For Reflective Moments

Mirror, mirror in my hand, who has the coolest guitar in the land?

If you like the reflective look, the answer would be Keith Urban, who recently took delivery on this custom Telecaster from Yuriy Shishkov, the Fender designer mentioned a while back. The guitar, which Urban is playing on his current tour, is covered with pieces of hand-cut mirror. Urban said he was inspired by a similar guitar that Paul Stanley played for Kiss.

I'd like to see Kyle Busch smash this guitar. He'd never win another race.

Check out more of Shishkov's artistry at his website.

The Great Rock 'n' Roll Robbery

It wasn't the crime of the century but it was one of the better capers in rock 'n' roll history.

In 1973 someone ripped off Led Zeppelin for $203,000 -- the proceeds from a three-night stand in New York -- and the case was never solved, nor the money ever recovered. Now a new novel, "Black Dogs -- The Possibly True Story of Classic Rock's Greatest Robbery" by Jason Buhrmester, fictionalizes the crime with a gang of shadies from Baltimore. It's a pretty good rock 'n' roll novel and has lots of movie potential.

A guitar plays a small but key role in Buhrmester's tale. It's a 1958 Gibson Les Paul sunburst that the gang steals from a pawn shop as its entree to Led Zeppelin. This guitar is highly desired by collectors because a relatively small number of them were made and guys like Jimmy Page, Duane Allman, Mick Taylor and Eric Clapton play them.

In the book, the thieves sell their '58 to Page for $2,000 but they should have held on to it. The originals now go for about 100 times that much.

Finding a Reason to Play Guitar

Why am I playing this guitar? Why, after all those decades of not having the slightest desire to make any sort of music, is the guitar now so important?

Guitar World magazine offers 10 reasons why people take up the guitar and I tried to see where I fit in.

10. Mating: Attracting girls is certainly a motivator for a teenager and I certainly could have used the guitar's help in my youth but, after 20 years of marriage, this is no longer a factor.

9. Irritate Your Parents: Too late for that one, too.

8. An Alternative to the Sporting Life: I was always comfortable with my lack of athletic skill.

7. Improve Your Vocabulary: Guitar World says it's cool to sling around the guitar lingo and, while I might like to randomly throw out phrases like "replace the nut" and "lower the action," I don't think it elevates my social standing.

6. Be the Life of the Party: No, it would take more than a guitar to make me interesting.

5. Form a Band and Join the Circus: But that would mean I would have to give up my day job!

4. Head Start on a Psychology or Management Degree: You learn a lot about people by playing guitar in a band but I already know too much about people.

3. Versatility: Guitar World points out the guitar's versatility by saying you can’t play chords on a violin or slur notes on a piano or play counterpoint harmonies on a sax. Unfortunately, I can't do those things on a guitar, either.

2. Slay Your Idols: That's what Nietzsche said, meaning to surpass your mentors. Most of my
guitar idols are already dead, though.

1. Enlightenment: Ah, at last, here's a reason that pertains to me. I started in order to give myself a challenge, to do something different and something creative. To do something totally new and alien to me. Plus, the girls love it.

Shoes & Obits

What's black and white and red all over and is going to court?

Eddie Van Halen is suing Nike, claiming the shoe company ripped off his iconic paint job, as seen on his Frankenstein guitar (above) for its new line of Dunk shoes (upper left in the picture above). Van Halen says he came up with that pattern for the guitar in 1978 and patented it in 2001.

Earlier this year he came out with his own line of funky shoes (upper right) and he says Nike has done him irreparable harm and damage by copying it. The Nike lawyers say the don't see the similarity.

Too bad the trial can't be held in the restroom at Stancill's Guitar studio. As you can see, the decor, which is a tribute rather than a profit-fueled trademark infringement, is perfect ...

Several well-regarded -- although not necessarily well-known -- guitarists have died lately. Most recently, Bob Bogle of the Ventures died this week at the age of 75. The Ventures' instrumental work influenced scores of guitarists and that was Bogle playing lead on their biggest hit, "Walk Don't Run."

