I'm going to take you through my rollercoaster, life as a musician, through the guitar lineage
of Laurie Geltman.
This guitar was my first, my first guitar.
I named it, or her, Harmony.
I'm not really sure why, but then when Elton John came out with that song, Harmony and
me, I thought for sure it was about us.
This is a classical guitar, but as you can see, I didn't take that very seriously because
there's all these marks in here.
There's like 3,000 little marks, and this is, I remember now where this came from.
This gouge, I had a bubblegum machine in my bedroom and it fell off the shelf and landed
on the guitar, and that was from a bubblegum machine.
But what I used to do, you're supposed to play this like this, but I did not do this.
That was basically what I would do in second grade, I'd bang the shit out of this guitar,
like this.
So that's why there's all those marks.
I was really into the Rolling Stones and the Beatles, and I wanted to be Keith Partridge,
so I was very much a rocker at a very early age.
For about eight years, seven, eight years I played this, I brought it everywhere.
I would take it to camp, I'd bring it to school, and it was really my way of expressing myself,
and it was also something I did every single day.
My very earliest influence was this cousin, Mita, and she gave my mom sticky fingers by
the Rolling Stones.
It was the famous cover with the Andy Whirl Hall, but we were you and Zippit.
Fourth grade I went to camp for two months in New Hampshire, and my brother, who was older
than me and my sister, who was younger than me, didn't go, so this was the first time
I went anywhere.
I didn't know anybody, and I took the guitar, and immediately it made a difference.
I made friends and the counselors and stuff.
A lot of them played guitar, and that's when I started really, for the first time, exposing
myself to other music that people would turn me on to.
I got in trouble a lot when I was at camp, and I would get sent down to the head counselor
of the girls side, and her name was Louise, Louise Cohen.
We slept in bunks, but Louise was in the tonk, so when you got sent to the tonk, it meant
that you were getting in trouble.
Louise played guitar, and she had this old Gibson guitar, and so instead of really laying
into me, we would basically just sit around and play crossbeast, still smashing young
songs and Bonnie Raitt, and she turned me on to Sippy Wallace and Bonnie Raitt and some
old blues stuff, and I was nine.
I ended up buying this guitar from the guy that played in the Bar Mitzvah Band.
It was a really sweet little cherry-red SG, it was a copy of a famous guitar that's called
a Gibson SG, but it was made by Honour.
I got that in 7th grade for getting straight A's.
My mom said if I got straight A's, they'd get me an electric guitar.
This guy, this bass player, he was going out with one of my best friends, and because
I couldn't drive yet, she used to drive me to the other town, it was like a whole other
town, which was a big deal.
I was in a band from another town.
I had this electric guitar, I had my classical guitar, which I played rock on anyway, and
I needed a serious acoustic guitar, so I got this guitar.
I really love this guitar, for so many years, it really was a big part of my everyday life,
and I really started playing a lot of lead guitar on it, it had a great neck, it's got
a really narrow neck.
My ovations aren't really considered cool anymore, and people hate them and make fun
of them because they have this round back and they slide off, but they never get that
to me.
I never had that problem and never really thought about it, until many years later, when I was
so sick of sound engineers making jokes about my ovation that I just stopped playing it,
but it records very well, it's got a great tight sound.
I needed a guitar for Berkley that would be suitable for jazz, because that was basically
how they taught music was through the study of jazz music.
So I thought I should get a jazzy guitar, and this is what I got, so excuse me, it's
very dusty, I haven't played it in a very long time.
I used to have a really amazing whammy bar, but this guy I was in a band with broke it.
So then I had to do this, instead of using my whammy.
Now this has got a really big, thick sound, and some of my favorite solos that I've recorded
are on this guitar, like the end of Bobby Call from Texas is my ode to Neil Young.
You have to really fall in love with the neck, you can't just like the looks of something,
it's got to sound good, but it's got to feel good most importantly, and I really did love
this guitar, because I didn't like the classic twangy sound, so I put this 57 Gibson humbucker
here in the neck position, and it gave it a thicker sound, and I put a whole pot on
it, and then it became like my guitar of choice for the 90s decade.
I used this guitar on the road, it wasn't a real expensive guitar, so I didn't have
to worry about it too much, you know, on the planes and stuff, and it was funny because
people would come up to me like, nice, that's a really nice guitar, and I was like, it's
my roommate.
This past six months I've done very few gigs, and I spent six weeks this summer teaching
kids music and doing songwriting with them.
I even thought about producing a record of young girls singing their own tunes, you
know, but if I can get a grant, because a couple of the songs that came out of this
workshop with the kids were amazing.
I'm always trying new guitars, and I think I found one, yeah, so I mean, yeah, there's
a bunch of guitars I still want, and hopefully they'll tell a tale.
But I'm ready, the wrong, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,
It's a wonder I can't stand at all.
