Ever since Jimi scorched the fuck out of his guitar at Monterey, the electric guitar has been the emblematic totem of youth (if we ignore all the bad middle aged guitarists like me, which we are doing). Essentially it boils down to it vaguely looking like a cock, being fucking loud and being available at reasonable prices.
My first guitar fulfilled all these criteria.
You are, I suppose, familiar with the concept of inflation. This states that things get more expensive with time. That’s why your parents are stunned to find out that you can’t buy a house for £88 any more and that that’s the price of, say, a reasonably fancy haircut these days. So: empirically we know that things were cheaper back then and you can probably sense a story coming up about how hilariously cheap my first guitar was. I’m belabouring this point though because, by any standards, the amount I paid for my first guitar was ludicrous.
A tenner! Including an amp!
This was about 1991. To put that in perspective, any halfway guitar and amp would have cost a lot more than a tenner as far back as 1961. In today’s prices, it’s like buying a car for a quid. Could you expect much for your tenner? Nope!
The whole set, guitar and amp, could be lifted one-handed by a 6 year old girl such was its flimsiness. This structural weaknesses also had the less than pleasing effect of making it almost impossible to keep in tune. Actually that wasn’t so much of a problem as I couldn’t tune the fucker anyway. Probably its finest feature was, however, its tone. By “tone” we mean the quality of its sound. Some guitars – such as a Gibson Les Paul fed through a huge stack of amplification – have a fat, rounded tone. Others – such as a Fender Stratocaster – have a stinging clarity that practically sings. My guitar had tow distinct tones: farty and squeaky.
Guitars come with various switches and dials to control the volume and tone. This lets the competent guitarist switch the mood of a song from passage to passage with the debonair sweep of a finger. Or, as in my case, it can let a hormonal 16 year old alternate between the sound of walrus being forcibly deflated by Brian Blessed and a rubber band being stretched beyond endurance by McCavity the thieving cat. Rather amusingly, at the time I thought this had enabled me to absolutely nail the change in sound heard on “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Ha!
Nontheless, the combination of me with my honking/screeching guitar, Bez (the non-singing singer) and Brend with his almost legitimate drumkit (although several cymbals had chunks missing from them as if they were a light snack for some that French dude who used to always be on Record Breakers for eating planes) made us a viable musical entity.
Around this time, I also brought my best mate into the fold – in fact he introduced me to Bez so the whole farrago could even have been his idea. The proximity of two close friends, with not enough instruments to go round and a growing realisation of the gap between how they actually sounded and what they wanted to sound like would cause the first major artistic schism in the group.
Not untypically, this was expressed as a dispute over a Dime Bar. Stay tuned for the story of Dimebargate and the repercussions that would nearly end our promising musical adventure.