The Song Fight Bulletin Board

man, here's a good story.....

right after i bought my american strat (which i still have and a number of you have played), i was playing with my band in the studio in redwood city and we had just finished a fairly long set. i had my strat maybe a week at this point. we had this small fridge right outside the studio door, and i had let my friend chris play it, and he casually opened the door and walked outside into the garage (bare concrete floor) with my guitar still strapped on. of course, you can probably guess what happened next. the end of his strap comes undone as he reaches down to grab a beer and the guitar slides off and falls to the bare concrete floor, shattering my beautiful tobacco sunburst love goddess. of course he felt terrible and i felt both mad and terrible. but he got it fixed, by neil young's guitar tech no less, and now you'd never know the difference.

of course, there's the d00ds with beltbuckles you gotta watch out for.....

fluffy wrote:Well, that explains why my Ibanez can take such a beating. It cost only $250.

...and why my Gibson acoustic got smashed against the wall, it cost around $1,600. Que sera sera.

I had an old no-name classical guitar for a while. I didn't know it was a classical when I got it, because I was fifteen and didn't know much about guitars at the time, so I put steel strings on it. I didn't know that the strings weren't supposed to be that far apart, or that the bridge wasn't supposed to be that high, because for a long time, it was the only guitar I ever played. It was a great guitar for learning on. It's that guitar you hear on almost every one of my Songfight songs before "Stairway to the Moon" (the sole exception, I believe, is "Accelerator," plus the songs that have no guitar at all). It was a pretty crappy guitar overall, but it was my first, and I liked it.

I put the guitar into my car's trunk the summer before my sophomore year of college. It was a long drive, and I had packed pretty much my entire life into the car. It's a 1994 Toyota Camry, and I still drive it to this day. Most Toyota cars have a quirk in their trunks, though, that's pretty easy to forget about. The trunk hinge hangs on two runners that descend into the cargo area like pistons as the trunk closes. And (of course) because I didn't want anything crushing it, I put the guitar right at the top of all the stuff in the trunk. And as I slammed it shut, the runners came down, right near the bottom of the body with a sickening crunch. A whole corner of the front panel had caved in.

I kept the guitar for three more years after that, even though it never sounded right again (way too dull). Because it never sounded right, I couldn't really find any motivation to restring it when two of the strings broke later on. It just kind of sat in my room, looking sad. Two months ago I freecycled it. I'm still kicking myself over the goof, though. I've still never played a guitar with quite the same punch as that old classical when it had steel strings.