Oct. 25th, 1974...Terminal Music on 47th Street in New York City...your man is 19 years old and has three hundred dollars in his left cowboy boot...he's traveled by train, alone, from Hyde Park, NY. He's been working for better than 2 summers at the Star View drive in theater to get that money together, and he's already able to see himself counting it out in exchange for a Cherry EB3. It's the only bass guitar on his radar...all else pales in comparison...it's a Cream thing.
Salesman seems nice enough, he can smell when someone is actually going to buy something.
I explain what I want and what I have to spend and ask, specifically, for the lighter, cherry finish, and we take an EB3 down off the wall for me to play. Deep inside, I am not as stunned by it as I had anticipated...it's top heavy...I recognize that feeling...the struggle between playing and holding the neck up so that it can be played...from my Univox copy of an EB1. Still, a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do, and I came here to buy an EB3, and BY GAWD I'm going to buy an EB3...and then he quietly suggests that, for the very same money, I could own this, specific, Rickenbacker. He sends a colleague off to the attic to bring back 3 cherry Gibsons (we've got a few minutes to kill now) while he tells me the story of it being an 'experimental' finish called Oxblood...that there are only 300 of them in the world, and that the one that is hanging on their wall has been there too long...the boss wants it gone, and I'm the guy who ought to throw three years worth of longing for an EB3 under the train and take that Ric home with me...and the finish is beautiful...not RED but 'Oxblood'...still I've been identified as 'the guy with the red Rickenbacker' many times since then. And the instant...the very instant that he hangs it over my shoulder, and I feel what a truly perfectly balanced guitar is SUPPOSED to feel like, I didn't care if it was Babypoop Green...It was mine, and I was its...and I was responsible for it, and I would never, ever leave it leaning against an amp (the guy actually threw in a guitar stand when I told him I needed one!), and I would never play it while under the influence of anything...(LIES, LIES, AND MORE LIES!!!), and I would always towel it down after each practice, and I would always wear my belt buckle off to the left side (True, True and more True) and I would search for the perfect name...which I never have found.
In fact, it is a 1972 Ric that had hung on that wall for well over a year, waiting for me. (Need I say that it is the most important thing I own?)
I have a few other guitars as well, including a Tacoma acoustic bass guitar which I love and respect more every day, a 5 string Cort Curbow, featuring some sort of composite neck that is the finest, truest, most comfortable 5 string neck I've ever played, a 2010 (read: made in China) Hofner 'Beatle' bass, a 2000ish MIM Precision Bass which is a dream to play, but has yet to give up its secrets in terms of the perfect tone, a Dean EUB that I'm barely familiar with; I play scales on it early in the morning, but I would not yet play it in public, and a sweet little pawn shop Ibanez Sound Gear with a P-bass pickup and a really playable neck that is currently living with the 15 year old son of one of my favorite Bluegrass Buddies. I hope it works out for them!
Thanks for sticking with me through this. It was therapeutic...
TKK
