Delta Del Dept. - Red Guitar Blues

Th' Legendary Delecaster© - canine decoration by George Clinton!

 

It’s Sunday and I’m on a day trip to the Island.  I pop a penny into the seafront telescope and sweep the horizon.  No sign of a rescue ship, so I train it instead on a group of marine biologists frolicking in the Foam.  I empty my man-purse on them and move on.  I say hi to the neighbours, I take a ride on the famous Random Post Button.  I decide to buy a small cast-iron replica of the Random Post Button to take home with me, where I will place it on a shelf in my room alongside a baseball mitt and a photograph of Uncle Salvatore eating a lobster.  He’s dead now of course, and so is Uncle Salvatore.

Tired but happy after another False Memory trip, I’m making my way toward the Island exit.  I decide to pause and refill my pipe before leaving.  I find a quiet spot behind a dumpster full of Beatles albums.  Leaning back against the dumpster, my thoughts wander as I pack another bowl.  How did I end up here?  Surely the straight and narrow path cannot lead to an enchanted, mythical Island populated by music freaks and ruled by a mysterious joker-scribe?  I must have taken a right wrong turn somewhere.  But where?  I draw a hot lungful from my pipe and everything dissolves …

1963 and a semi-detached house in a semi-rural village 20 miles north of London … I’m a 9 year-old kid playing with my Dinky toys on the front porch when I see something amazing pass by … a lanky teenage boy with strange hair carrying a red electric guitar.  An un-cased naked bright-red electric guitar, and shining quiffed-up hair.  I’d never seen the like before, ‘cept maybe on our scratchy black & white TV.  Never in real-life living colour, never here in Little Nothinghappenton.  And I’m sure I made the connection between this lanky quiffhead’s electricity-guitar and the family radiogram.  A splendid hunk of furniture for spinning discs and sweeping the wavebands of the wireless world.  It dominated the front room, with a speaker as big as a little kid who liked to sit right in front of it and feel the waves.  The smell of hot electricity and furniture polish, the robot clank n' whirr of the record deck auto-changer, a green magic-eye tuning tube, and a connection leading somehow to red electricity guitars.  I was hooked early.

I stared at the village rocknroll rebel as he passed by a few times that year, always with the naked guitar.  And the fully dressed hair.  I guess later he must’ve got some wheels, gave up walking to the bus stop and left the village squares behind.  I hope he made a lot of rocknroll noise in his life, and got well paid for it.  I know he left junior-nerd me wishing I could get some of that red-guitar attitude.  And wondering exactly what is this strange power that can affect the shape of a man’s hair.

That was the beginning, the first sight of The Path That Leads Astray.  It took me another year or three to get my own electric guitar, and you bet it was red, bright red.  A Watkins Rapier, and somewhen in those early days an Audition amp from Woolworths.  Almost immediately, the strange power of electric noise-colours began to affect my hair.  It grew and it grew and it grew.  The parting set off from its traditional side-head position and made straight for the middle.  Soon the transformation was complete … I looked like a girl.  Shining quiff-related styles were yesterday’s thing, me and my budding-rockstar buddies preferred to look like girls.  And back in late 60’s Villageville, long hair on a boy really upset people.  Especially, and perhaps logically enough, the local skinheads.  So much abuse triggered by me lookin' like a gurl.  Maybe that's why I spent so many hours safe in my bedroom practicing on my red guitar.

So I’ve got the hair and I’ve got the guitar, now what?  Musical theory talks about the “circle of fifths”, it’s something involving chords and scales and stuff, I never got into it.  I got into the circle of spliffs … I pick up my guitar, I want to get high … I get high, I want to pick up my guitar.   An unbreakable circular connection.  And a perpetual motion thing so that 50 years later I’m still loopin that loop like a red-eyed hamster in a wheel.  I’d have grown tired of many a cage along the way if it weren’t for that wheel.  And yes us hamsters know that the wheel is built-in to make a cage seem OK when it really aint, but it feels good anyway so lets go round again.  Oh dear.

And now the Island sun is setting.  The dumpster casts a long shadow.  I have traced the beginning of The Path That Led Astray.  It’s time to continue my journey.  I tap out my pipe, in a cool latin-funk kinda way, and stand up, in a creaky oldman-stoner kinda way.   Myra appears, seeking a quiet spot behind a dumpster.  Hey Del howzitgoin … her eyes focus on my groin area …  Is that a cast-iron replica of the Random Post Button in your pocket, or are you just glad to see me? … I turn and run like hell into th' Foam.

The Delecaster [above - Ed.] 

I’ve owned this red guitar for a very long time.  It has a Hofner Colorama body with various tweaks to the hardware and electrics.  Coloramas date from the time I spotted the quiffhead, it could have been one he was carrying back in 1963.  The dog drawing was done by George Clinton at an album signing in Manchester (I pledge allegiance to the flag of Funkadelica). The un-tweaked version of this guitar once belonged to a hippy-biker called Misty who died when his bike left the road and hit a tree one Friday night in 1972.  Not knowing what had happened, I went round his house the next day for a Saturday afternoon jam.  Writing this I feel a faint aftershock from that awful day almost fifty years ago.

 

FT3 writes - hey, if any youse bums want to see your ax in this here Gallery O' Guitars, post an imgur link in th' comments! (You don't need an account to post something on imgur - just make sure you click the "private" button or whatever it is)