By Bud Herron

Guest columnist

The guitar is an equal opportunity instrument.

Guitars can be really cheap — at least compared to grand pianos, pipe organs and Stradivarius violins. When I was a 15-year-old, would-be rock ‘n’ roll star, I bought a Silvertone acoustic guitar at Sears for about $25.

Of course, famed blues guitarist Muddy Waters got a better deal. He is said to have bought his first guitar — also a Silvertone — from a Sears-Roebuck catalog for $2.50 in 1930 — three decades before I purchased mine.

Muddy’s guitar no doubt sounded great. Mine, on the other hand, must have come off of a different assembly line somewhere in Albania. My parents said it sounded a lot like an alto hummingbird caught in an electric fan.

Problem was all guitarists have to learn to push the strings down to the neck of the instrument with enough pressure to create a clear note.

Silvertones were mass produced in a way that often left the strings so far from the guitar neck that only Superman could accomplish a buzzless sound.

For months, as I floundered in my efforts to master the instrument, I assumed Muddy Waters just lucked into a Silvertone with better aligned strings. The only difference in our music, I was certain, was poor quality control in Albania.

Whatever.

Music was not the reason I wanted to play the guitar anyway. The reason was (take a guess before reading on) girls.

How could a chubby, bespectacled boy — whose hair was too curly to grow “ducktails” (you young people can google that) and didn’t have enough whiskers to grow Elvis-type sideburns — get a girlfriend?

Girls would date a wooly mammoth with bad breath if he could play a hot guitar and sing “Do Wap Ditty Ditty Do.” As for me, try as I did through hummingbird buzzes and bloody fingers from pushing the strings, I never got the rock-star-groupie girl I sought.

When I finally convinced a girl to join me for a movie at the Crump Theater and a burger at Frisch’s Big Boy on 25th Street, she did not care I was a failed three-chord wonder who couldn’t grow acceptable sideburns.

Sears didn’t care, either, and refused to refund my $25.

Recently, I spent some time talking to Tom Pickett, the Columbus music store icon who has owned stores both here and in Bloomington and sold guitars to generations of would-be rock stars, Dylan-type folkies, folk-rock devotees and singer-songwriter hopefuls.

“Do guitars still have the draw they did in my day for chubby bespectacled guys with no sideburns?” I asked.

Tom, now in his reflective, later years but still running his music store on National Road, smiled. “The parents buy the band instruments. Then the kids go off to college and all they want is a guitar. So they trade in the clarinets and trumpets for a guitar.”

Tom has a lot of those other instruments if the next generation of parents need a used band instrument for their teenager. And unless the late 2020s see a return of the Big Band Era of the 1940s, he has some guitars to sell to the boys (or now girls) who are still looking for a mate.

He has no $2.50 Silvertones or even one for $25 but says the strings on his guitars can be pushed down without bloodshed.

Some music commitments are about music. Some turn out to be something else. The guitar is an equal opportunity instrument.

Bud Herron is a retired editor and newspaper publisher who lives in Columbus. He served as publisher of The Republic from 1998 to 2007. Send comments to [email protected].