We were packing up our guitars after practice and my friend was using his handy-dandy tuner to make sure he was in tune. Yep, he was, and that made him very happy because the guitar had held its tuning perfectly for a week.
Wanting to brag on my own git-fiddle, I allowed as I had only needed to tweak one of my trusty old guitar’s 12 strings that morning. We both were duly impressed by each other’s instruments.
It suddenly occurred to me that I have owned that guitar for 50 years now.
“It was the first toy I bought for myself with my first radio job,” I said.
“I bet there’s a story there,” he said. Yep.
It was a hot, sunny day in the summer of 1975 in Waupaca, Wisconsin, and I had been thinking of sneaking into the radio station’s production studio some weekend to record some of the songs I’d written. I had grown enamored of multi-track recording and had recorded some of my songs by going back and forth between cassette recorders, harmonizing with myself. Now I had an opportunity to play with honest-to-gosh professional reel-to-reel machines.
All I owned was a nylon string classic guitar, which is perfectly fine for picking and strumming, but I thought steel strings might add a little punch to my songs, so I walked into the music store with whatever cash I’d been able to accumulate in a month or two of radio news gathering.
I don’t actually remember the specifics from inside the store or even what led me to grab the Ensenada 12-string guitar off the wall. What I think I was probably thinking was I could get the sound of two guitars strumming for the price of one.
All I know for certain is that for $59 plus the cost of the guitar case, I went up to my little apartment above the TV store that afternoon with a guitar I would still be playing 50 years later.
And I did record with professional machines for the first time that summer. The downside was that they were monoraul machines; owning stereo equipment was not a priority at the time for a small-town AM radio station.
Of course, I did not go on to fame and fortune, but I sure do enjoy plunking around on this old thing. Here’s what it sounded like in 1975; you can compare with “Song for My Daughter” elsewhere on this page, for what that’s worth.
