Apart from Tania, a Swiss Army knife, an iPad, an iPod and of course iLiner, a travel guitar is essential for me when I’m on the road.  It has to be compact, sturdy and able to jam into an overhead bin and yet it must still sound great.   Not an easy combination.  For years I have searched for the perfect balance between sound, weight and cost.  Musser, one of my favorite luthiers, custom built me a handmade beauty which sounds superb but looks way too good and I’m always scared someone will nick it.  I do take it to Mexico, but I prefer the beautiful Parlor Guitar and a couple of others of his, which are simply exquisite, but of course they are too good to risk.  A travel guitar needs to take some knocks and not break your heart if it gets pinched.  I have tried several electric travellers, but then you need to hump all the electronics and you end up playing with headphones or plugging in mini systems which defeats the purpose, which is to play happily while waiting for the wife to get out of the bath.

To avoid the problem I try and stash guitars round the world in friend’s houses, and I have found kindly disposed guitar shops will hostel them for me, because I don’t like having to haul them on airplanes, I don’t like being in hotels without one and I can’t go for more than a few days without playing because you lose your pads and then it hurts like hell – think of fingering a cheese-grater.  So this year was a problem.  We were off to a wedding in Henley, and then going to Bath and Venice, and it would be at least two weeks before I found my next stashed guitar.  Too long.   And you must sing in Venice, at least to shut up the gondoliers and annoy the tourists, while in Bath….well there must be a Jane Austen song, or ironically, haven’t I written it yet?

My lovely luthier friend Danny Ferrington made a beauty of a mini guitar for Jeff Lynne back in The Wilbury days, which I always pick up and admire whenever Jeff permits me to come over and hear his amazing new music (coming this Fall)  so I asked Danny to make me one, but that will take him a while.  Danny is a sunset man who has his priorities right:  and he won’t make a guitar for just anyone….

Jeff himself travels with a little rough guitar, which is virtually a plank of wood with a small sound board, which he can chuck into a suitcase, not unlike The Rutles guitar I had Danny make for George Harrison, and boy can Jeff make that plank sound great.  But then he is Jeff Lynne.  I require more help from the guitar, but the Ferrington won’t be ready before the fall, so I faced my usual dilemma, what to take on the road?

Fortunately this year for my birthday Kevin Nealon, the tall sweet funny man with the banjo, gave me a Gift Card at The Guitar Centre and there I found a guitar as good as almost any I have ever owned.  It’s a Taylor for less than $400 called a GS Mini, and it’s a real beauty.  An absolute cracker.   I’m crazy about it.  I can’t put it down. I can’t wait to  pick it up. It sounds great, it’s easy to play, and the acoustics are magnificent. It also comes with a very strong, light, padded, traveling bag, so bless them, they have thought of everything.

I have had Baby Taylor’s before, and even a Baby Grand which I left behind on Tomburoa in Fiji, because the local boys played so well on crap guitars and it was the least I could do, but this GS Mini leaves them all dead in its wake. In fact for pure tone, and for depth and purity of sound it leaves most guitars behind.

I once toured the Taylor factory in San Diego with Clint Black, because I wrote with him a new intro for The Galaxy Song, which he recorded for his D’Electrified album.  Movingly for both of us it was Clint’s version they played from space on the last morning of the Space Shuttle last year.  Personally I think they should have played mine but you know these Texans….Anyway Clint asked for a new intro to the song as opposed to the old Python lyrics:

Whenever life gets you down Mrs. Brown

And things seem hard and tough….

….which he felt didn’t apply when he sang it on stage, so together we wrote and recorded this:

When you’re feeling inside out and insecure

And life keeps getting you down

When all life’s daily worries

Hurry through your head

You don’t wanna even get up

You just lie around in bed

 

When you feel you just can’t take it anymore

And you wonder what on earth it is all for

Your love life’s like a war zone

Your TV’s on the blink

It’s enough to drive a drinking man

To stop and take a think.

 

Just remember…etc

(Recorded with Clint Black for Delectrified in 1999)

Anyway out of the kindness of his heart Clint gave me a lovely Taylor, and arranged for us to visit the factory, which if you are a guitar freak is fascinating.   It’s certainly the first time I have ever been in a Board Room where people pulled out guitars for a jam.  So thanks Brothers Taylor, for this very travelable, very fine guitar, which accompanied me to Henley, Bath, London and Venice, and is now happily accompanying me to Biarritz for a family wedding in a rented Peugeot. The wife is driving, Clint Black is on the CD player, and life is good….

Just remember….

 

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