Huey Long (no relation to the Louisiana political family) died last week in Houston. He made it to 105 after a career that included playing with Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker and the Ink Spots.

Fort Worth boy Stephen Bruton (right), who died of cancer in May, was an especially witty songwriter, as well as a solid player. He was Kris Kristofferson's guitarist during Kristofferson's prime and had been a force in the Austin scene for a long time as a solo act, with the Resentments and as a producer. Bonnie Raitt, with whom Bruton also played, played an Austin show shortly after his death and cried her way through one of his songs, “Too Many Memories.”

You've got to like a guy who can come up with lines like: "She wasn't really smiling, only showing me her teeth" and "You can kiss my ass 'til my hat pops off."

With Apologies to Jeff Foxworthy ...

(click the picture for a better view)

You might be a guitarist if ...

• ... you take more than one guitar on vacation.
• ... you have a guitar on your knee as you read this.
• ... you check strangers' fingernails to see if they have the short-on-the-left-hand, long-on-the-right-hand guitarist manicure.
• ... you wrote in Keith Richards' name in the last presidential election.

You might be a bad guitarist if ...

• ... you cry whenever you see tablature that includes a B chord.
• ... you have more than $500 worth of instructional books and CDs sitting in a pile.
• ... your family encourages you take up Guitar Hero.
  
• ... your instructor says "open D string" and you have to silently recite your memory crutch ("Every Average Dog Goes Back Early" works for me) to find it.
  
• ... the guys in your band have nicknamed you "Buzzy."

Some borrowed, some original. Feel free to add your own in comments.

Cat Scratch Fever

I should just stay off youtube. It does nothing but aggravate me. I check out the instructional guitar videos that are billed as being for beginners who have never touched a guitar and maybe only heard one played a couple of times. But 45 seconds into the video, it's over my head with talk of intervals in a traditional pentatonic scale that are normally limited to whole steps and minor thirds. My self-esteem gets shattered.

Plus, youtube is brimming with videos of cats that can outplay me. Like this guy, who apparently thinks he's Kiti Hendrix or somebody. Maybe Kittie Ray Vaughan.

Welcome to Play a Little Guitar

Welcome to the Play a Little Guitar blog, where I am now well into my second year of musical incompetence.

This blog, which is pleased to be cited as today's Blog of Note, is the chronicle of a middle-aged beginner with no musical background trying to amuse himself by learning the guitar. Sometimes the efforts go beyond amusing to downright comical and sometimes even tragic but as it stands now, I am well on target to reach my goal of appearing on "Austin City Limits" in 2029.

Here you can read about Telecasters through history, my daughter and her stray guitar, a bathroom that looks like Eddie Van Halen's Frankenstein guitar, my prejudices against all B chords, goofy things said at Guitar Center stores, guitar toilet seats, the ethical dilemma of pinky-planting and the distressing trend of distressed guitars. Someday, once my band-to-be, Stinktown Willie & the Hard Liquors, makes it big, I'd like to have my own guitarist action figure.

And while I have your attention, can anyone tell me why they call the song 'Dueling Banjos' if one of the guys in the movie is playing a guitar? And what about a guitarist's fingers? Are they overrated? How long should they be? How many is too many and how many is too few?

Thanks for looking around.

Subway Singing & Saving Frets

I know you're currently reading your favorite guitar blog of all time but I'd like to recommend another, The Beat Below the Street. It's written by a journalist who decided to mark the first anniversary of his unemployment by busking his way through New York City's subway system for 48 days (to mark his age). The quest just began on Monday and so far the blog has been an engaging tribute to the city as well as music ...


It turns out that Sam Bass, the artist who painted the Gibson Les Paul that Kyle Busch smashed (see the video here) after winning a NASCAR race in Nashville, was a bit miffed to see his hard work destroyed. (Click the pictures for a better view.)

"I don't care who you are -- that's got to hurt a little bit because you have something invested in it," he said.

