I happened to mention one time on Daddyo (my email group at yahoo) that there were a couple of people I'd like to track down. They were Debbie Brizzi and Jan Fleenor, the two girls who bought me my guitar in LA in 1986. I've gone out on the internet several times over the years looking for them, and never could find them. Well, a friend in the cafe, C-Carl, went out and tracked down Jan for me, sent me her phone number, and I called her up, left a message, and the next day she phoned.
See, my lead guitar player, Sugar, and I used to go over to this outdoor cafe/patio type place in Hollywood in the evenings and set up our little amp and sit there and write songs, practise the songs we'd already written, you know, jam around, have some fun. After a while it got so there was always the same little group of people there. Friends and fans. Maybe you were there. Let me know if you remember. Anyway, I had this old Yamato folk guitar that I had been playing since 1972, and every night I'd break at least one string, sometimes two or three, and every time I broke a string I'd mutter about this mythical guitar I'd seen one time in a music store up in Vancouver: a Fender El Rio. Acoustic/electric, thin body, single cut-away, red and black sunburst. The guitar of my dreams.
Well, one day these two girls, Debbie and Jan, took me down on Melrose to Nadine's. They wanted me to show them this guitar I was always talking about. Nadine's didn't have it, so we went over to the Guitar Shop, where they have that rock'n'roll walk of fame, and there we found a Fender El Rio. It. The Guitar. They had just one. Then the girls did this amazing thing. They told the guy there to put the guitar in a case. They told me to pick it up. They told me it was mine. They paid for it and we left.
I have that guitar to this day, and it's still my main instrument.
Over the years there have been a number of times when I've been on the verge of giving up. That's a seriously low place to get to. But every time I get to that point, all I have to do is open up the case and look at that guitar. I think about those two girls. I think that if I ever quit I'd be letting them down. I've never quit and I never will.
So it warrants a news flash that I've finally reconnected with at least one of these girls.
Thank you Jan, and thank you Debbie, wherever you might be today. I'll play my El Rio 'til I'm done with this life.
