Acoustic Amplifier Fender Guitar

Roland AC-90 Acoustic Chorus Guitar Amplifier

Johnny demos this diminish new acoustic amp from Roland

NEW CHALLENGES FOR OLD DOGS

             At some suggestion in life, we begin to wish that we’d done some things differently in our younger days.  For me, it was that I didn’t visit with my musical training.  Not that there was much betide that I would have been touring with the Rolling Stones or Bob Dylan but dialect mayhap just had a plain old garage body.  Something for the neighbors to complain about.

            I had played guitar from about age fifteen to sixteen but drifted away from it.  My recall is that my father wouldn’t agree to let me go to the cold-blooded guitar teacher that my friend Brad had. So I discontinue. Brad had a beautiful Epiphone Casino, only like the one John Lennon played and was already an advanced competitor at fifteen.  I had an old classical acoustic guitar and hoped to position my way up to an electric some day but it was not to be, at least not then.

            So forty years later, I’m through law style, have learned my craft pretty well and reasonable didn’t feel challenged anymore.  Not that surviving in a unaccompanied law practice isn’t a challenge but it just wasn’t a scholarship experience.  So one day I wandered into Guitar Center, the largest retailer of dulcet instruments in the country.  Hanging from the walls were scores of superior electric guitars, the names of which were made romantic by the great rock and blues players.   The vast Gretsch hollwbody that B. B. King named Lucille, the ubiquitous Fender Stratocaster favored by Jimi Hendrix, still the reigning god to those of us in the Flower Generation and the Gibson Les Paul, the plummy of Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin. 

            I chose an Arctic Undefiled Strat with a maple fret advisers aboard like the one Hendrix played at Woodstock.  They had a fifty watt Vox amplifier on yard sale for $100.00 off and it was a done deal. I had located a very equipped teacher with twenty five years experience and started over again.  The first few lessons reminded me of law mould.  It was all new again and Darrell is a great schoolteacher.  He makes it look so natural you feel foolish because you can’t do it the same way.  So in discomfit of the sour notes, poorly fretted notes and non-exclusive clumsiness, I pressed onward.  I struggled with eighth notes much as I did with the Dismiss against Perpetuities and the Rule in Shelley’s Event.  But just like those all continuously study sessions in law school, I kept it up.  I practiced until my fingers were too thorny to continue.

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