To make it up to Bass, Busch commissioned two identical guitars. The original was valued at $25,000 and Busch's purse for winning the race was $52,000 ...

The guitar world's environmental concerns usually are focused on using alternatives to endangered tropical woods like mahogany and rosewood. But folk-blues singer Otis Taylor wants to save a little metal. His custom-made Santa Cruz acoustic doesn't have frets above the 14th fret. "I never play past there ... so why waste the metal?" he said in a Q&A with the American Songwriter website. "I think people need to sit back and get a little green on their guitars."

Who Needs Fingers?

I think I could play better if I had a few extra fingers but lots of renown guitarists get by with less than 10. I'm not sure how they do it.

Les Paul, who turned 93 this week, has the use of only two fingers on his left hand due to arthritis and he's still playing a weekly gig at a nightclub in New York. Django Reinhardt got caught in a fire and ended up with two partially paralyzed fingers on his left hand but still became one of the great jazz guitarists. A childhood wood-chopping accident left Jerry Garcia with only 9 1/3 fingers and his oddly configured right hand became something of a trademark. That and really long solos.

Now Leslie West, who provided the soundtrack for much of my teenage years with "Mississippi Queen," has told the Gibson people he only needs two fingers on the fretboard. "I play the guitar with only my first and fourth fingers, on my left hand," he said. "I never learned to use all my fingers, like you would playing a scale." But does this picture indicate otherwise?

Canada Can't Pull It Off

The competition for world's largest guitar pull is more intense than I suspected. I hope the people in Luckenbach realize that.

Canadian guitarists swarmed a festival in Toronto last weekend in hopes of breaking the Guinness World Record for world's largest guitar ensemble. The official count was 1,623 guitars, which left them 179 short of the record set in Germany a couple of years ago. It sounds like a good time was had anyway.

The rules for the Toronto pick-a-long specified that only acoustic and unplugged electric guitars were allowed. No Guitar Hero fake guitars. Not even bass guitars, banjos, ukuleles, mandolins or lutes.

The song of choice was "Helpless" by Canadian homeboy Neil Young. I think I'll add it to my repertoire since it's pretty simple. Just a series of D, A and G chords while singing through your nose, which I do naturally.

"Helpless" was chosen in an online poll -- beating out other greatest Canadian hits like Bachman-Turner Overdrive's "Takin' Care of Business," the Band's "The Weight," Bryan Adam's "Cut Like a Knife" and Feist's "1, 2, 3, 4" -- but not everyone liked the selection. "Gawd what a boring song!!" one person wrote in a comment on the Globe & Mail website. "And to hear that many people play it would really be grating."

"Helpless" certainly isn't everyone's cup of Molson's but I thought Young's performance of it was one of the highlights of "The Last Waltz."

Kyle Busch Is No Pete Townshend

Since I favor harsh punishment for those who commit hate crimes against guitars, I hope someone is wetting down the waterboard for NASCAR driver Kyle Busch.

I don't really know a thing about Kyle Busch but apparently he has quite the reputation in NASCAR circles for being a bit of an arrogant, boorish, bratty crybaby. After an extended series of left turns on Saturday, Busch won a race at the Nashville Superspeedway and this video shows how he celebrated.

That was a hand-painted Gibson Les Paul he smashed -- smashed in three tries, it should be noted, so I guess there is no need for steroid testing on Kyle Busch. The artist, Sam Bass, who is an officially licensed NASCAR artist, took it well, though, as you can see in the picture on the right.

"I was stunned when it happened," Bass said. "When I took the picture with Kyle ... the first thing he said was that there was no disrespect to me or the trophy or the speedway or any of the sponsors. He just said he was going to give each of his guys a piece of the trophy. As a person that loves rock 'n' roll the way I do and appreciates a good show, Kyle Busch put on a great show in Victory Lane and shocked the world."

Busch said since the guitar didn't break up like he had hoped, he was going to have it neatly cut up so his crew members could each have a piece.

This would be a good time to quote John Hiatt's "Perfectly Good Guitar."

