We escaped to the Delaware shore for a few days this week, during which my guitar-related experiences were few and minimal. I drove past the exit to Stevensville, Md., which is the home of the Paul Reed Smith factory, but that wasn't very musical. The only time I applied fingers to strings was after spotting this guitar swap shop (above) a few miles west of Bethany Beach.It's a tiny place that's only been in business about a year and has a bunch of amps and about 20 acoustics and electrics, none of any fancy pedigree. I plunked and plinked on a few and had my first experience with a 12-string, which rang nicely.
My fantasy is to walk into a place like this or, more likely, somebody's yard sale and spy a '59 Les Paul with a price tag of $75. I'll offer $60 and settle on $70. Then I take it home and start cleaning it up. While I'm lovingly polishing up the sunburst, a genie will appear and give me the playing skills of Duane Allman, although he will require me to find my own bottleneck slide.
On the drive to the beach I put the iPod on random play and something odd happened about a dozen songs in. It played "Born to Run" -- the Springsteen song from "Live at the Odeon" -- and followed immediately with "Born to Run," an entirely different song that has the same title as the Springsteen tune. The non-Springsteen "Born to Run" was a semi-hit for Emmylou Harris and this particular version was by her former bandmate, the British Telecaster master Albert Lee.
Emmylou's "Born to Run" was written by another Brit, Paul Kennerley, who once had the pleasure of being Mr. Emmylou Harris. Kennerly's story is pretty interesting. He was an advertising copy writer in London when he heard Willie Nelson on the radio and got hooked on country music. He eventually gave up advertising and started writing country songs, including one of the best concept albums I've heard, "The Legend of Jesse James," which features Harris, Lee, Johnny Cash, Levon Helm and Charlie Daniels.
In the meantime, I'm still looking for that overlooked Les Paul.
6 comments:
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ahhh... I think we've all had that dream before! I always have a tiny bit of hope in my heart that the next garage sale will have a 59 LP for under $100 (with case of course)!
Good luck finding you Les Paul. Just save the magic American Deluxe Stratocaster for me.
I just got back from a week spent travelling... I checked out a few pawn shops during my travels and I didn't see any Les Pauls at all... none. There were a couple of nice strats, though. Odd, no?
My guitar amigo Robbie has the knack of finding insane bargains like that, but not a '59 Les Paul - yet.
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