As I write this, the Dallas International Guitar Festival is a week away. And, as I’ve written before, this time of year brings me to reflect on my younger days when I first got into playing the guitar.

This week I found myself thinking about my late best friend in sixth and seventh grade, Jim Hughes.  Jim and I were inseparable during those two years.  It was because of Jim that I went from admiring guitar players to actually venturing into learning to play.

Jim was a character.  He learned to play guitar because his older brother, John, played and, as I recall, was a darn good one at that. Jim would take John’s beautiful 12-string guitar and take it to school with him. This earned Jim quite the butt-whoopin’ from John every time he did this but he never stopped swiping the guitar.  To Jim, the gain of playing far outweighed the pain of brotherly punishment.

What went down in the Bro Beating Hall of Fame was the time John had an expensive, borrowed electric Gretsch guitar of some sort.  Jim was very impressed with this work of art and, for some ungodly reason, decided that it would be great for “show and tell” at school.  ‘Cept we didn’t have show and tell at school.  Such technicalities never stopped Jim from a good excuse to boost that six-stringed treasure without permission.

I don’t remember what the consequences of the Great Gretsch Guitar Heist of ‘70/’71 was but I’m certain that it was a near death experience administered by the brotherly hand of justice.

It’s been right around 40 years since those days and I have long since lost track of the Hughes family.  The last that I heard was that Jim is dead now (but not at the hand of his brother).  I often think of some of the funny scenes that happened that Jim and some borrowed guitar starred in.  I’ll, no doubt, share those stories in articles to come.

Since those days, I enjoyed playing guitar with other friends during high school and during my first year of college.  In time, though, things like life, school and careers got in the way of learning much more than what I learned from playing with Jim.  Maybe someday that will change.

In the mean time, as I walk the aisles of the Dallas International Guitar Festival next weekend, I’ll likely see and hear things that will instantly take me back to those innocent days.  Days of when anything was possible and the guitar playing sounded infinitely better in our heads than they did to our listener’s ears.

I’ll also be sure and smile to myself at the first glimpse of a Gretsch electric guitar.