Wailing on the fretboard of my guitar while I belted out — and I belted — songs by Sting, Nirvana, and EMF, for six or seven hours a day, seven a day week, I stretched my guitar strings to their full capacity, causing them to whine until they popped.
But as long as the strings didn’t break at the headstock, I could get four or five uses out of them. They clung more desperately to their second chance at life, tightly wound like pinched tendons resisting the urge to snap. The thick, resilient low E and A strings were troopers; they could withstand the brutal force of my strumming. The feeble G string, however, broke about 12 to 16 times a week. At some point I began using an unwound G string that held up pretty well, but it dug so deeply into my left ring finger that I had to use Super Glue to fill in a gash at the top of my hand and stop it from bleeding. I was riddled with desperation, exploiting every last breath of life that G string had left.
Eventually, I would cave and buy new strings, factoring them into my already starved budget. Venturing out for new strings also meant that I had to go out of the subway to get them, paying a fare each time I came back in, so I would try and make the most of my visits to the music store.
That’s how I got to know my close friend and former bandmate, Steve Brown.
I met Steve in early 1995 on Music Store Row in Manhattan, which was on 48th street between 6th and 7th avenue. The block of music shops was around from the late ‘70s to the late ‘90s; the stores were gathering places for mostly rock and wannabe musicians, who could pick up a guitar regardless of whether or not they could afford it, and play some fancy lick to try and impress the other customers, or close their eyes and pretend they were on stage at CBGB’s. That was until a wrecking ball swung its final stroke on Music Store Row, knocking the sounds of amateur drumming and flat “Freebird” melodies into a heap of dust.