Old Is New Again

It is indeed a strange sensation to randomly come across the exact 1979 Gibson Les Paul "The Paul" you once owned for sale on Reverb for a cool $1,899, as if it were some sort of rare bird or desired commodity. How do I know for sure that's my former guitar? Well, I was there the day in 1985 when my boy Mike Nesi bought it from Russ at Music Guild on Main Street in Danbury. I was also there the day we took it to East Coast Sound and had those exact EMG pickups installed. The bearded tweaker tech guy kept saying, hands full of discarded Humbucker, "Oh yeah, these will give it that crunchy sound. You guys want that crunchy sound, right? I can tell you want that crunchy sound. Oh yeah, you do." I bought The Paul from Mike in San Francisco in 1992 for $180. Like a tool, I talked him down from his asking of $200. What, so I could buy five more burritos? To be fair, my bookstore job at the time paid $4.25 an hour. Even so, I still feel bad about it. I hammered away at The Paul for ten years, carried it around town in a green spray-painted case that had a single word stenciled across the front, can't remember what it was. Some Dadaist non-sequitor, like INTERROGATORY or DIFFIDENT or BOWDLERIZE. I plugged it in to crappy amps and cranked it through crappy covers of "Welcome To The Jungle" and "Bitchin' Camaro". I'll tell you what, that guitar was a commitment, a seriously heavy chunk of walnut to sling around your neck with it's too-wide fretboard and sludgy, Muscle Shoals sound. I eventually traded The Paul in 2002 for a Taylor 414CE, which I still have. In any case, it's like seeing an old friend again, one who disappeared on that European backpacking trip without a word, as if you woke up in a Copenhagen hostel one brisk Dane morning and your traveling companion was just gone.

And now here that friend is again, smiling, older, abashed, a bit of hard-won wisdom in their eyes. You want to ask, "Hey, pal, what you been up to the last couple decades?"
​
Yes, it is tempting to buy The Paul again, just for nostalgia's sake. I might even go up to $200 this time.