It is mine...

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posted on 12 Oct 2005 under category Meta

My Strat

Back when I was a kid, first getting into music, I must have been 10 or 11 before I decided it was something I actually wanted to play. Late every Saturday night one of the TV stations would play excerpts from live concert videos, and this one particular night the selection was excerpts from Dire Straits “Alchemy”. While I knew a couple of the songs from the radio (this was way before Money for Nothing; their biggest hit at the time was “Industrial Disease”, and before that only “Sultans of Swing” made any real blip on my own radar as a kid…), I watched anyway - and was mesmerized. The music was amazing stuff, but what got me was watching Mark Knopfler play.

Now, before this, music was always something to listen to, and in fact I got started on listening to metal a year or two before - but music was something MUSICIANS did. Watching this, though, demystified it. Sort of. If you’ve seen the film, you know the long, extended closeups it shows of many of the guys playing their instruments - particularly Mark. I watched his hands moving, and while I had no idea how it was making those noises, I could see it was HIM doing it. And, I figured, if he could do that, why couldn’t I?

Anyway, the other big thing that struck me was just how damn beautiful his guitar was - it was a gorgeous candy apple red Strat with a white pickguard and maple fretboard. Ever since then, through all of my other musical affinities and growth, through all of my other instruments, I’ve ALWAYS wanted one of these.

I swear, it’s like Christmas for the first time ever, all over again.

(I love playing this guitar, but I haven’t had much of a chance to use it on record yet - just a little bit in one of the Bellum Aeternum re-recordings and on the intro track to Crimson Frost. I need to work on that.)