The title should be fairly self-explanatory.  Here is a run down of every guitar I have ever owned, to the best of my knowledge.  I still own some of these.  The pictures are not my actual guitars unless noted.

This was how it began.  The year was 1986.  Rhett and I had just decided to form The Lavone.  I need a guitar.  With $160 in hand I went to the Burnsville Center, walked into Schmitt Music, and walked out with the COOLEST FUCKING GUITAR THEY HAD.  At least, that’s how I saw it.  I was 12.  I liked Lamborghinis.  This was obviously the coolest guitar.  I mean, just look at it.  It didn’t sound good or play good but neither did I.  For the first three years of The Lavone, it didn’t matter, this was my axe.  Then, in 1989, I got The Black Ric.

Knut-Koupee music in Burnsville was the place, and this black-on-black 12-string Rickenbacker called my name from somewhere out in space.  I had never seen a guitar like it and after three years with the Katana I was ready for an upgrade.  The Ric was semi-hollow, it was $600, and I bussed tables and washed dishes for six months to buy it.  Worth it.  This became my main machine and before long I sold the Katana, but not before acquiring a couple more guitars to go with the Ric.

My friend Sue in photography class told me she had a guitar I could buy for $40 and without even seeing it I agreed.  The guitar in question was a Teisco Del-Rey E-110, a cheaply made, thin bodied, all around low rent guitar with microphonic sounding pickups.  It was the anti-Ric and I LOVED it.  It just had charm.  Charisma.  It was light and you couldn’t take yourself too seriously when you were playing it.  I wrote and recorded several songs with this bad boy.  However, I had another even stranger guitar.  If you can even call it that…

This was the Casio DG-20 guitar synthesizer.  A guitar? A synth?  It was basically a synth with strings and frets.  The strings didn’t make sound, they were plastic, but they triggered the notes.  The Casio knew what notes to play because the frets were RUBBER.  That’s right, they sensed when you pressed down on them.  This low tech approach worked shockingly well and I played this thing on several Lavone tracks on two consecutive albums before passing it on to a schoolmate.

As it turns out, you can’t go forever as a band without acquiring a bass guitar and that brings us to…

I had no way of knowing it at the time, but the first bass guitar I ever bought was one rare beast, it was a Toyota!  You could be pardoned for doing a double take on this one because there are precious few Toyota musical instruments in the world.  Even the internet knows very little about these things other than that they were made sometime in the 60’s or 70’s.  I know it played and sounded great and I have no idea what became of it but damn I wish I had this thing back in my hands today.  What a cool bass that was…  It wasn’t the only cool bass I got around this time period.  The second was also quite the oddball.

OK, so, that looks like a Rickenbacker 4001 and it played like a 4001 and it sounded like a 4001 but it was in fact a clone made by Ibanez (note the IBZ on the headstock).  Ric sued the crap out of Ibanez for these clones and they stopped making them but that didn’t stop me from buying one and playing the hell out of it (pictured here, me with Purple Triangles at a grad party in 1992).  This bass may still be in the possession of my younger brother, I have no way of knowing.  I hope it is.  Side note: the guitar being played by Sy on the right hand side of the pic here is my actual black-on-black Ric.

Eventually I got married and ran into financial difficulties and wound up selling the black Ric and using the money to buy a used car.  Sigh…  I still had another guitar, however, an acoustic.

You would think that for as many years as I owned this particular guitar that I could tell you what it was but I honestly can’t.  It was an Alvarez acoustic, it saw many many gigs and sessions and heavy usage and at some point I didn’t have it any more.  I honestly don’t know what model it was or when it left me, but here it is, being played by the lovely and talented Cindy Ivy at a show, my Alvarez acoustic.

Truth is, the mid and late 90’s were not great moments in guitar ownership for me.  There was this…

I don’t really know what I was thinking.  Of all the guitars I have ever owned, this felt the least like ME.  I guess I wanted to try the Strat thing at least once in my life?  I dunno.  I had it for a couple of years, never fell in love, sold it off.  During that time I also tried another Fender, this one a bass.

Around 1998 or so I acquired a 5-string Fender Jazz Bass V similar to the one pictured here.  I played it for a couple of years and then sold it.  I liked it, honestly.  Played nice and looked good enough. This was the bass I played at the very last gig that The Lavone ever played in 2000.

Around this time I ditched the red Strat for another more interesting guitar, a bit of a rarity actually…

Now this was a sweet guitar.  After years of playing the mystery Alvarez and the boring red thing, I once again owned a guitar that I was interested in playing.  The Harmony Rebel looked good, sounded good, and played good and I loved it.  Between this and the 5-string bass, I was pretty happy with my options, especially when I consider that I had one more guitar, purchased in Liverpool in 2000.

