This was my very FIRST guitar and what is interesting is how the guitar appears today, foreshadowed by my Charvel addiction. With time, I customized this guitar to my liking by adding aftermarket hot pickups (Dimarizo PAF bridge and a Gibson PAF neck), a custom paint job (I probably had sprayed 5 or 6 different paint schemes on this guitar over a span of 2 to 3 years and that is not counting my sticker phase!), relic look (after seeing SRV's strat I knew that beat was cool) and a fake "Charvel" logo. Hell this was back in the late 80's when all I knew about Charvels were from pictures in magazines. If you look closely, I even painted the import style Charvel logo and not the original Charvel style logo, because I did not know the difference back then.

I approached my parents about wanting to learn to play guitar in High School after hearing my good friend Paul Smith play Hells Bells! My parents said that if I wanted a guitar I should save up some money and buy one. After having enough saved from various jobs, I ordered this guitar from the Sears catalogue. When she finally arrived my dad drove me to pick her up. When I took out my money to pay for her, my dad (he still is the coolest) told me to save my money and he would take care of it.

The guitar itself (in its original state) was a phenomal bang for the buck as it looked, played and sounded great. The guitar had a neck through construction and was finished in natural which nicely showed the wood grain. The tuners were nonlogo'd Gotohs which years later, I stole for use on one of my Charvels. It also had brass hardware (trem and neck inlays), two powerful pickups, jumbo frets and an ebony fretboard.

I logged many, many hours learning Ted Nugent, KISS, and AC/DC songs on that guitar. This guitar remained my only guitar for about 3 years and I played it every day. The first modification I made to her was changing the stock pickups. I purchased a Dimarizo distortion pickup (cream of course) for the bridge position and a Les Paul pickup (w/chrome cover) for the neck position. My friend, Glen borrowed his dads soldering gun and after a few failed attempts we finally got sound to come from her. In fact, years later (after the graphic was painted) I realized the pickups were wired out of phase but she sounded great so I left it.

My fascination with graphics started when I was a child and painted my toy cars. This guitar was not immune and shortly after getting the guitar I added two strips of masking tape a la Matthias Jabs of the Scorpions. Then followed a stripe pattern (a la EVH) using black electrical tape and finally I applied a Zebra pattern, which I made by cutting out the pieces from tape. I then graduated to paint, and after painting her a few different colors I decided on red. A few series of sticker phases occurred and when I decided to remove the stickers I found that my clear coat was ruined. I sanded down the clear coat and fell in love with the dull red color. Finally I was happy, well for about 2 months anyway.

I asked my friend Paul Jones to paint a graphic on her which resulted in the Garfield graphic you see today. Believe it or not, I owned 2 Fender Strats, a Tele and my beloved Les Paul Standard at this time but still played this guitar the most. In fact this guitar was not retired until after I scored my number one favorite player, my beat to shit '69 tele.

The relic phase was inspired after seeing SRV, which was the same time I acquired my beat '69 tele. I could not believe how cool a beat up guitar looked. Armed with a hammer, chisel, screw driver and some sand paper I went down to the basement only to return a few minutes later with a   badly cut finger. The next day I had better success and the relic job was complete. Nothing like doing a job yourself and I was proud of how well it turned out.

This guitar traveled everywhere with me until I left her leaning against the bed one day only to come back to find her lying on the floor with a cracked neck (headstock). The repair made her as good as new but by this time Charvel fever had me and quickly all my non-Charvels got less and less attention. I often pull this guitar out of the case for a tune just to reminisce. About the score carved in the back, well that's a story I will leave for a different day.