Portrait of the Writer as a Young Guitarist

Or, when a random photo pops up with perfect timing

This is me, 37 springs ago, in my freshman dorm room at Vassar College. I have no memory at all of this photo being taken, nor did I have any memory of its existence until last week, when I went through some boxes in search of a pic of me and my sister as little kids. But it pretty accurately captures who I was circa May 1986, or at least how I projected myself at the time. Musical heroes on the wall? Check. (I spy Bob Dylan, Pete Townshend, Keith Richards, Sylvain Sylvain, Jimmy Reed, The Men They Couldn’t Hang and of course the goddess Debbie Harry.) Italian flag? Check. A Hubert Robert print? Check. Cartoons from the Village Voice and a letter I’d written that got published in CREEM? Also check.

And then there’s the guy in the foreground. No sideburns yet — those would take a few more years to arrive — but for the first time in my life I’m letting my hair do its naturally wavy/curly thing, and a barely visible earring is dangling from my left lobe. My mod period of the previous four years or so has clearly come to an end; I’ve loosened up enough by now to wear a t-shirt (Hüsker Dü) instead of a jacket and tie, though I still have enough of a complex about how skinny I am that I’m wearing a dress shirt on top of the t-shirt. The snarl on my face is as playfully-ironic-yet-also-kinda-real as the Taco (“Puttin’ On the Ritz”) button I’m wearing on my guitar strap; I’d just played my second or third gig as the co-frontman of my first band, Voodoo Sex Party — Vassar’s only band doing Ramones, Clash, Cramps, Eddie Cochran and Hoodoo Gurus covers — and I was definitely feeling GOOD, people… in fact, I was feeling way more confidence in myself than I’d ever felt up to this point in my life.

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And then, finally, there’s the guitar I’m playing that open E chord on — my trusty Hondo Fatboy. This was the third electric guitar I ever owned, and the first one I really loved. (The first was a nameless pawnshop 3/4 Strat clone, and the second was an early-’80s Peavey T-15 — a guitar which has since developed something of a cult following, but which I unfortunately never really bonded with.) The Fatboy was apparently Samick’s attempt to shake their Hondo subsidiary’s reputation for cheapo pawnshop guitars; the Korean company sank a lot of money and effort into making what was essentially a copy of a Gibson L-5 (only with DiMarzio-style X-14 humbuckers), but it didn’t take off. Over the years since then, I’ve only met one other person who owned one.

I bought mine from a small guitar shop on Lincoln Avenue in Chicago in early 1985, after deciding that I actually liked how it played and sounded better than the beat-up Rickenbacker I’d gone in to try, or the totally badass-looking Danelectro Longhorn I saw hanging there on the wall. In retrospect, either of those guitars would have been a much more sensible long-term investment, but the Hondo Fatboy felt like me.

Which, I suppose, is kind of a metaphor for how I’ve lived my life. I’ve made a lot of decisions and pushed off in a lot of directions over the years that haven’t turned out to be the wisest financially, and perhaps in other respects as well. But I’m ultimately okay with that, because my life has always felt significantly richer and more satisfying whenever I’ve let joy and authenticity be my guiding stars. And while I have since owned several guitars that were better, more expensive and more collectable — I bought the Fatboy for $350 in 1985, and it’s worth about exactly the same amount today — I like having the Fatboy around to remind me of that principle.

The Fatboy worked its ineffable magic again a couple of weeks ago — shortly before I unexpectedly excavated the above photo — when I had the profound pleasure of interviewing Paul Simonon and Galen Ayers for this FLOOD Magazine feature about their wonderful new album, Can We Do Tomorrow Another Day? Paul has been a hero of mine since 1980, when I first got hip to The Clash, and Galen is a very talented singer-songwriter in her own right who also happens to be the daughter of the legendary Kevin Ayers. While I wish I’d had enough time to ask Galen about her dad and Paul about his Clash days (I’d been warned by their publicist to keep my questions focused on their new project), our Zoom interview was a total blast — they were both so funny and sweet and down-to-earth, it really felt like I was hanging out with a couple of old pals.

Whenever I do Zoom interviews, my guitars can usually be seen lurking somewhere in the background, because the area directly behind me in my home office is really the only place I can leave them out and not trip over them. But I like to think they also send a subliminal message to my interview subjects that, yes, I play music as well, and therefore have a little more of a grasp of what their lives entail than someone who doesn’t. The folks I’m interviewing rarely comment on them, of course, but Galen and Paul seemed to take a genuine interest in what was going on in the room behind me — they kept asking about certain framed posters on my wall, and things on my bookshelf like the realistic-looking human skull I call Memento Maury. And finally, they brought up the Fatboy.

“I have guitar envy,” said Galen.

“Oh, what, the SG?” I asked, thinking that she was either talking about the Gibson Angus Young signature model or the pink ‘50s reissue Fender Telecaster sitting behind me.

“No,” said Paul. “The semi-acoustic.”

“Oh — that’s a Hondo Fatboy.”

“I’ll bet you get a nice twangy sound out of that one,” Paul said.

“Oh yeah, and a good low-end rumble, too. And actually — not to bring up previous projects of yours, but I bought it nearly forty years ago, and that’s the one I learned to play Clash songs on.”

“I learned to play a lot of Clash songs on a guitar like that, meself,” he laughed.

That was the extent of our guitar exchange… but two weeks later, I’m still flying from having one of my formative musical heroes nod appreciatively at the axe I played in my first band — the one I ripped through “Brand New Cadillac” on at just about every gig we played — and from getting the opportunity to let him know just how much his old band meant to me. If you’d told the skinny kid in the top photo that this would happen someday, he would have lost his damn mind.

The moment, however brief, also gave me a huge, much-needed lift at a time when I’ve been cursing the freelance writing existence more than ever, thanks to the maddening infrequency of work, the increasing skimpiness of pay, and certain outlets (not FLOOD, I should hasten to add) taking their sweet, sweet time compensating me for work that I’d already done for them.

(And hey, no pressure — I deeply appreciate every one of my 500+ free subscribers — but if any of you are thinking about maybe bumping your Jagged Time Lapse subscription up to a paid one, now would be an excellent time to do so.)

But even as I’m looking at job listings and starting to plot my escape from this infernal freelance carousel, I remain incredibly grateful for the countless magical moments I’ve experienced over the course of a career that’s resulted directly from my passion for music and writing. And talking guitars for a few seconds with Paul Simonon now occupies a place near the very top of that list.

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