Cool story man....here's how I got where I'm at today with the music I like/listen to/play/whatever.....This is a pretty long post, so I apologize in advance, but here goes....
About '75 or '76, I discovered Elvis Presley...Yeah, I was that fat little kid who listened to, bought books, everything Elvis...Gotta gimme a break though, I was only 5 years old....My old man had an old Fender P-Bass copy with a little small amp (which he didn't even know how to play btw, I really don't even know why he had it), & he would occasionally break it out, just acting silly, beating the shit out of it while dancing around...He'd flip it over with the strings toward him & just beat on it in time with whatever music was playing...That was it, that was the start of my musical journey...
From that point on, I pestered the fuck out of my parents for a guitar, pretty much daily...
So, I'm in my room with my 8-tracks & my sister's 8-track player just like this:
Dunno why, but I started looking around through her tapes, & found KISS "Rock & Roll Over"...."WTF is this?" I said to myself, where has this been all this time??? How do these guys make these cool sounds??? From that day on, Elvis was gone forever, replaced by KISS...
That made me want a guitar even more, so I kept on with the pestering...I kept on checking out the other 8-tracks my sister had, & discovered AC-DC, Foreigner, Black Sabbath, The Who, Queen all kinds of stuff...
In September of 1979, the sister who's 8-tracks I'd been listening to, took me to my first concert, AC-DC's Highway To Hell, in Johnson City, TN, & it literally blew me away (yeah, I was 8 years old when I saw AC-DC...corrupted at an early age...
)I became obsessed with music, guitar, the whole shebang...
Around the spring of 1980, my Mom had me out, & we stopped at a little shop called "Rogers 5 & Dime", little Mom & Pops store that had a little of everything, & there it was...A little acoustic guitar for $40...That was a lot of $$$ then, especially for parents to spend on something they weren't for sure their kid was gonna stick with, but they bought it anyway...I've still got that guitar btw, & wouldn't take
anything at all for it...
The little acoustic guitar kept me busy for a while, but I still wanted an electric guitar & amp....So, the pestering continued, & for my Christmas present in 1984, Mom & Dad bought me a Gibson SG Jr., & Fender Bronco amp for $300 from my uncle...I've looked for years, but only have saw a couple/few like it, it was made like this, except it had a LP style pickguard, & the p'up didn't have any pole pieces:
With this setup, I could make clean sounds, unless I cranked the little amp, which I couldn't do very much. But, I noticed if I kept playing while I turned the amp off, it sounded beautiful as the sound faded out...I finally realized I either needed something done to the amp, or needed more/different gear...I even took it to the local tv shop to see if he could make the amp sound like that, but he couldn't....Looking back all those years ago, I wanted a master volume or some sort of PPIMV on that amp...
...I did end up getting an Arion Metal Master distortion pedal a little later on though, & that cured my GAS for just a little while...
Christmas/birthday of '86 brought me a B.C. Rich Warlock & an original Marshall Micro-Stack, & I could then get a lot closer to the sounds on the tapes I was playing along to...
I started playing in a band around that time, & ended up getting an Ibanez Sabre 540, which was a great guitar...I didn't look so out of place on stage with this guitar compared to the B.C. Rich (especially since the band I was in played country music too, around here it's a have-to thing, but I wanted to play so bad I didn't give a fuck)...lol...It was identical to this:
All the gear I've talked about here is gone, except for the little acoustic. The SG & Ibanez were sold by my lovely first ex-wife to support her drug habit while I was at work. She actually cleaned the whole house (literally), & sold everything we owned for little to nothing while I was at work one night...I ended up trading the little micro-stack off after I blew the speakers with a Randall amp at an outdoor gig...I've thought about getting another SG & Ibanez, maybe I will someday, but it won't be the same at all because those were gifts from my parents when I was a kid...
Myself, I've just always liked different guitars, but the first Ibanez I got when I was a teenager just made me appreciate the versatility of the super-strat guitars....I always loved the body shape, but I could have humbucker/single coil p'ups, Floyd Rose, etc, all in one guitar...I actually couldn't stand Les Pauls up until just a few years ago. I thought they were boring, out-dated, heavy-ass relics, but things change...
Sorry for the long-ass post, I just got on a roll & threw this out here...