Free Diary of a Player by Brad Paisley

things I got to see at that show. From the amplifiers and guitar gear the greats used, to Chet Atkins sitting around backstage pickin’, to Vern Gosdin so furious with his monitors that he threw his cup of beer in the air, which completely soaked yours truly. Now, that’s a baptism.
    Thankfully, very few bottles came my way, and I still have some of the photos of me with all these country greats when I was just a kid. Some of my most treasured are photos of me at twelve with Vince Gill and Steve Wariner, who were just then becoming my heroes as singers, songwriters, and, more importantly, guitarists. Meeting these giants and sharing a stage with them was my first real hint that maybe this was not an impossible dream. I was at least in the vicinity. Perhaps I really could become a player.

    A s an American musician, I hold this truth to be self-evident: a guitar makes a better friend than most human beings. Seriously, some of my best friends are guitars. But right about this point in my coming-of-age as a man and a musician, I started to notice something beyond guitars . . . amplifiers.
    Disclaimer: These next few paragraphs are probably going to be boring for anyone not interested in guitar gear. You’ve been warned.
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    As an American musician, I hold this truth to be self-evident: a guitar makes a better friend than most human beings.
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    That’s right: I was a teenage amp-head. Suddenly it dawned on me that as much as I loved guitars, the amp was often 75 percent of the equation. My grandfather had started me off small with a little Fender amp that was just fine for a while, but then I convinced my father that I needed to have a Fender Twin—and I needed it on wheels, too, because it weighed about a hundred and fifty pounds, and my father, who had to carry it most of the time, only weighed ahundred and fifty pounds himself. But just when my father thought I would be satisfied with that, I decided unilaterally that I needed—that’s
needed,
mind you, not wanted—a Mesa Boogie pre-amp and amp with two speakers and a big rack full of junk with blinking lights to go with it. I was a kid in a candy store playing at that Jamboree. I would see these guys come through with their fancy rigs and flashy guitars, and my saliva glands would activate. I had Fender amps, then Peavey amps, then pedal boards, then rack gear, then wireless units—you name it.
    All of this high fidelity and high finance pales in comparison to what my father and I call the Great Vox Amp Crisis of 1987. That’s the year when I came to Dad at age fifteen to explain to him in no uncertain terms that I now needed—again, not wanted, but
needed
—some very specific and hard-to-find Vox amps from England. My father had begun to realize that something was going on a little earlier when he noticed that his phone bill was suddenly full of long and expensive phone calls to Great Britain because I had done due diligence and discovered the numbers of some excellent music stores across the Atlantic.
    These amps were the stuff of legend, first made famous by the Shadows and the Beatles, and they were rare and mythicalin late-eighties West Virginia. They looked as exotic as a Ferrari to me with their basket-weave tolex, diamond grill cloth, chicken-head tone knobs, and blue bulldog speakers. And like I was Veruca Salt in
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,
they were my golden goose. I had to have them. “How much, Wonka? Won’t take no for an answer. Come now, how much, I say? Now, now, everything is for sale . . .” And they were going to be mine.
    My sudden and overwhelming interest in calling England first started when I opened up for my new favorite group, the Desert Rose Band, an incredibly innovative country band formed by Chris Hillman, formerly of the Byrds, and featuring the apex of my all-time guitar heroes, John Jorgenson, who would go on to play for years with Elton John and record or tour with