I went to my friend's house one day, and he had an electric guitar he had just bought with a tiny little amp. I turned the volume up to 10 and I hit one chord, and I said, I'm in love.
I like the bad-boy types. Generally the guy I'm attracted to is the guy in the club with all the tattoos and nail polish. He's usually the lead singer in a punk band and plays guitar. But my serious boyfriends are relatively clean-cut, nice guys. So it's strange.
We decided to do some of Merle's things with modern instrumentation. We used a flute, a bass clarinet, a trumpet, a clarinet, drums, a guitar, vibes and a piano.
So I played the acoustic guitar and harmonica and stomped my foot and I think I was right in assuming that Greenwich Village would be the best place to perform my own material and possibly get some attention, move on to making records and all.
There was just no way I could leave this little Martin guitar in my apartment overnight or even in the afternoon, and expect to find it there when I got back.
I stuck with that size because I could bend the strings so well, and somewhere along the line I must have gotten it into my mind that I had small hands, so I was thinking I'd never be able to play a full-scale guitar, but I also felt like I was cheating or cutting corners.
I thought what I was good at doing was playing real simple guitar licks, since I'd cut my teeth on what Duane Eddy was doing; licks that were simple but had staying power.
There's just not a lot of guys around playing like that these days; a lot of steel players are plugging into stomp boxes, trying to sound like Jeff Beck on a steel guitar.
