Guitarist 40TH ANNIVERSARY
When Guitarist began in 1984, it’s doubtful the launch editors imagined readers would still be turning the pages well past the millennium. And yet here we are. Editor Jamie Dickson reflects, to paraphrase Pink Floyd, on all that is now, and all that is gone – and all that’s to come…
This issue, Guitarist magazine turns 40. It’s a milestone in a person’s life, let alone a monthly magazine devoted to oddly engaging chunks of wood and metal and the people who play them. But, such is the nature of guitar that a lot can change even while the things we love about it remain constant. The first copy of the magazine I ever bought was the July 1992 issue, with Slash on the front cover. The mag had been in print for just eight years at that point, so Ihope you’ll forgive a little walk down memory lane with me now.
In my home town of Lowestoft there was one decent music shop, Morlings, which sold household appliances on the ground floor and guitars (plus sheet music, keyboards and things) upstairs. Back then the internet was in its infancy and certainly wasn’t a part of most people’s daily lives. So if you wanted a guitar you went to a shop that sold them. Avisit to Morlings left a powerful impression on the wide-eyed beginner that Iwas then –even the smell of a guitar shop seemed magical: a unique fragrance of waxes and wood-scents and warm electronic circuits that I can still recall to mind today. If you looked around the store, back then, you’d see a family of Red Knob Fender combos, from a hulking Twin down to a little Champ, proudly on show beside a display stand showing off the jagged lines of the then-new Heartfield Talon range of electric guitars –Fender’s answer to the Ibanez RG series.
Meanwhile, on the wall, there was a custard-yellow ’52 Tele reissue (they still had away to go to get the details right back then) and, holy of holies, an Eric Clapton Strat in Pewter Grey Metallic finish with Gold Lace Sensor pickups, the most expensive guitar in the shop at the time.
If memory serves, its price tag was around the £700 mark, an astronomical sum that my 16-year-old brain couldn’t imagine ever being able to afford. Atop the sales desk was a tray with a perspex cover, beneath which were lots of little compartments holding a colourful assortment of plectrums –and it was with one or two of these consolation prizes that I’d usually leave the shop after an hour’s gawping at all the guitars I couldn’t afford. I can remember turning the plecs over in my hands as Irummaged through the box –from the talc-dry surface of the Tortex pics to the cool curves of the Sharkfin plecs and the little Jazz picks, which looked like a petrified teardrop. I loved them all and no sweetshop pick ’n’ mix could ever have come close in allure.
