Like a self-replicating fractal, it just seems like everything repeats in patterns. Everything reflects everything else. The stuff of the universe forms and reforms itself into seemingly infinite variety… yet underneath it all, it’s all the same noumenal field… endless, timeless.
The guitar in the perhaps familiar graphic to the left is not the guitar I was writing about when I wrote that song. A photo of that guitar graced the previous AYoS version of Guitar and was the subject of that day’s blog entry.
This guitar to the left is not just the AYoS logo, it’s actually pretty much the AYoS guitar, providing all but a few of the guitar parts on the songs so far. (The others I’ve used were my $75 12 string and my $50 3/4 size guitar.) It was sitting on a stand in my living room when I shot this. I glamorized it a bit in my photoeditor. There aren’t really fluffy clouds in my front room. As a rule.
The car in the second verse of this song was my first car, a Karmann Ghia that started out yellow (a great color for curtains in the breakfast nook, maybe) but got painted a cool smokey metallic grey when I plugged half a week’s wages into an impossibly cheap (yet still not cheapest) paint job.
At the time I wrote this, the grey paint was still shiny — a few moments within a narrow sliver of time when I actually almost felt cool in my Ghia. (But, actually, after the paint oxidized in that first, single season, it had a kind of naturalness to it that ultimately felt pretty comfortable.) I loved that car but I put it through hell. I sold it for a few hundred bucks just at the dawn of that peculiar era when Ghias actually did gain a certain sort of geek hipster cool. I guess.
Anyhow, I did love that car. We went everywhere together.
I Can See Myself in My Guitar
I can see myself in my guitar
I can see myself in my guitar
It’s getting kind of old but it’s shiney
I can see myself in my guitar
I can see myself in my car
I don’t care what anyone says we’ll go far
I can see myself in my car
out in the country, we’ll go far, we’ll go far
I can see my self in everything
ain’t nothing cosmic, it’s just there
I can see myself in you
and you know I see you everywhere
This is the headstock of my first guitar. Sharp-eyed comics fans will note the faded image of the Silver Surfer, which was sliced off the cover of Silver Surfer issue # 2 with an X-acto knife. This, I believe makes it the most expensive (if not valuable) guitar of its class, ever. Well… how was I to know? It was 1971 and it felt like the whole world was tipping on the edge of the apocalypse. The last thing on my mind was the future value of a comic no one else I knew had ever heard of…
But, actually, it was my third guitar (below) that was the first one I really fell in love with… a love affair that has mellowed with time but is no less deep to this day.
That battered old Yamaha came to me at a time when I was really down. My little house had been burglarized and my big, shiny dreadnaught steel string had got sucked out into the night with 300 of my most recently played LPs, my turntable, my tape deck, a bunch of my tapes… a bummer.
I moped around for a couple weeks without a guitar, being a broke student with a couple of part time jobs. Finally one of my friends mentioned his brother in law had an old guitar he wanted to sell. I was a little let down when I heard it was a nylon string classical — the Silver Surfer guitar was a nylon guitar and it was virtually unplayable, and had a flat, lifeless sound I could never make work for anything but scratchy rhythm.
But I came over and met his brother in law, a young hippy guy. He pulled out this Yamaha G-130A classical, a little dinged, the plastic (!) varnish worn away a bit on the butt, in a cardboard case. But it had a sweet, warm tone, completely unlike the ‘Surfer. I asked him how much he wanted for it.
Thirty-five or forty, he said. I offered him $37.50, which gave him a chuckle and we shook hands.
I’ve loved that guitar ever since.
I Can See Myself in My Guitar
I can see myself in my guitar
I can see myself in my guitar
It’s getting kind of old but it’s shiny
I can see myself in my guitar
I can see myself in my car
I don’t care what anyone says we’ll go far
I can see myself in my car
out in the country, we’ll go far, we’ll go far
I can see my self in everything ain’t nothing cosmic, it’s just there I can see myself in you and you know and you know I see you everywhere
I can see myself in my guitar
I can see myself in my guitar
It’s getting kind of old but it’s shiny
I can see myself in my guitar
That battered old Yamaha came to me at a time when I was really down. My little house had been burglarized and my big, shiny dreadnaught steel string had got sucked out into the night with 300 of my most recently played LPs, my turntable, my tape deck, a bunch of my tapes… a bummer.