I know it sounds weird, but my ’65 Strat is actually the very first guitar I ever touched in my life.

In 1985, my stepdad had retired from playing for a living, and his 1965 Stratocaster was his only remaining guitar. It resided in the back room of the hi-fi store he was running at the time,  and he used to noodle on it in between clients. He had bought it in 1975 in Italy during holidays. He had paid $175 dollars for it… One day, on my way back from school, I popped by his store and asked him if he would let me try his guitar… Little did I know that this was to become the defining moment of my life.

He agreed to let me try it, and proceeded to show me how to play an E minor chord. The tone of that guitar plugged into his Twin Reverb with the reverb set on 6 did it for me…it changed everything. Right there. My first E minor chord is still ringing in my ears, 25 years after.

On my way home that night, I knew all I wanted to do was to learn how to play guitar. The next week, I spent all my savings on an acoustic guitar, and a few months later I got a $100 blue Aria Pro II and a 15W solid state Yamaha amp. For the following years, I followed the regular path of an aspiring musician, practicing for hours after school and spending my weekends going from jam sessions to basement rehearsals and eventually working my way into ballroom bands to avoid boring summer jobs.  Once in a while, I would sneak into my stepdad’s music room while he was gone, and I would  carefully open the old guitar case, and just gaze at the ’65. Something about the smell of its old nitro finish had a hypnotizing effect on me…I didn’t dare touch it anymore;  I was scared of doing something wrong to it.

And then, in December of 1993, as I had graduated from music school and was starting to play professionally, something crazy happened. My stepdad wrapped his ’65 in glittery shiny metallic blue gift paper, and he gave it to me for Christmas. Like that. He said that I deserved it more than he did.

I have been playing that guitar ever since; it has been everywhere with me, and it has become my musical home. Through the years as I went through different musical phases, I did mods to it, changed the tuners, the bridge, the pots, the nut, the cap, the tremolo block, experimented with plenty of different pickups as I wanted a fatter tone in the bridge (it was the 90′s after all…I even had an effect rack back then, but thank God I never put a Floyd on it… ). Di Marzios, Seymour Hotrail (yes, I know),  and finally a Harmonic Design Super 90 stayed on there ’til 2004. When I moved to the US, I had Joe Glaser in Nashville do some work on the guitar (new frets, plek job and a beautiful custom nut). I also asked Lindy Fralin to repair the stock bridge pickup,  and I then reverted the guitar to 100% stock.  The guitar rings like a piano these days; the neck pickup tone is indescribable with words. Hendrix was using ’65 Strats in the studio because of that neck pickup.

I don’t play it exclusively anymore these days as my playing style has made me move away from Strats, but I still use it in the studio often,  and pretty much every time I plug it into my ’66 Vibrolux , I get goose bumps still, after all these years.

This guitar has given strength when times have been hard, it has always been a reminder that there might be a reason why it came to me the way it did, and that I have to keep my game up to deserve it. The fact that my stepdad tragically passed away a few years ago hasn’t weakened my emotional link to this guitar either, to the contrary….But one day, when I’ll retire, I will pass it along to someone who I think deserves it more than I do…