What was the first serious guitar that you bought with your own money?
“My own money? I have to say that it was kind of a loan. My grandmother took me to 8th Street Music in Philadelphia in 1968 and so I was 17. I’d been playing a little while and I had a bunch of cheap, really crappy electric guitars that were terrible and that year an album called Super Session came out and Mike Bloomfield was playing a Les Paul, so I decided that’s what I had to have. “My grandmother loaned me $200 - I think I had maybe $100 saved up and so she covered the rest and I paid her back when I worked after school - and we got one of the 1968 reissue Goldtops with the P-90s in it and it was a beautiful guitar. Unfortunately, maybe a year or two after that, I was in my bedroom standing up practising the guitar, playing along to a Taj Mahal album, and the strap came off, the guitar fell to the floor and the neck broke in two. I really had a bad time that night.”
Photo by Olly Curtis