ever saw. It was a Fender Music Master, it had one pick up on it. Duo Sonic was the same guitar but Duo Sonic had two pick-ups. There were these Music Masters and I don’t ever see any of ‘em around. I see these Tele- casters and Strats but I never see any old Music Masters around. These were almost like a three quarter size guitar. They were a little smaller than Strats and Teles.
Oh yeah, for sure. But it had all the tuning pegs, you know how Fender is, it had all the tuning pegs on one side and I had to have one and it took me about a year of playing on an old Silvertone that had strings about two inches high off the fret boards. If you learned to play on one of those guitars, you knew you were committed because you would be crippled for life playing these things. You know, permanent dents in your fingers. I got a Fender Music Master just like my friend had and people would just come and gawk at that thing cause there just weren’t any around. So it was definitely not a musical area of the country that I was from, except somebody might have an old Sears and Roebuck guitar, you know, like I started on. And they played on the back porch and that was about it. So that was my first steps to- wards actually performing. I was always real extremely shy and I reckon I still am and I was sitting around one time and I think I had learned two chords on this guitar and I was playing those two chords and a girl walked over and talked to me and that changed my life! It only took two chords and a girl talked to me and I thought, “Huh, I see what I got. I see the route I need to take from now on.”
Chicks dig guitar players. Then I went to the University of Alabama when I got out of high school and of course the world opened up. There were bands, there were musicians, there were people play- ing and music. There were fraternity parties
that had bands playing. I was never in a fra- ternity but I crashed plenty of parties they had. (Laughs) And a new thing, I was ex- posed to black musicians. I don’t think I’d ever seen a black musician playing. Never had seen one – period. And here were these blues bands and people like Slim Harpo and then there was Arthur Alexander, a lot of the peo- ple that had started out in Muscle Shoals, you know and of course, at the time, I didn’t know a thing about Muscle Shoals and so I was ex- posed to a lot of different stuff and I was con- sidered a pretty hot, flashy guitar player at that time and place. I remember a band hired me to play with them and I was auditioning for ‘em and playing every lick I knew and they wanted to know didn’t I know any Chuck Berry? I said, “Who’s Chuck Berry?” They said, “Can’t you play ‘Johnny B. Goode?’ and I said ‘Man, I never heard that in my life!’” (Laughs) So I was playing guitar all this time and previously, backing up a little bit, when I was eight years old, my mother had bought an old upright piano she paid seventy-five bucks for. At that time, seventy five bucks was a big chunk of money anywhere back and being the kind of slacker that I was, I hated school, I hated studying and I hated all that stuff so being in about the third grade every day I’d see some little girl or something get to leave class early, get out of class. And I found out
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