This guitar is an Epiphone Sheraton. It is semi-hollow, which means the body has two hollow sections either side of a central block of wood. I haven't made any changes to this guitar except for replacing the tiny plastic tip on the switch that selects the two different pickups.
My tastes in guitars have changed a bit over the years, and nowadays I'm not especially keen on fancy bits like gold-plated components and elaborate inlays. I didn't realise at the time, but much of the cost of this guitar is in the aesthetics, rather than the quality of the instrument itself. Also it is coated in really thick, glassy, polyurethane varnish which makes it pretty resilient but I'm not too fond of the way it looks. The gold-plated bits are especially pointless - all the metal parts on my guitars get fairly corroded and there isn't anything I can do about it.
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| Corrosion |
The best thing is when you are playing it really loud and everything is resonating you can feel air coming out of the holes in the side, which is kind of thrilling. I have played some of my favourite guitar with this, and recently it's the instrument I play most at home.
I've had this for so long that I've had two different kinds of grief about it from my bandmates. At first, the drummer would call it my Oasis guitar, which kind of makes sense because it is very similar to the kind of guitars Oasis used to play before they got really, really rich. More recently the drummer would call it my Vampire Weekend guitar, which makes perfect sense because it is identical to the guitar that Ezra Koenig from Vampire Weekend plays. Neither band influenced my purchase. I wish I was famous.
There are a couple of dents on the side. I remember when they happened. It was very soon after buying the guitar, so let's say 2002. My band at the time were playing a show in Croydon, which was so far away from where we were based in North London that it felt like a proper adventure. I remember getting accused by the person doing sound at the venue of breaking some microphones. We didn't break any microphones. This is kind of a speculative scam by venues (or employees trying to shift blame) and it happened a few times over the years at different places.
Anyway, in Croydon I accidentally dropped a Cry Baby way on my fairly new guitar from a fair height. That wah pedal is big and heavy, with a metal chassis. God knows what I was doing with a wah pedal back then, I've never been able to do anything decent with one. The accident left a couple of small dents, which illustrate just how tough the polyurethane finish is.
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| Dents |
The main thing I remember about this guitar was the day that I bought it. My future wife and I were in the early stages of seeing each other. We were out on Oxford Street for lunch or maybe breakfast, I might have it wrong but I think she was living in Marble Arch at the time which explains why we'd be there. It was a really clear, spring day. A Sunday. My future wife had plans nearby with a friend, so we met and I said goodbye to them both. I remember thinking "I'm going to go and buy a guitar". I don't know where the money came from back then. I guess my rent was very low, I was working, and I ate a lot of pasta and pesto.
I went to Denmark Street, where there are lots of musical instrument shops. There is a cliche about staff in guitar shops having a terrible attitude and I've often found it to be the case, particularly that day. Admittedly I did say something rather stupid when I went in the shop, asking them if they were open (because it was Sunday) and the two cool dudes behind the desk who unlike me could widdly widdly shred on the guitar like George Lynch snorted in utter disdain and one said "OBVIOUSLY". I felt really at ease then, it was super great retailing from the guitar dudes. I suppose I did end up buying a guitar though. I vaguely remember trying a few semi-hollow guitars in the shop, and then being offered this one at a slight discount. I'm not sure why it was cheaper - there must have been something wrong with it but I've never known what.
My wife and I are separated now, and getting divorced. She has always supported me in my making music, without being closely involved. This guitar is one of the few music things I have that I strongly associate with her, purely because of my memory of buying it. I don't want to come across too sentimental though - it's not like this guitar is making me sad.
Still, I do think there is something interesting about musical instruments. They can last a long time, steadily accumulating new memories, as long as you keep playing them.
