So, I bought this thing. I’m not sure why. I haven’t played one for twenty years, and truth be told, I can’t even remember which end you’re supposed to blow in.

So what do I want with a guitarra? Well, it’s like this: I don’t miss my old music jobs, but I miss making music a mite. The guitar was never my primary instrument, but I always had one or two of them, mostly because there are only really two instruments capable of producing the entire spectrum of music: guitar or piano.

I have even less talent at the piano than I do at the guitar, which is to say, none. Some people, like my sons, look at a piano and understand the way it works immediately, and start making music on it pretty quickly. It’s mathematical. I look at the piano and see horse teeth, a hernia when it’s time to move it, and not much else. So if you want chords, I’ll have to bash them out of the guitar for you. To understand music, you need chords.

I played the electric bass, which is nothing like playing the guitar. Well, it shouldn’t be, but in the real (rock and roll) world, bass players were mostly extra guitar players who were drafted into playing the dratted thing because none of the other guitar players wanted to. People press-ganged into bass playing mostly end up playing the guitar on the bass, instead of doing their jobs. Prog rock is full of guys playing the guitar on the bass, for instance. They’re noodling around on the top two strings, around the 15th fret all the time. The addition of the fifth string to basses just made it worse.

There is a music scene in Merida that is drawing me back. They favor the sorts of things I like. Straightforward jazz, bossa nova, gypsy, and tin pan alley pop standards renewed from decades past. For me, after performing musical comedy and happy hour tunes for straight cash homie, it was a trip up the river looking for my musical Kurz. Back, back, back into the future. So this guitar choice reflects that.

It’s a knock-off of a notable Gibson guitar. It’s about the first notable guitar you could plug into an amplifier, the ES 150, commonly referred to as the Charlie Christian guitar, popular in the 1930s:

That model had a single “blade” pickup, mounted near the neck. After World War Eleven, they changed it to a P-90 pickup, the type you see on my guitar. It had a different magnet and winding and put out a stronger signal for the amplifier to work with.

The first versions of the pickup were called soap bar pickups, because of their shape and color. Eventually they started making them with “dog ears,” like the one you see on my guitar. They also started making the guitars with a thinner (but still) hollow-body, like the ES 330. Eventually, they put a slab of wood right down the center of the guitar (ES 335, a Chuck Berry guitar), but by then, they had two pickups, and they were humbuckers, a less noisy pickup that didn’t pick up as many random electrical signals. Humbuckers are overrated if you ask me. You haven’t really lived until your PA system starts broadcasting police radio messages in the middle of a song.

A hollow body with a P-90 pickup mounted at the bridge gives you a smooth, midrange jazz sound.

I like that. That’s a real Gibson ES 150 he’s playing, a1946 vintage, in the video. Not many of those around.

You could, however, get your hands on a similar 1950 model for the low, low price of only 141,000 pesos, about $7,500 in USD. Plus beaucoup shipping, and a good pawing over at Mexican customs, I’ll bet.

Um, er, uh, I think I’ll pass on that one. Mine cost $189, no tax, no import duties, and free shipping.

It seems appropriate that I’d buy the one that costs 97.5 percent less, because I’m planning on playing it 97.5 percent worse than everyone I’ve heard performing at the Dzalbay cantina so far.