f you can play passably, having a rea lly expensive, big-name Before graduation from high school, I got a superb guitar— guitar confers a kind of status that is surpassed only by a Martin D- 28 dreadnought acoustic, which my folks were having a really cheap, crap-name guitar. My first electric, able to buy at a considerable discount with the help of a which my parents bought for $24.99—about what my cousin, an architect who had worked on the Martin family musical talent called for, in their good judgment—was a home in Nazareth, Pennsylvania. I did not deserve such an Danelectro in brown Formica with a wing-shaped white instrument, and I knew it, and I also knew enough not to pick-guard. This was some time before Danelectros share that knowledge. I loved the object and fetishized were rediscovered and reassessed to be so cheesy as the curves of its rosewood body and the silky patina of its to be cool. Then, they were just cheesy. I played mine mahogany neck. I modulated up from E, A, B to G, C, D to suit in a five-boy garage band called the Ryders (after our idols, the acoustic—changed what I played, nominally, but played the Byrds) in a brown Formica town called Phillipsburg, no better than ever. Still, the tone of that Martin was majestic, New Jersey, and the instrument contributed significantly to and it looked so impressive that it elevated my standing in the ridicule I earned among my teenage peers in the cutthroat Phillipsburg, especially among nonmusicians, including suburban band scene. several girls whose interest was among the main reasons I Our lead guitarist, Tootie Ritz, assumed prominence without played guitar to begin with. discussion or dissent, in part because he could play barre chords It wasn’t until I went to college at N YU and started (he never actually played lead; all three of us guitarists strummed seeing real musicians perform live in the clubs in and in something close to unison) but mainly because he had a around Greenwich Village that I learned the higher cherry-red Gibson SG, the same model Pete Townshend played. physics of instrument ownership, musicianship, and It is true that Tootie’s instrument was secondhand and public perception. I saw Talking Heads, early in their had a sizable crack in the neck, rendering it impossible to career, and David Byrne was playing a Squier—Fender’s play well but affordable to his dad. To us, the crack—and low-budget version of its own Telecaster. I caught the mystery of its provenance—only added to the allure of Prince, at the old Academy of Music, and he was using Tootie’s Gibson. After all, we knew how Townshend used to a Hohner imitation of a Telecaster. Later, I noticed the Edge smash his guitars at the end of Who shows. Could it be that with a Japanese-made Custom starter guitar, Jeff Healy with a Pete had broken this very one and sold it to Pettinelli’s Fernandes pseudo Stratocaster, Jack White with a Montgomery Musical Instrument Shop? Ward Airline plugged into a Sears Silvertone amp. I learned The image of Townshend unstrapping that the difference between the make of the guitar and the music exquisite specimen of craftsmanship and the guitar makes, and I discovered that there can be an inverse hurling it into his speaker cabinet fascinated relationship between the status of an instrument and and repelled us. We puzzled over the act, stature of its player. To be truly great is to be good dissected it, debated it like a midrash. We enough to use a bad instrument. In that sense, for liked to get together on the grounds of our a musician in a position to buy any instrument he old elementary school, where there was or she wants, choosing a no-brand guitar is not to a poured-concrete pool empty most of the defy branding, but to brand oneself as superior year. We would sit on the bottom of the deep to the guitar. part and strum away on our guitars with no Today, I play mostly for myself in the mature amps—E, A, B...E, A, B—and the chords would knowledge that no one else wants to hear me. I ring around us. We wondered why every rock sold the Danelectro and the Martin years ago, concert was not held in a pool, and wondered, idiotically, and I no longer fetishize guitars. Unlike above all, how Pete could destroy his own a lot of people I know who play as amateurs, I have instrument. The act seemed sacred and only one guitar: a Gibson L- 7 acoustic archtop. profane in ways we could never fully grasp. The other three in my bedroom don’t count, Raised as Catholics, all five of us, we knew because one is a half-size “travel guitar,” from the stories of the saints that sacrifice is another needs a neck reset, and the last is a the noblest of acts, and so we understood junker I should throw away but just cannot there to be something profoundly holy bear to sacrifice. in the destruction of a Gibson SG. But... the saints had given their own lives for a David Hajdu is the music critic for The New higher cause, for God. What cause could Republic and the author of The Ten-Cent be higher than rock’n’roll? That, we could Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How never figure out. It Changed America.
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