are Archie and Jughead. Archie is a Les Paul ( I refer to it as a "Much Less Paul") knock off kit guitar made from some strange Asian wood. I bought it from eBay and put it together like a soap box derby racer from cub scouts. It was fun and I learned the basics. It has a pretty decent action and sounds "okay". Putting it together was not much different than working on my first car- a 1968 VW Karmann Ghia. Generally everything about Archie is pretty cheap but he tries to please. I have put him away for a while.
The black hollow body is Jughead. It is another eBay project though this was a restoration and not a box of parts. I bought it from New Jersey and it was listed as a playable guitar and it arrived trashed: electronics wrecked, wires stripped, neck potentially cracked, scratched, filled with dust bunnies and wanting to be euthanized. It looked like it had been looted from a Super Storm Sandy closet. It was never a great guitar- it is a "Winderoo" which was a Chinese company in the 90's. They are still made as a "K-tone". I took it apart put in new electronics and used more extreme Epiphone pickups. It was a nasty, harlot red, and I painted it Mad Max stealth flat black. I had it professionally set up and a new bridge put in. The guitar tech shook his head like a surgeon that couldn't save the patient. "Enjoy it for whatever time you have left" he said. I really like it's twangy, grimy, bluesy sound. Even though I have almost no idea what I am doing - I am enjoying myself. If I close my eyes, bending a note in the pentatonic scale, I can imagine I am BB King for a split second, and then I re-materialize as a fifty something white dude in his family room annoying his cats.
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