Hi Josh~
I'm Kevin, but most people call me Cowboy.
I am 56 years old and have been playing guitar since the 3rd grade. My mom didn't like to drive so I used to have to ride my bike the 5 miles into town with my aqua colored electric Silvertone guitar...that is until my bike was stolen from outside the music store during a lesson. From that point on, I had to hitchhike to my guitar lesson; yes, I had to hitchhike when I was in the 3rd grade.
When I got to my lesson, often times the door to the music shop was locked, which meant that I had to go into the bar next door and drag my guitar teacher out so I could have my lesson.
He had me playing songs like "Blue, Blue, My Love Is Blue." Needless to say, my interest quickly waned.
After that I had an old no name hollow bodied arch top electric guitar. It only had 3 strings on it so I unraveled a screen wire to make a B and an E string and played without a D string. I wrote songs like "She Stuck Me With Needles And She Killed Me With Knives" ...but at least I wrote as early as the 4th grade.
One day a factory near where I lived burned down and we kids scavenged it after the firemen left. One of the buildings held a music warehouse with cheap low end products. I scavenged a plastic tambourine, a harmonica that didn't really work, a broken banjo that was unrepairable, and 5 or 6 sets of guitar strings. Those strings lasted me throughout my whole childhood.
There were a lot of factories near where I lived, both beyond the woods across the street, and all along the rail road tracks, which were about a block and a half away. Behind one of them were stored thousands of discarded skids (or pallets, if you don't know what a skid is). Now, most kids back then built a clubhouse or two, some kids built forts, some kids built tree houses (we built a couple of those too, but we built "shacks," and we used the wood from the stolen skids to do it.
These were elaborate structures with multiple rooms, second floors, lookout towers, windows that opened (wood, not glass), secret passages, and one even had an elevator, which worked well the first day, until someone got hurt and nobody wanted to use it anymore. We would cover these shacks in tar paper so that they would stay dry. Oh yeah, I should mention that every room was about 3 to 3 1/2'' square--width, length, and height--because that was how big the skids were.
As you can imagine, these shacks were pretty ugly to look at--a genuine eyesore! So of course we weren't allowed to build then in our own yards. Instead, we built them near the factories at the edge of the woods. But the factory owners didn't like them either so they would often tear them down, cursing us kids, cause tearing 'em down was no easy task...we literally used THOUSANDS of nails!
One time we built a cool one next to the RR tracks. It was 8 rooms arranged in a square with a center courtyard. You could close the outside doors and open the inside doors and have a camp fire in the middle, and nobody could see it.
The problem with that one was a bit different. You see, there was an old mansion further on down the tracks. iTunes to be the home of the guy that Jones Beach (on Long Island) was named after. This was once an opulent Gold Coast mansion in the style of the Great Gadsby era, but now was run down and operated by the state. It was called the Jones' Institute back then, and one of the things they did there was what people referred to as an "old age home." The truth was that they did alcohol rehab for older men who had no home. These guys would ride in on the rails in freight trains that they had stowed away on, get drunk, then arrested, and remanded to the Jones' Institute. Hoboes, they were called back in the old days, but we just called them "bums."
One evening, shortly after we completed the shack by the RR tracks, it was getting dark and hard to see inside the shack. We lit some candles and saw a bum laying in the next room. We thought he was a dead guy, and ran screaming from the shack. Outside the shack, of course nothing happened, so curiosity got the best of us and we furtively went back inside. We put pennies on his eyes and a small flat rock on his forehead, and still couldn't believe that we had our very own dead guy right there.
Scotty got bold and dripped wax onto the flat rock in some sort of made up pagan ritualistic manner that could have only been dreamed up by a kid with an over active imagination. As the hot wax rolled off the rock and onto the dead guy's forehead, the dead guy suddenly woke up screaming!
We ran, but he couldn't chase us, and we realized he was just passed out drunk.
The next night, he was gone, but a really old bum came upon us with a guitar strapped to his back with an old frayed rope. He was nice to us and gave us candy. He was a really respected bum, among the world of bums, and over the weeks that followed, introduced us to some of their friends. We would go steal packages of hotdogs from the A&P and vegetables from local gardens and they'd make "hobo stew," and we would listen as our friend would play the blues on this old beat-to-crap Martin guitar. He would make up the words on the spot and include our names in the stories, and he would sing about where he has been...Topeka...Santa Fe...Chicago... He had been everywhere. So we called him god (from the Baltimore Catechism:"Where is God? God is everywhere.") ...but with a small g of course.
I loved the storied songs and the 12 bar blues became ingrained in my mind.
Then one day, I was watching a TV show called "The Courtship of Eddie's Father." In that show, Eddie was playing a blues progression in A. Two strings, two fingers, then up a string to D...then down two strings to E. I recognized it right away and thought I could do that. I must have played that progression every day for a couple of years, every which way, fast, slow, and then I got fancy. That is when I really started playing guitar. ...plus it helped get me laid in HS.