There ought to be a law with no bail
Smash a guitar and you go to jail
With no chance for early parole
You don't get out 'til you get some soul

Oh, it breaks my heart to see those stars
Smashing a perfectly good guitar
I don't know who they think they are
Smashing a perfectly good guitar.

Pete Townshend and Jimi Hendrix have immunity on this matter because they were the first. In 2006 Townshend said he would no longer destroy guitars on stage because the act had become such a rock cliche.

"Dad, It Just Followed Me Home"

My daughter brought home a stray the other day. Not a puppy or kitten but a stray guitar.

She had called breathlessly from school to let me know that while helping clean up a backstage storage area, she had come across an abandoned guitar. It was filthy, battered and missing a string and bridge pin but had potential, she said. Her music teacher said she could keep it over the summer if she fixed it up.

Plus, my daughter said, this guitar had a beautiful etched pickguard.

Beautiful etched pickguard? That made my ears perk up. An etched pickguard, I thought, it's got to be a Gibson Hummingbird -- the acoustic preferred by the likes of June Carter Cash, Sheryl Crow and Keith Richards. A guitar that runs into four figures. Yes, yes, we can give this guitar a home, I told the daughter, even if only for the summer.

But, alas, my excitement was not justified. It's not Hummingbird and not even close. This stray is a three-quarters-size mutt of indeterminate pedigree. The logo on the headstock has been rubbed off and the label in the sound hole doesn't mention a manufacturer, which makes me think the maker wanted to remain anonymous. I'm not sure what kind of wood it's made of but it's barely a step above cardboard. I think it must have been used as a prop in a play rather than as a guitar in the school's music program. New, it probably cost no more than $50.

Still, we took it by Stancill's Guitar Studio (check out the new website) where Scott graciously took a look and said a new set of strings might make it playable.

The daughter's enthusiasm was unabated and she gave the non-Hummingbird a thorough cleaning that got it sparkling quite nicely. With a little guidance, she put new strings on, which means it is now worth at least $12.99. The low E string buzzes but we may be able to adjust the bridge or file down the first fret a bit to take care of that.

So it's not a Hummingbird and by September it probably will be back in that dark storage room until it's pulled out to dress up a set in a high school production of "The Glass Menagerie." But it's another case of a guitar providing me with a nice father-daughter moment -- the kind that can be pretty rare when you're dealing with teenagers.

And, besides, all guitars deserve a good home, even if only for the summer.

Redefining the Term "Big Band"

Want to be in a band? A really big band? Head to Luckenbach, Texas, (as in "... Luckenbach, Texas, with Willie and Waylon and the boys") on Aug. 23 and join the "Pickin' for the Record" effort to get into the Guinness Book of World Records as the largest guitar ensemble.

Organizers, including the Kerrville Folk Festival, are hoping to draw 2,000 guitarists, which would break the record set by the 1,802 people who played "Smoke on the Water" in Germany in June 2007.

No word on what's on the playlist for Luckenbach but you have to assume that not everyone gets a solo.

Participants do get a T-shirt and dogtags, though, and proceeds go to Support the Welcome Home Project's Veterans Endowment for Traumatic Brain Injuries.

Angels and Playboys

They say nothing is an accident but I can't come up with an explanation of why these songs came up on the iPod when I hit shuffle for June:

• "Walkin' Blues," Lucille Bogan
• "The Factory," Warren Zevon
• "I Want Let You Go," Ray Charles
• "Crazy Lemon," Joe Ely
• "Bluin' the Blues," Bob Wills & the Texas Playboys
• "Say, Man," Bo Diddley
• "Everybody's Talking," The Resentments
• "One of These Days," Emmylou Harris
• "Stray Cat Blues," Rolling Stones
• "Knowing," Lucinda Williams
• "Wind Me Up," Alvin Crow & the Neon Angels
• "It Wasn't Me," Chuck Berry
• "Orange Blossom Special," Johnny Cash

I'm currently working to add "Stray Cat Blues" to the list of Stones' non-hits that I can play in mediocre fashion. It's basically C's, D's and G's.