Hock

One of them has a sweeter, rounder singlecoil pop to it.  Sort of like a sweet table red, or a well defined Riesling.  She gets dirty, but not in the usual sense.  I wouldn’t use her for metal or for the more toneless varities of jazz.  The action’s too high for any sort of fast chromatic finger wiggling.  No, she’s more about emotion.  She’s about frets worn down from hammered and bended and shaken notes.  When the gain gets high and the string harmonized with the alder of her, a thick wall of all day sustain and feedback comes out.  It’s a tone you can feel.  You can feel it in your hands and in your belly, where she sits and growls into your guts.  That is one hell of a guitar. 

There’s another one.  Like a T-bucket ‘rod with a cobrajet.  It isn’t that you can tell it’s fast, you can just tell it’s hiding something.  Jaguar switching (of course a guitar is a feline) opens up some overwound humbuckers into tonal possibilities not many can match.  It isn’t a straight line machine.  It isn’t a circle track racer, either.  It’s ported and polished heads full of possibility and a four on the floor.  It can burn a hole in the road or burn a hole in your ego, one quarter mile at a time, or it can take the De Beque cutoff like it was riding the rails.  The tone is a million things.  Every switch is a new version of angry snap and the tonal response to your fingers give you the bare possibility of clarity and sweetness.  A port, maybe. Or like a shot of bourbon with a little lemon on the rim.  

Another one is nothing but purity.  A spectre in pure smooth white with ringing wood tones that don’t cut into the pristine crystal harmonic symphonic smooth. You don’t play that one.  You approach and beg and plead at the alter of hard wooden vestal femininity for some time.  Nothing but pretty.  Not a scratch on her.  No marks from the pick hitting to heavy into the string when I had something I had to say.  She’s straight.  No fretwork needed and no glistening glaring evidence of cold or neglect.  Nothing but wine coolers for this one.

The glass in my hand full of smoke and love and hate and limestone filtered Kentucky.  It’s a rye with an angry life behind it.  It was borne to the surface of the Earth by the collision of giants.  By the fracture and orogenous behavior of that Iberian bitch, Caledonia.  Rye is meant to be strong, but when it’s mashed and distilled it turns to sugar and nothing but smooth.  Then the charcoal.  

Buddy Guy said once, “If it ain’t been in a pawnshop, it can’t play the blues.”

Casey said once, “If the rock ain’t got a history, I won’t drill that core.”