“My First Guitar” podcast
I was 12 when my parents got me my first guitar, a cheap plywood model from Sears. The sound was pretty thin, and pressing the strings down took a lot of muscle, but I was hooked—especially because my brother was starting too, and we could learn together.
The premiere issue of Acoustic Guitar, July/August 1990, with my cover story “My First Guitar.” The complete feature is available on Patreon.
By the time I was 14 or 15, I’d upgraded to the Yamaha dreadnought pictured above, and my brother and I had some actual restaurant gigs in our town in New Jersey—playing Cat Stevens, Neil Young, America, Grateful Dead, and more from the ’70s folk-rock canon, plus a few of our fledgling originals.
Our most epic performance was when we jammed our way, Dead style, from “Horse with No Name” into “Death Don’t Have No Mercy” (learned from Jorma Kaukonen) and…wait for it…back into “Horse.”
I’m thinking back to those days because I just cohosted (along with Nick Grizzle) the debut episode of the Acoustic Guitar Podcast, titled “My First Guitar.”
The episode includes reminiscences from Richard Thompson, Bruce Cockburn, Badi Assad, Tommy Emmanuel, and other artists about their first guitars, and a bunch of Acoustic Guitar readers share their stories as well.
The topic of first guitars is itself a throwback—to the cover story I wrote for the first issue of Acoustic Guitar magazine in 1990. For the podcast I even dug out my old interview tapes, with artists like Doc Watson and Michael Hedges who are no longer with us, and managed to transfer them from micro-cassette so we could share a few clips.
As I recount in the podcast, my Sears guitar met a sad fate—I gave it to a friend, thinking he wanted to learn to play, but he promptly smashed it to pieces. The Yamaha is gone too—it was stolen from my apartment in San Francisco (thankfully, the thieves didn’t spot the much more valuable Guild guitar I also had at the time).
Somehow all that didn’t deter me, though...and here I am, with more than a little amazement, looking back at a career and life built around guitars, music, and writing. Grateful as ever for the crummy Sears guitar that opened the door more than 40 years ago.
More
Listen to the Acoustic Guitar Podcast on the website, or through Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, or whatever podcast app you use.
In the debut episode I perform the podcast theme, composed by Adam Perlmutter.
The complete “My First Guitar” magazine feature from 1990, with stories from Sharon Isbin, Doc Watson, Norman Blake, Michael Hedges, Laurindo Almeida, Ferron, and more, is available on Patreon.
