stratocaster

It’s 1968 and I’m a 13-year-old Hendrix wannabe, like a thousand other teenage guitar players. In a pawnshop on Elm Street in Greensboro, North Carolina, hangs a brand new olympic white Stratocaster with a rosewood fretboard, oozing Hendrix vibe (many pawnshops were official Fender dealers back then). It hung there for a year, gaining a stain from the neck hanger which looked like the infamous burnt cigarette mark you see on some Strats. I worked an entire summer painting fences to earn the $300 it took to take that guitar home. (I worked the next summer to earn enough to buy a ’69 drip-edge Pro Reverb).