This guitar is me, as all parts of me are me, dimensions of my being.
It’s my favorite guitar — a rare fact among guitarists who idolize a model unreachable, unattainable, a Les Paul played by Page or Wes Montgomery’s hollow body. Its short neck and small body fit unexpectedly into my long frame, and nothing is lost. The strings, which I like to tune low into blissful open chords, resonate through the body, with no cutoff for further echo. I’ve wiped its frets, stringed and unstringed (then using lemon oil to maintain the rosewood), hundreds or thousands of time, yet I’ve no fixation on the limb’s cleanliness. I’ve bumped the arms of chairs, scratched the laminate, jolted the neck, and the strap sheds its leather on my shirts. My arm will get sunburned in a lapse of lotion; my guitar will get bruised as I use it in the same carelessly efficient way I use the rest of my body. It is me. I am an instrument and I wield myself in nature.
“Guild,” a brand now-defunct, is lightly lettered on the headstock — a unique seal that appeals to my desire for heterogeneity. It stands out at an open mic. I’m not strumming the ubiquitous light-colored Yamaha singing “Don’t Look Back in Anger.” I’m strumming a darkened, sunbursted, and striking miniature booming out of a shell made tiny by the giant holding it. And I’m singing “Don’t Look Back in Anger.” Everyone loves it.
It was given to me by my father. I tell people that. It’s the mythology of the thing, although such a myth exists for other people’s sake. I want them to remember the instrument, so I attach a corresponding memory for them. I’m grateful for my dad’s generosity but I don’t think of it in such terms anymore — do you feel as if your dad gave you your leg? He did, but you don’t.
What is my primary attachment to this limb of mine, if not by nerves, blood, and flesh? It is a marriage of sorts, an endlessly productive relation by which my inspirations move from spirit to sound. Together, we (I) are (am) more. Writing a song does not happen first in the head then in the fingers. Often it is the fingers, by which I mean the strings, that act first. Then a dialectic, in which thought toward craft lifts up inspiration of muscle and approach comprehensibility. The marriage of True Minds — the mind of self-consciousness and the mind of its own. The intensification of my bond is a quantitative one — not all of my songs were written with it, but all of my Songs were written with it. These are the ones I think about. Sometimes I play them for people.
I do not feel this for my laptop. I don’t feel this for my lifeless midi controllers, grids and keys alike. Those are mere instruments, tools and technology to get to some end-state of craft, comprehensible to the world. My guitar is instrument and inseparable, my thumb and forefinger. I will never sell it — first, it will break and be repaired until the luthier declares it dead.
The original pickup was a hybrid microphone-magnetic dongle that was industrial glued to the inside of the guitar. My body rejected it — five times I went to our legendary local shop, run by a legendary Kramer, and he would reattach it after the glue inexplicably dissolved. Eventually, I swapped it for a much more erotic pickup, a pure magnetic one that points its fingers at the base of the bridge, the most tenuous point of the whole apparatus. It sounds amazing. Far better than the bloated technology of the mic-magnet with unintuitive dimmer dial. I regret subjecting myself to the torture of a quintuple transplant of eventually rejected organs. We’re cool now. We just made a move ~1000 miles across the country. Most of my stuff is packed away, but not that.