Some time ago I wrote a series on my guitar collection, detailing how I came by the various instruments and the stories behind them. More recently I explained the difficulty that I had with one of them when it started to show signs of age and needed repairing. Today I want to go back in time and tell the story of this guitar (a story that has not been told yet) and why it is such an important instrument in my collection.
As I explained previously, I thought that being asked to learn the recorder as an instrument to use for teaching music in the classroom seemed quite absurd at the time, and it still does. It was 1969, my first year as a student at Wollongong Teachers College and all General Primary students were required to learn the recorder. I still have mine and, apart from the cork seal between the two parts being perished, it is in substantially the same shape as it was back then, for obvious reasons, it’s never been played since I left college!
I reasoned that a guitar was a much more suitable classroom instrument for many reasons and I believe that my reasoning has been vindicated many times over over the years. Despite three years of Choral Elective I still am unable to read music but my ultra-keen “ear” for music has meant that I usually only have to hear a song once before I can figure out the chords and play the thing.
In 1969 I had already taught myself to play the ukulele and enjoyed playing around on that, but, one day, someone pointed out to me that the four strings on a uke correspond exactly to the bottom four strings on a guitar, eh, what was that? That was the catalyst for me to go out and buy a guitar, and here it is. In March 1969 I bought this Yamaha..
..an S-70 steel string folk guitar. I quickly taught myself how to deal with the extra strings and the uke was put away (somewhere along the way it has disappeared). Of course learning to play a steel string guitar was hard work and I soon learned that rubbing the tips of the fingers of my left hand with methylated sprirts helped to encourage the necessary degree of callousing. I spent hours and hours practising my chords (I never have mastered the more advanced techniques of playing) and soon found that the auditory skills that had stood me in good stead on the four string instrument had translated over onto the six string one.
I played it as often as I could and drove my grandma and grandpa, in whose house I was boarding while attending college, mad. I joined up with a few other musos at college and we formed a band in which I played happily for the remaining three years of college.
But, once bitten by the bug, I soon started coveting something better and, in March 1970, I shelled out the outrageous sum of $150 (the Yamaha had only cost me $48) on my Maton CW80/6 which I still have. Now I was an impecunious college student and there was never any thought of me KEEPING the Yamaha as well (I only became a guitar hoarder much later). What to do? Well, as luck would have it (though his was only one of dozens of such “coincidences” that have dotted the lives of my identical twin brother and myself) my brother, at college in Newcastle at the time had also decided, without any consultation with me, to buy a guitar! He was even more impecunious than me and the very cheap one that he bought didn’t last very long at all before the neck started to bend and the body warp.
Problem solved. I never have been a good salesman but Paul was happy to pay me what I had paid for the Yamaha and he got a much better guitar for 48 bucks.
So, did it disappear only to be miraculously found years later? No, the story is far less compelling than that. It lived in a soft case for a number of years as Paul, not long after and after admiring my Maton, had gone out and bought another Yamaha, a dreadnought-bodied full sized guitar. Once, years later in a fit of enthusiasm, Paul bought a new hard case for both the instruments and they both have lived on the top of various wardrobes in the many and varied houses in which he has lived over the last nearly-50 years.
I often thought to ask him if he’d sell the Yamaha back to me but, somehow, it never happened until the other day when all the ducks seemed to be in line and I did. Not only did he agree to sell it back to me for the original sale price but he also sold the hard case to me at a drastically reduced fee as well.
I’d be lying if I didn’t say that I am tickled pink. It’s still in super shape apart from a little distortion in the top deck, but I can live with that. In 2019 (not long, really) it will be 50 years old, pretty cool, eh?
Unsurprisingly, this John Denver song has been floating through my head a lot in the last few days.
I’m happy to welcome my original guitar home.