ALL THAT GLITTERS:
When I was ten, Dad decided it was time for me to
get serious about playing guitar & enrolled me with
a tutor just up the road from the guru’s house.
This was in pre-guru times, before he turned up as
the travelling salesman & before the boys in the year
above got wind of my ability to hold down a few
chords. This was the thing that created that wind
& it was all down to Dad.
Mr. Wilson was an elderly gentleman who taught
classical guitar from a smart & suburban semi in
the posher part of Kidderminster. He greeted me
every week with increasing weariness, knowing
full well I hadn’t practised the work he set me
& that my excuse would always be that I’d been writing
songs instead, which I’d play him before stumbling
through another hour of painfully slow sight reading.
I tried to learn, but was too impatient,I had too much
music in my head that had to come out & the last thing
I wanted to do was bury it under tired renditions of
‘Oh Susana’ & ‘She’ll be coming round the Mountain’.
At one point he tried to spark my enthusiasm, waving the
manuscript for The Rolling Stones ‘Honky Tonk Woman’ –
not a cool move. We spent an uncomfortable hour in the
unspoken certainty that our two generations should never
look for a common ground in the celebration of a night of
sleazy bar-room debauchery – bless him, he really tried.
Finally, on the day he announced that I clearly wasn’t suited
for his style of teaching & that he could no longer take my
Dad’s money, Mr. Wilson concluded his last lesson by saying,
“I have something for you”
From a back room, deep with the house he returned holding
two amazing things. In the one hand he held the most beautiful
ebony banjo, inlayed with intricate patterns in Mother of Pearl
& in the other hand, a cheap red & white electric guitar.
“Both of these are for sale & they’re both they’re £8 10s, but
you can only buy one of them, which would you like?”
Even today, as I remember that kind, gentle man standing in the
doorway of his front room, I recall how beautiful that banjo was
& what a sensible investment for the future, offering considerable
financial return in years to come. Without hesitating I said,
“I’d like the electric guitar please”
(K)
Karl Hyde 
L´Enfant carburateur (The Child Carburetor) – Francis Picabia (1919)
on my mind
That is just beautiful. *sigh*
Nice story.was this the guitar you used on stage in the 80s?