You can’t really see a lot of detail in the picture, but this 12-string Hondo acoustic is still in possession and is therefore the guitar I have owned the longest at this point, 22 years.  I bought this guitar at a pawn shop in Liverpool and this pic is me playing it at a hostel the day I bought it.  I later added a resonator cone to it and dubbed it the Hon-Dobro and I have since used it exclusively for those rare occasions when I want open-tuning 12-string slide guitar.  Rare, but still…

Around 2004 my life changed a lot and I decided I wanted to do a lot of recording on a tight budget.  I wanted a lot of guitar tones from one guitar so I bought this next one.

My Variax 500 has been with me now for about 16 years and it still works, which is a bit surprising considering what a strange piece of tech it is.  Easily the weirdest guitar since my Casio DG-20, the Variax is NOT a synthesizer but it’s not a traditional guitar either.  It’s a guitar without traditional pickups.  It only has piezoelectric pickups built into the bridge.  These capture the string vibrations and transmit them to an on-board modeling processor that process the string signals in real time.  It can switch between electric and acoustic sounds, alternate tunings, even emulate 12-strings, and it does it all with relatively high quality.  Not only that, it can model a Telecaster, Strat, Les Paul, Rickenbacker, Gibson 335, all sorts of other guitars.  It’s versatile as shit, albeit a little gimmicky.  Still, for versatility on a budget, it worked for me and it’s still down in the studio.  In fact, I also own a second, newer, one that combines the modeling stuff with single-coils.  It’s basically a Strat with modeling built in.  Neither guitar is “cool” but they are useful studio and stage tools.

The Variax was fine but I found myself in need of a bass guitar as well so, this time, I built one.  Sort of.

Shown here is what I lovingly refer to as The Pinup Bass.  It began life as a cheap knockoff of a Fender Jazz Bass built by some company called S101.  Made in Korea, maybe?  It was black with a white pick-guard and it sounded like crap.  But it was sub-$100 and I just wanted it for it’s body.  I gutted it, painted it white, got a brushed aluminum pick-guard for it, then I installed real Fender pots and wiring and control plate and some EMG Vintage Active pickups.  I also replaced the E tuner with a Hipshot drop-D bass extender so I can go into a drop-D tuning any time I want and than jump right back to standard.  As a final touch I put pinup girl decals on the body and headstock.  The resulting bass sounds great, plays great, it’s one of a kind and it’s not going to be mistaken for anything else if it’s stolen.

This wasn’t the only guitar that I stumbled across around 2007/2008.  I also bought a car, a 2007 Volkswagen Jetta, and it came with, of all things…

Despite being made by First Act, a guitar manufacturer that is targeted at kids and first time players of not particularly high quality, the VW Guitar is surprisingly good.  It has lovely pickups, great action, a built in battery-powered practice pre-amp so you can play it through your car stereo aux jack (no, really, it’s really cool), and it even looks good.  The VIN number of the car is engraved on a plate on the back, it has a matching gig bag, the guitar strap is made of seat-belt mesh, it’s really wild.  I no longer have the car but I still have the Garagemaster and I love the little thing.

The other guitar I picked up around this time was an acoustic.

After years of owning cheapo acoustics like the Alvarez and Hondo (and also I think there was a Yamaha 12-string in there for a bit but I can’t remember enough about it to find a pic) I finally decided to splurge a little and buy something a bit better sounding.  I went to The Podium (sadly, no longer in business) and I played every acoustic that was sub-$800, which I had decided was my ceiling.  For around $500 I got myself a Martin.  Yes, the construction of the neck, sides, and back, are all cheap compared to a proper Martin, but the top is solid sitka with classic Martin X bracing and it just sounds like a fucking Martin dreadnought.  Seriously could not believe it the first time I heard it and I still think it sounds amazing.  You know what?  When I bought it I was warned that the neck would bend, the sides would split, blah blah blah…  This thing has now served me as a daily driver for almost 15 years and it still plays like new, looks like new, and sounds like new.  Not bad for $500.  In fact, I just checked Reverb and found this same guitar selling for $640 even after all these years.  Apparently, these are now fairly rare and sought after.  Hmm.  I think I’ll keep mine.

The next guitar I added to my life was an unplanned event.  Let’s call it a temporary moment of insanity…

I really didn’t mean to buy this one but it was a one day special sale, it has P90s and a Bigsby, it’s SO SHINY, and it’s a semi-hollow.  I haven’t owned a semi since the Rebel.  I just couldn’t say no.  And I didn’t.  And I have no regrets.  I do, however, have other guitars.  Including my second stab at building one for myself, my beloved “Partscaster” Tele.

