Shut Up & Play Your Guitar

Where I sit now at work, I’m surrounded by guitar geeks. 4 guys who have spent the better part of today discussing guitar makers and hardware and what brands were pieces of shit and which guitars turned into pieces of shit once they started being made in Korea. All sorts of technical, fanboy terms were being thrown around in a coffee fueled geek-off frenzy.

One of them actually said this: “I have no love for Strats post ‘64”.

Now hey, I like guitars. I LOVE guitars. I think they’re hyper sexy machines. I myself have one of these:

It’s one of the sexiest freaking things going. Seriously, look at it! But the gearhead, way-too-much-useless-information, “look at me and how much more I know than you” mentality drives me fucking apeshit!

These same guys would use their college degree vocabulary to mock car freaks for doing the same thing. I don’t know why this pisses me off so much, but it does.

Okay, here it is.

Some of the best, most amazing music I’ve ever heard has come from beater, pawn shop guitars. And yeah, a more expensive, better designed guitar will sound better in anybody’s hands; but a true artist can take the limitations and make something amazing and completely new. Or they can skate right on over those limitations like they never existed.

And I have come to terms with the fact I will never be a stellar guitar player, I can manage a few notes but I just don’t have that thing that makes some people geniuses. But for all of the hardware specifications, and odd numbered stringed guitars, and the fact that they know what year a guitar was made by what kind of dots are on the fret board… 40 Year Old Fanboy is still playing in lame bar bands and talking about when he hung out with Mudhoney.

Yeah and shut up, I know – if they had been talking surreal film makers I would have sprained something jumping into that conversation.