Pop's Guitar
My Grandfather, Al Boggs was a guitar player. Not just a guitar player but the real deal, a serious Jazz Musician, with a union card. He could read music, and played every kind of music there was. He started playing the guitar in the 30's, he went electric as soon as it was possible. I have pictures of him in every facet of his career and he always has the latest gear. This is his Obit I have it taped in the pocket of my first guitar. His guitar. I got it from my grandmother when I was 15 (a very impressionable age) Pop had just died and no one in the family played guitar, so in his will he left them all to his friend Don. Don never showed up for them. I felt it was my Duty to learn to play Guitar, it's hard to explain because I had been around the guitar my whole life but never even felt a spark, but after he died it was all I could think about. Funny thing is once I got it I picked it up and I could play it, right from day one. It blew my parents mind. Anyhoo, enough voodoo. He had had a 40's Epiphone with the "frequensator tail piece" , a Gretsch Clipper (yipe), an early 60's ES-175, and a Red 66 Guild Starfire III, with Bigsby. I saw that guitar, red with chrome, and thought it looked like a race car. I went apeshit for it and begged my grandmother to let me have it. She said no.....
She did say I could buy it (!)
She was on a fixed income and needed the bread (so she said) I think she was trying to teach me the value of ownership. I worked like a slave for $2 an hour putting the stripes on parking lots to buy that guitar. This was in the dead of summer. Well I got it and I never looked back. That was the beginning of a life long love affair with Hollow body guitars with Bigsbys particularly Guilds.
A sweet beauty, no?
