Ain’t it a shame it can’t be your birthday EVERY day? Especially when it’s a major birthday with a zero on the end …
Well, gotta give a(n elderly) boy some credit for at least trying. I managed to extend my recent 60th to run a possible-world-record of around six weeks. And here’s how we did it …
My ACTUAL, OFFICIAL birthdate is June 27th. However, for boring technical reasons the event thrown on my behalf by my small but immaculately hip publisher Headpress as a combined 60th birthday party and launch for my novel The Hellhound Sample (as reported in a blog post you’ll find not to far south of here) took place on June 22nd. Smaller, less formal and more intimate events took place closer to the time … but one thing was missing: my BIG SPECTACULAR PRESENT.
Which started as a vaguely indulgent ‘gift to self’ and then escalated. (Warning note to non-guitar-geeks: your eyes may be about to glaze over.) I’d considered swapping the Hot Noiseless pickups in my Fender Custom Shop Jeff Beck Stratocaster for a more vintage-toned set, preloaded into a scratchplate so I could preserve the originals in situ, and raised the topic in a discussion on Harmony Central’s Electric Guitar forum. Then a friend who posts under the name of Ratae Coritanorum, lives in Bath (so I don’t see him nearly often enough) and builds Fender-style guitars of intimidating quality stepped in and made an offer I couldn’t refuse: that for very little more than the cost of a plate loaded with a set of premium vintage-style pickups and a qualified guitar tech’s fee for installing same … he would assemble me an entirely new Strat-style guitar, constructed to my specifications and using the finest parts he could scare up. As he put it, ‘A guitar that money couldn’t buy for less than half the cost of an American Standard Strat.’
I mentioned this to my sweetie … and instead of saying, ‘Are you nuts? We can’t afford it and you already have too many guitars!’ … she offered to buy it for me.
It didn’t happen overnight: he has a day job, a family who need to see him once in a while and a backlog of other builds to complete. Nevertheless, last week it arrived … and it was everything he said it would be, and more: Fender Custom Shop quality at the very least. So we bust out a bottle of the Birthday Champagne we’d been saving … and declared the birthday finally complete.
So the longest birthday party is finally done … and the next time Crosstown Lightnin’ surface, that guitar will be front’n centre. It may well be the best single birthday present I’ve ever received in my life.
So here’s to my baby … and here’s to Ratae Coritanorum (making the world’s tone better one Partsocaster at a time) … and here’s to all y’all!
