My first electric was a really odd-looking Kent model. Kind of a Hofner-bass-shaped guitar with a pointy lower bout. I bought it off my childhood friend Jan Strachan for $50 while we were both in high school. What a weird guitar - I wish I still had it. I don't really remember all the details of controls, etc., and this is the only photo I have of it. Looks like it had some slide switches and four normal volume/tone knobs. It also had a vibrato tailpiece - WITH the vibrato bar.

Armed with this guitar and my first (and still my main) amplifier, a 1966 Ampeg Gemini II, I got into my first band. The photo shows me with the Kent and the Ampeg, circa 1976. That band played 50's and 60's oldies and I stayed with them all through college and grad school, eventually getting good enough to be the only guitar in the band.

My next guitar purchase was a 1966 Fender Jaguar with block fret markers, a bound neck, and a big wear mark where your right forearm rested on the body. It was a little beat, but I loved it - at least at first. The lead guitarist in the Sands of Time played a Stratocaster, so now I felt like we were on a little more equal footing, at least as far as equipment went. The Jag would make some great sounds, but I was too inexperienced to realize what a gem I had, or that I had already found my ultimate guitar. I think I paid $175.00 for the Jag.

I forget exactly how long I kept the Jag, but I remember I had to practically give it away. If I knew then what I know now...

I was on some sort of holy quest for the f-hole electric of my dreams (picture Eddie Cochran, Duane Eddy, etc.). I found an old Gretsch Tennesseean (I'm not really sure it was this model) with one pickup in the neck position and, as I found out later to my horror, a slightly twisted neck. I can't find a single photo of this guitar and I've never seen another exactly like it. When I tried to play this thing in the band, it would feed back like a son-of-a-gun. It was one of my lesser choices of guitars through the years. I kept that one for less than a year and, once again, practically gave it away.

NOTE - this is not my actual guitar in the photo at the left, but a similar one that I found online recently.

After the Gretsch fiasco, I realized I needed a solid-body guitar for the band. My next acquisition was a brand-new Univox Les Paul Jr. copy in so-called "TV yellow."

It had two P-90 pickups, a Badass tailpiece, and the normal 2+2 knob setup. It sounded neat and twangy, and I started to learn lead on this thing. The only real issue with this guitar was that it was very neck-heavy, so I had to hold onto it carefully or the neck would want to head for the floor fast. That got old after six months or so and I sold it.

At the same time I had this guitar, I acquired an old "blackface" Fender twin. To finance this, I sold the Ampeg to my friend Paul, who had just bought an electric guitar and needed an amp. This was the first of two times I sold the amp to a friend and later bought it back.

Here's a shot of me with my Gibson Melody Maker (see story below) and the blackface Fender Twin at a gig at some VFW hall. Check out the Fender Multi-echo unit on top of the Twin. It was an echo unit sometimes known as an "oil-can"echo, and hooked into the amp's reverb wires to work. I still have this thing, although I've only ever gotten it to work with a Fender reverb amp.

BEFORE

One day while checking out the used stuff at a local music shop, a guy approached me and asked if I'd like to see his 1964 Gibson Melody Maker. He proceeded to sell me this guitar for $150.00. It was really neat with one anemic little single-coil pickup pickup and a "vibrola" tailpiece, which you could opt-out of by stringing the guitar through the wrap-around bridge/tailpiece alone.

AFTER

Over the next couple of years, I proceeded to do things to this poor guitar that make me cringe today. You just don't do what I did to a vintage guitar... I replaced the compensated bridge/tailpiece with an adjustable "Badass" bridge - nothing irreversible there. Then I decided that I wanted better tuners, so I bought Grovers and reamed out the holes in the headstock. I replaced the stock knobs with cool-at-the-time "speed knobs." Then I had a brass nut installed (everybody did that in 1978, didn't they?). Lastly, I decided I had to have a DiMarzio PAF humbucking pickup, so I bought one and routed out the body of the guitar and the plastic pickguard. To be fair, the guitar sounded awesome and it stayed in tune like nobody's business. However, a couple of years later when I went to sell it, I found that I had really killed the vintage value. Live and learn...

Somewhere in that time period, I also bought a Fender Bassman 10, which had 50 tube-watts and four 10-inch bass speakers in a sealed-back cabinet. What was I thinking? I ended up selling that to my brother, Dave, when he joined the band to play keyboard. It was the first amp I had with a master volume - you could create some good tube distortion at a sane volume if you wanted to. Of course, this wasn't so good for Dave's keyboards and he eventually bought an RMI transistor amp head and a 15-inch Cerwin-Vega speaker cab.

ANOTHER odd guitar I acquired in this time period was a Guild thin-hollow body with one pickup - not that functionally different from the Gretsch. I kept this only a short time, much to the chagrin of another girlfriend, who had fronted the deposit as a birthday gift...

Also somewhere in that timeframe I traded my Fender Twin to someone for a minty "brownface" Fender Bassman head and 2x12 cabinet (little did I know then that this amp would be perfect for my present surf-rock band!) Also in this time period, my brother Dave and I tried to start another band to play "new-wave" hits. We called ourselves "The B-Sides" and we lasted about six months...Then Dave and I continued on with the Wanderers for a few more years.

Here's my first Fender Telecaster. It was a 1971 model in perfect shape and I paid $275 for it in 1978. This became my main guitar in the band, which had changed it's name from the Sands of Time to The Wanderers. We used to play biker bars in Bristol, CT, and somehow I felt more secure with this big block of wood in front of me. (Incidentally, the bikers usually liked the oldies we played.) By now I was the sole guitarist in the band.

Then I found what seemed to be the guitar of my dreams (again!). I sold both the Tele and the Melody Maker to finance this big $450 purchase. It was a 1958 Gibson dot-neck ES-330, with two of those P-90 single coil pickups and a Bigsby tailpiece. The guitar had a great, twangy sound and I loved the Bigsby for instrumental songs like "Walk, Don't Run." The fact that the guitar was hollow didn't seem to be a problem. I had bought the Ampeg back from Paul (or was it my other friend, Brad Lutz?) and I experienced no feedback problems to speak of.

Below is a promo photo of the Wanderers, circa 1980 with me and my ES-330. There's my brother Dave at far left. Later in 1980, I needed some emergency money and I traded the 330 for my Electra X140 and $100 in cash...!

Here's a shot of the Broken Hearts playing the Grotto in New Haven - the best-sounding stage monitors I've ever experienced. There's me on the left with the Tele Thinline.

Somewhere in this time period, I also picked up a Vox Super Ace, which was a thinly-disguised Strat-copy in baby blue. It turned out to need a fret job, but I didn't know this until after I'd already sold it to a guitar-dealer friend (who should have known better). I did use this guitar to record a rhythm track to a song of mine called "Don't know what to Do With You." It's one of the "lost" Broken Hearts tracks that was never finished. This guitar also appears on one of Michael's "Want One?" songs, "While You Were Having Fun," with the vibrato.