Mike

Ball

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February 18, 2008

A Case of Classical GAS

As anyone who has been around me at all is aware, I play the guitar. I play it constantly, enthusiastically and just well enough that I usually avoid being attacked by angry villagers with pitchforks. And for more than 35 years I had one main guitar, born the same year as me, a 1951 Martin.

I picked up that guitar when I was in college. I traded for it, swapping all the stuff I had left over from my 1960’s “rock star” days – including a solid body electric guitar that would be worth a small fortune today – for a little wooden box that had pick marks on the top and “John S. Miracle, WCPM, Middlesboro, Kentucky” stenciled on the guitar case. It seems that old John had spent about 20 years breaking it in, and I decided that it was the least I could do to carry on in his honor.

I hardly ever went anywhere without my guitar, and I wasn’t shy about hauling it out and banging through some songs with a bunch of friends. I can think of at least a few times over the years when that guitar and I woke up on a beach somewhere, both of us sleeping off what was probably a pretty interesting night before.

Like me, as the years went by my old guitar got a little banged up – everything still worked pretty well, considering, but there were a couple of dings on the fenders.

And that was just the way I liked it. For the last decade or so that guitar always sat in a stand next to my computer, so that whenever I needed to sit back and figure out how to unscramble some ungodly mess I had just written, I could grab it and hammer out a few bars of “Little Martha” to clear my head.

A couple of years ago when I began playing on stage a lot for Lost Voices, it became apparent that my old guitar was hurting. It would no longer play in tune, and the strings were sawing my fingers off. It turns out that it was way overdue for some expensive neck repair that I didn’t have the cash to pay for.

So I did the smart thing – I sold my guitar to a collector, picked up a spotless 10-year-old guitar that was in perfect condition and ready for the stage, and put a fair amount of money in the bank.

Well, in this case “smart” didn’t work out all that well for me. The first problem I had with the new guitar is that I just could not get comfortable playing it. It was designed with a special slim neck and super fast action, and I was used to playing on a neck that had been, charitably speaking, hacked by hand out of a small tree trunk.

A bigger problem, though, was that this guitar was the most beautiful thing I ever saw. It had snowflake and rosette inlays, specially selected and matched woods, premium finishes and not a scratch on it anywhere. I was afraid to get it out of the case.

And so, after a year of trying to adapt, I decided to sell that gorgeous guitar and get a simpler one with a beefier neck – one that I wouldn't be afraid to put a few pick marks on. I spent hours reading guitar reviews and haunting the online forums for guitar fanatics. I combed eBay and Craigslist and all the other guitar buy/sell web sites.

And somewhere in that process I picked up a major case of what the guitar fanatics call “GAS” – Guitar Acquisition Syndrome. This means that I've been eating, sleeping and dreaming about nothing but buying guitars. I remember when I used to eat, sleep and dream about nothing but playing them.

After a couple of months of this, I have finally hit pay dirt – I just completed a deal for a guitar that seems to suit me perfectly. With a little luck, I intend to keep this one and spend the rest of my life wearing a hole right through the top of it. I have to admit, though, it's pretty darned fun to look at all the cool guitar pictures in those "For Sale" ads and dream.

But I guess that, deep down, what I really dream of is someday coming up with big a pile of money, so that maybe John S. Miracle and I can go find that collector and get our guitar back.

Copyright © 2008, Michael Ball. Distributed exclusively by North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

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