Resurrecting My First Guitar

When I started playing guitar at age 13, I had to prove to my folks that I was pretty serious about learning this instrument. While at camp Keewaydin in the summer of '92, a fellow camper named Dan Knight taught me how to play "Don't Cry" by Guns n' Roses. Yes, I must admit that Slash was the first guitarist who inspired me to play, although the lifetime commitment was due to watching Jimi Hendrix's performance at Woodstock the last day of 8th grade in Mr. Serraceno's social studies class... but that's another story. When I came home from camp that summer, I remember immediately running down into our basement to dig up the acoustic guitar I knew my dad had down there. I vividly remember the excitement as I opened the guitar's case... quickly followed by a deflating "chuh-wahng!!!" sound as the bridge popped off the face of the 30+ year old guitar. I guess my dad didn't know that you couldn't put steel strings on a classical guitar... oops. After begging my parents to have it fixed, I set about learning more popular MTV songs of the day, taking lessons at Nolde's Music in Flemington, NJ and scratching the heck out of the top of my dad's old guitar with a pick. I knew his España brand guitar wouldn't do though. I was 13 and needed to rock. So I asked for a Jackson Dinky Reverse:

Yikes... A near fatal "oops!" The above tiny photo is actually the same model I had my heart set on: faux stone flake finish, maple neck and Floyd Rose. Eeek. That thing was hideous. But to my young mind it was super cool. Thank God my parents saw fit to get me a real guitar: under the Christmas tree that year was a Gibson Les Paul Studio in wine red with gold hardware. Hot diggity that thing was a beauty! Although I must admit that at first I was a little disappointed that I had gotten the more boring of the two guitars. Thanks Mom and Dad for starting me off on the road to good taste... well, at least with guitars that is.

Fast forward a couple years: after absorbing many Metallica and Green Day songs, I snapped the headstock off for the first time while sleeping one night. I was a freshman in high school and had the guitar on a stand next to my bed. I must have rolled over and slapped it with my hand and it just fell smack on its face. The sickening thud of the Les Paul hitting the floor woke me up... but it was repaired.

It survived until one of the guitar's strap knobs broke during a Mr. Brownstone rehearsal in 2002 and the headstock snapped again. This time Sadowsky guitars in NYC fixed it, telling me that "if it breaks again, it's over."

Well, the third and final charm was my friend, Dave Godowsky, who wisely packed my guitar in the trunk of his car while on a 5 hour drive from Boston to NYC in February the following year. Contrary to popular belief, freezing temperatures are actually bad for guitars and headstock cracked yet again. At that point, I thought my Les Paul was a goner. I stripped it of its parts and put it away in its case for a few years, thinking that one day maybe I'd fix it myself.

So...

Now that I'm at R-V, I'm learning how to properly fix this type of breakage. Tonight was the first step in resuscitating my '92 Les Paul. Below, the guitar on the bench, with the headstock crack fully epoxied and clamped to sit overnight:

Mega thanks to Robert Mazzullo of Mudd Guitars for his help on this.