So here’s the deal with my “Telecaster”.  It began when I bought a guitar for $79 off of Woot.com.  Yes, you read that right, Woot.  The website that sells cheap shit by making it sound funny.  I expected the guitar to be an unplayable atrocity but as it was, it wasn’t half bad.  Wasn’t great either.  I threw a GFS tremolo on it and toyed around with it and then I was granted a gift, the remains of a real Telecaster.  Pickguard, controls and chrome, pickups, neck, bridge, everything but the body.  My buddy Chad Stanley had sent a Tele body off for repaint one day and never got it back.  The other parts were homeless.  So, I took the body from my $79 Woot guitar and the neck and electronics from his Fender and made my “Telecaster”.  Wootcaster?  Tell-nobody-caster?  I dunno, but I play it, it feels like a Tele, sounds like a Tele, it’s a Tele living on in some imitation Tele body.  Probably made of graham crackers or sawdust, but it seems to work.  Pretty too.

And let’s mention those other two guitars pictured here while we’re at it.

Sometimes you get absurdly lucky at a pawn shop and you find something selling for a price so low you seriously wonder if they made a typo or looked up the wrong instrument or something.  Such was the case with my 2006 Gibson Les Paul Studio.  I won’t say how cheap I got it for but let’s just say it was likely they thought it was an Epiphone.  Anyhow, I was stoked and I brought it home and I played it for a few years and then I got a crush on SG style guitars and I mostly stopped playing it.  It was not that there was anything wrong with the Les Paul, but like my previous experience with my red Strat, the classic guitar that had been played to death by half the guitarist population just didn’t excite me enough.  I wound up trading it to Chad Stanley even up for…

Is it worth as much as a Les Paul?  Probably not, but Chad had already given me the parts for my Tele, we’ve been friends for 1000 years, he really wanted the LP, and I really wanted the G400.  It was a good trade.  I think it needs a Bigsby though…  And maybe a re-paint.  One of these days…  Besides, it looked really good next to the bass I had just acquired…

I had started playing bass in this 90’s cover band called Fistful of Datas and one day The Pinup Bass developed an issue and I couldn’t play it for the upcoming show, which was that night.  I needed a bass for one gig.  Just one.  I stopped in to Guitar Center and bought the cheapest bass they had, the Epiphone EB-0.  One pickup, short-scale, sub-$200.  You know what?  I really really liked it.  A lot.  I liked the sound, the simplicity, the feel, it was shocking how much I liked that bass.  Enough so that I decided to sell it and upgrade to…

This is my current primary bass guitar.  The one I bought was used and relatively inexpensive but it came with black strings installed on it, which was a nice touch.  It’s a pretty fantastic bass, in my opinion.  I play it regularly in Awkward Bodies and I don’t (yet) see any reason to change that.

Having mostly settled on a daily driver bass and a stable of electric guitars, I decided that I wanted to get something special for the film premiere of Witness Underground last November, but what?

Over the summer, while preparing for the show, Esther and I took a roadtrip to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan where we happened to drive through a small town called Germfask.  On the side of the road was an instrument store and I pulled over and stopped in.  It was HEAVEN.  Guitar Man’s Ruff Cut Music was a guitar geek nirvana and Chip was it’s resident Buddha.  He had guitars there I couldn’t believe and I vowed to return to buy a special guitar for my show.  A few months later, I did.

When I returned to Chip’s shop with my buddy Michael, I spent the better part of an afternoon just playing everything, weighing the pros and cons, talking myself into and out of various purchases, but the J45 caught my eye within seconds of walking in the door and once I played it, no other guitar in the shop could beat it.  I fell in love.  The tone, the feel, it was the first acoustic I had ever played that I preferred to my Martin and it was drop dead gorgeous.  It came home with me and will be with me from now until I’m buried if I have anything to say about it.

And this takes me to my final guitar, one I’ve wanted all along.  Over the years I’ve had only two real Fenders.  That red Strat back in the 90’s and the purple Bass V.  My very first guitar was a Squier, which is a type of Fender, sure, and my Wootcaster is mostly actual Telecaster parts, but a proper legit Fender?  There has only ever been one that I really wanted.  Around the time I bought The Black Ric I was contemplating another guitar at Knut-Koupee, the Jazzmaster, and despite 35+ years of owning guitars it wasn’t until this winter that I finally snagged one.

Will I acquire more guitars?  Duh.  Of course I will.  Technically I have a couple more I didn’t mention here.  I have two that I’m building (one is a replica Rickenbacker 325, the other a replica Les Paul), I own an Alvarez baritone acoustic that slipped my mind, I have an old 1960’s Decca acoustic that is not in playable condition, parts of a couple others that I might restore or cobble together (particularly cool is the body to a 1960’s Zen-On Victoria ZES-1400, a truly unusual guitar).  It never ends, but this is a tour through all the primary guitars I’ve owned and loved and played and recorded with over the last 35 years.  I still own quite a few of these and it’ll take a lot of convincing to get me to part with them.

How many guitars does a guy need?  Just one more.