Tony's Guitar & Fishing Tackle
Though Japan might be considered the spiritual birthplace of the cheap electric guitar some of these would appear to come from Soviet Russia, or that place I knew back in the safe, prosaic England of the 1970s under the general term Behind The Iron Curtain.
Some of these instruments bear more resemblance to bazoukis, balalaikas and and other exotic instruments from places where they write the alphabet backwards with half the letters arse-about-face.
They don’t look much like the tools of toe-tapping Merseybeat.
I found one not so long ago in a place called Tony’s Guitar & Fishing Tackle, a vast and dusty emporium of modern junk somewhere between Orlando and Jacksonville down in Florida. Guns, rifles, flat screen TVs, fishing rods and the occasional Hondo Les Paul copy.The general shape and design of these things owes much to the distorting lens of an espionage camera, the result being an approximation of a teenbeat icon created by a Soviet industrialist.
The neck is coming away from the body.
It’s never been played - it’s practically unplayable having spent most of its life gathering dust in a basement or an attic, a sad testament to shoddy workmanship and the failure of another dream.
Tony of Tony’s Guitar & Fishing Tackle tells me it’s an antique, a curio:
"These are very rare - you could hang it on the wall as a talking point - you wouldn’t play it of course, though a lot of the pro guys are buying these up and using them on their recordings…"
Some of these instruments bear more resemblance to bazoukis, balalaikas and and other exotic instruments from places where they write the alphabet backwards with half the letters arse-about-face.
They don’t look much like the tools of toe-tapping Merseybeat.
I found one not so long ago in a place called Tony’s Guitar & Fishing Tackle, a vast and dusty emporium of modern junk somewhere between Orlando and Jacksonville down in Florida. Guns, rifles, flat screen TVs, fishing rods and the occasional Hondo Les Paul copy.The general shape and design of these things owes much to the distorting lens of an espionage camera, the result being an approximation of a teenbeat icon created by a Soviet industrialist.
The neck is coming away from the body.
It’s never been played - it’s practically unplayable having spent most of its life gathering dust in a basement or an attic, a sad testament to shoddy workmanship and the failure of another dream.
Tony of Tony’s Guitar & Fishing Tackle tells me it’s an antique, a curio:
"These are very rare - you could hang it on the wall as a talking point - you wouldn’t play it of course, though a lot of the pro guys are buying these up and using them on their recordings…"
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It's has one knob too many, a collection of inexplicable switches, a tone control that turns the volume down, four rusty strings and one missing machine head. It's based on neither a Fender, a Gibson, a Gretch or a Rickenbacker but somehow it's an amalgamation of every guitar ever made. It's big and clunky and doesn't look quite right, and even though it's cheap common sense tells you to leave it behind. But it's seductive - charming in its charmlessness. It's going to clutter up the house and clutter up your life but it comes complete with a tolex covered cardboard case with a grimy checkerboard patterned interior and broken catches and you've just got to have it.
The Lada, the Honda or the Nissan of the electric guitar world - a raised up chunk of scratchplate that could have come from the dashboard of a car from the same era, large cream plastic control knobs and a lever where there might normally be a switch to select different combinations of the four oversized pick-ups. It's a piece of junk that was quite possibly created from a bad drawing done from memory.
This one has no bridge or tailpiece but that's ok because it has a dyslexic f hole and no tuning pegs. It's a good looking beast - you could fix it up and hang it on your wall as a conversation stopper...
There are more out the back - we got cheap drumkits coming too...
The Lada, the Honda or the Nissan of the electric guitar world - a raised up chunk of scratchplate that could have come from the dashboard of a car from the same era, large cream plastic control knobs and a lever where there might normally be a switch to select different combinations of the four oversized pick-ups. It's a piece of junk that was quite possibly created from a bad drawing done from memory.
This one has no bridge or tailpiece but that's ok because it has a dyslexic f hole and no tuning pegs. It's a good looking beast - you could fix it up and hang it on your wall as a conversation stopper...
There are more out the back - we got cheap drumkits coming too...
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Guitar Chords
And guitar chords. I've always loved guitar chord diagrams. My sister had a book called Hold Down A Chord which promised to teach you how to play folk music on the guitar. In my sister's case it failed. The back page had chord diagrams for the main chords in each key. I tore it off when she wasn't looking and learned all the chords: dominant, sub-dominant, tonic and minor. I was fourteen at the time, I haven't looked back.
I've often thought the small chord paintings could be used as a composing or songwriting aid but that would take a degree of organisation that I don't possess - I'm haphazard, even in the chords I choose to paint. I seem to have been stuck on F and F# recently.
I've often thought the small chord paintings could be used as a composing or songwriting aid but that would take a degree of organisation that I don't possess - I'm haphazard, even in the chords I choose to paint. I seem to have been stuck on F and F# recently.
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