MyRareGuitars.com

Get around round round I get around/I’m a real cool head/Get around round round I get around/I’m makin’ real good bread. Back in the day, The Beach Boys were often pictured with what was sort of their “band car,” a Chevy Corvette Stingray. There was some spiritual force that inextricably linked hot rods and guitars back in the early to mid-1960s. Rock and roll and Big Daddy Roth kind of went together. Just ask Billy Gibbons. Or just consider this 1967 Gretsch Corvette 6135.

I don’t remember what drove me to my first lap steel. Maybe I needed a new sound for a song my band was working on, or perhaps I just felt like my guitar playing was in a rut. Whatever the reason, once I discovered it I was instantly hooked.

The good news is that you don’t need a professional publicist to get your music out into the world in a pro format. In fact, some of the best material I’ve received over the years has come from individuals, while some of the worst has no doubt cost the artists a fair amount of cash. Here’s what you need to know.

Devo have always taken an unconventional approach to their music, videos, and striking fashion sense so it’s no surprise that this attitude would also apply to their choice of guitars. While many think of them as a synthpop band with the occasional guitar thrown in, in their early years they were precisely the opposite – at times featuring three guitarists in their line up (guitarist Bob1 [Mothersbaugh], guitarist/keyboardist Bob2 [Casale], and singer/keyboardist/guitarist Mark Mothersbaugh). By the early 80s, however, Bob1 was the only member with strings on his instrument with Bob2 and bassist Jerry Casale having mostly switched over to playing their parts on synths. They seemed to have not only enjoyed unusual choices in guitars (shying away from the all too common Strats and Les Pauls) but rotating through many different models as well.

EKO was an Italian manufacturer located in Recanati, Italy. Their products include classical guitars, 12-string guitars, arch top guitars, electric guitars and acoustic bass guitars. EKO guitars gained high popularity during the rock’n'roll craze of 1960s, becoming the largest guitar exporter in Europe. Their electric models were often highly ornamented with pearl, featured 3 or 4 pickups and recognizable “rocker” switches for pickup selection. The acoustic models were popular in country and folk rock bands of the late ’60s.

As I’ve said many times, one of the privileges of writing about off-beat guitars is that I get to do detective work and, when I’m lucky (and in time!), talk to someone who had a direct hand in bringing us the guitars in question. I had to dig hard to uncover something about Alamo guitars and I was both lucky and luckily in time with this story!

We have been forced this week to make an ammendment to the popular, “GAS Rule Book”. After referring to Rule #23: “Never Ever Tell Your Spouse”, we followup with Rule #23b: “Never Ever Use Your Wife’s Ebay Account to Buy a Guitar”. I know it might seem obvious to most people, but after receiveing the following message yesterday, I thought it would be prudent to pass this along to my fellow GAS addicts. Read and learn.

Lots of people are getting their music out there on YouTube these days. If you put up something creative – featuring Eastwood or Airline guitars – we will give you a shout out in our monthly newsletter. Here are the latest ones…

Spring seems an appropriate time to clear out the music shelves, so I started sorting the CD’s I received for review over the past 8 months into two piles: Reviewed and Not. I was a little surprised to see that about 400 were Not, and nearly 100 were Reviewed. I should mention that I call myself a reviewer instead of a critic because I will not pan somebody’s work in print. It’s hard enough to get a career going without bad press, and not everybody shares my opinions, so I just don’t review those I don’t really like. I will, on occasion, send a critique to a player whose work has real promise even if I don’t review it. So in that spirit I would like to offer up some tips that have come to me from decades of reviewing as well as talking to other reviewers and critics about their methods.

“Suppose,” enticed the email message (back when email messages were still something of a novelty), “I could get you into a strip mall that has one music store and the rest of the spaces are FILLED WITH GUITARS?” Thus began a remarkable once-in-a-lifetime adventure that involved packing up my photographic gear into jerry-rigged thrift shop suitcases, hopping onto an airplane to head west, joining Tom, a knife salesman I’d never met except on the internet and at the other end of a telephone line, and driving up to Bob’s House of Music in Wheat Ridge, CO, just north of Denver. Where I would encounter more vintage guitars—including this 1974 Carvin CM95—than anyone could ever conceive! The second Temple of Doom of my life (so far).