Gear: The Beginnings

In the very beginning I bought an usually heavy black strat copy from a friend in high school.  The asking price was $100, which I didn’t have.  I was worried because someone else was offering $80.  Luckily I was able to scrape together $90 which was enough to seal the deal.

This thing was an interesting beast. Glossy black body with white pick guard and tremolo. I never heard what brand or type of wood the body was.  The neck was from a Gibson Corvus, which had the un-strat-like shorter 24.75” scale length common to Gibsons.  None of this meant a thing to me at the time.  I had a guitar!  I started breaking strings immediately.

Pretty soon I had made a stencil and used cheap Testors spray paint to add a Punisher skull to the body.  The unintentional overspray actually looked pretty good.  But one day it took a dive and the headstock broke. My father was not a luthier, but he glued it and put in a couple screws which worked out just fine.  Until the next time it broke.  I left the neck with him to fix again but it never happened.  The neck is lost but the body remains.  Someday we may bring it back!

Ye olde broken-ass strat

When I had enough money to consider a proper guitar I was in college living in Albany, NY.  The closest music store had some stuff I liked.  Being influenced by the big Gibsons Robert Smith was playing at the time (Wish tour era/“Show” film) I had gravitated to a black Epiphone Dot.  This was the cheap version of the Gibson ES-335, with humbucking pickups and semi-hollow body construction.  The only issue was that I really wanted a tremolo on it.  I brought my concern to the gentleman at the counter, who grabbed an Epiphone catalog and flipped to a picture of the Casino and said they could order one of these for me with a Bigsby tremolo.  He said “it’s basically the same thing” and that it would be there in a couple weeks.   Neither statement was true.

After two weeks I started calling that shop every couple days looking for my Casino.  Eventually someone told me it would be 6 - 8 weeks.  When it eventually came in I heard, “Yeah, I was really surprised to see that come in a box.”   They never told me case wasn’t included.  I was livid but I forked over another $100 for a case. I pointed out the bullshit I had been told by the fellow that sold me the guitar and found out that he was one of the owners.  I never shopped there again.

On the point of “it’s basically the same thing,” it does have very similar looks.  But body construction and pickups are different, making it sound very distinct from the Dot.  This wasn’t a factor at the time though, and i was happy with the new guitar which I still play to this day.  Sonically, the hollow construction and p90 pickups have really become home to me.  If I had gotten the “right” guitar I’m not sure where my tastes would be.