Month: March 2020

I deep cleaned my Stratocaster. Cleaned off all the scum buildup off the fretboard with citrus cleaner, hit it with some renaissance wax, put new strings on – (“Heavy Bottom”) 10-52 strings – which means it needs the action adjusted from the twelfth fret on up but I don’t want to mess with a truss rod adjustment. It also needs some fret leveling – I’ll pay somebody to do all that when times are more normal. 

I cleaned off the “surfer girl” sticker on the front and the Tasmanian devil sticker on the back. The surfer girl looked a little bit like the soft porn era of Melania Trump, and the Tasmanian devil, now that I am trying to learn the style and subtlety of Peter Green, no longer reflects the spirit animal of my approach to music.

I bought this in Tokyo in 1997, at a store called, I think, “Tahara’s.” The store was the biggest guitar store in Tokyo – 3 levels, if I remember correctly, with a glass elevator that ascended into the heaven of guitars and other musical instruments. They had everything you could think of, as I remember, including a Gibson Jimmy Page Signature Les Paul that was of course actually signed by Jimmy Page. Millions of Yen. The had a beautiful National Steel resonator guitar – a shiny silvery beauty of a type of guitar that I had only seen in photos before. They had a guitar previously owned by B.B. King – more millions of yen. 

The sales clerk tuned this Strat for me with lightning fast precision and then thrust it toward me with the words “Hai! Dozo!” Or “Yes! Please!” I went through the motions of plucking out a few notes and riffs, then tried to remember the phrase I wanted from the two week indoctrination/ acclimation course that the Navy puts you through when you first get orders to Japan – the phrase for “I would like to buy this.” I couldn’t summon it from the depths. It is very easy to go wrong when you are a “Gaijin” (foreigner) trying to speak Japanese – I had lived with a Japanese-American girlfriend in San Diego in the 1980s and I had learned a few intimate phrases in Japanese but I didn’t want to go anywhere close to them by mistake. So I pulled out my wallet from my hip pocket, opened it, pulled out a credit card and pointed to it. 

That wasn’t the most optimal move, either, because anything coming from your hip pocket is not the way to impress Japanese people. For instance, as we learned in indoc school, if a Japanese person gives you their business card and you put it in your wallet, put your wallet in your hip pocket, and then promptly sit down in a chair,…..well, there’s not much worse you can do. Business cards need to go into a breast pocket, near your heart. You don’t stow them near your butt.

I paid attention to all of this stuff in indoctrination school – I’m the guy who once brought my Japanese-American girlfriend some white chrysanthemum flowers, which, it turns out, symbolize death in Japan. 

However, producing the credit card had the desired effect. “Hai!” The sales clerk said. Yes! This gaijin would be allowed to purchase this guitar. Immediately. We descended in the glass elevator down through guitar heaven to the register. He ran an imprint of my card, smiling and saying “Hai, Hai, Hai,” the only words needed, really. It was 100,000 yen or so – about $915 dollars at the current exchange rate. He gave me some customs forms, half English, half Kanji, which in theory I was supposed to do something with – I think they are still up in my attic in a box with my Navy papers somewhere. I signed the credit card slip. He produced a padded nylon gig bag that fitted the Stratocaster. “Hai! Hai!” That was free. We grinned at each other. 

The ultimate sugar high. Buying a new guitar. We shook hands. “EEEN,” he said. “EEEN,….Eeeen-Joy!”

“Hai!” I said. “Domo arrigata GO-ZAI-EEE-MAS!”  I headed out the door and toward the train station grinning ear to ear, a kitchi-gai gaijin with a new guitar.

So, from the serial number it is a 1993 Fender Japan 62 Stratocaster, meant to emulate Stratocasters made in the USA in 1962 when Fender in California offered a rosewood fretboard. It came with overwound “Texas Special” pickups made in the USA, which were popular in the 1990s when millions of people were trying to sound like the late, great Stevie Ray Vaughn. I like the sound of these pickups because you get a bell-like tone, glassy and smooth, less “quack”-like than a lot of other Strat pickups. The build quality of the guitar is very good. Fender Japan made them in a factory that also produced orchestra instruments – bassoons, oboes, cellos, etc. I haven’t changed anything on the guitar at all. 

It is my only electric guitar and I have no intention of ever selling it. But like I say, Surfer Melania and the Tassie devil had to go. 

Now I really should be writing. The quarantine situation is playing havoc with my normal creative process.