congratulations! excellent choice...
Way back in 1972 I was lost in the haze... broke up with my true love,
everyone I worked with was a low life... I was spiraling down where there
actually is no bottom.
I saw an ad for a Fender Bass for sale. I saw it as something to grasp hold of...
like a life ring for a drowning man. I put five twenty dollar bills in one pocket of
my jeans, and one more twenty in the other pocket. Then I went to see a man about
a bass.
He pulled the case out from under his bed. It was dusty, like it hadn't been played
for a while. He laid it on his bed, and I opened the case. 1966 Fender Jazz Bass,
Sunburst finish, tortoise p/g. I picked it up, and bonded with it instantly. As soon as
I touched it, I wanted it badly. I squinted down the neck, and shook my head.
"I don't know, man, the neck is warped. I might have to get a new neck.
I'll give you a hundred bucks..."
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He wanted more, but he knew the neck wasn't straight. He wanted more for it,
a new Fender Jazz Bass at that time was probably $350. But those were bigger dollars
then. I pulled the five twenties out of my pocket, showed it to him and said,
"This is all I got, man."
He took the hundred. I took the bass. That was actually a lot of money for me at that
time. I was cooking in a restaurant, making about $150 a week. That bass was my life
line. It gave me another chance, or I used it to make one. I could have slid down into
depression and drugs, or I could have started playing music and re-invented myself.
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The fact that I'm writing this today is proof that the music is the way. AND the J-Bass
of course. I felt like I'd lucked into the best. I took the bass to Dan Erlewine, who had
his luthier shop in Ann Arbor then, and he straightened out the neck for me. No further
trouble. I was never really interested in any other bass, the Jazz did everything I needed.
I played that one bass for literally decades. I'm sure I made
hundreds of dollars
playing it... *grins
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And I never considered selling it until recently. But I finally did. I've been turning lots of
my things into money I might need later. And I have another bass to play, so I decided I
didn't need the old one. When I bought it for a hundred bucks, it was just an old bass.
Nobody was worshipping them yet. When I sold it last year, I got about three thousand for
it. Why so low? because I stripped the sixties sunburst finish off it, and gave it an oil finish
like a gunstock. I liked it better that way, but I took about $10,000 off the value of it.
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Me and my Jazz bass got older and funkier together. *Grins
And we had a career, where I learned to measure wealth by other means than money.
For a while, I played it without the covers and the pick guard, because I thought it looked
more radical without them. And it did. I put black nails in the screw holes. radical...
But about ten years ago, I decided it would look more radical with the old parts
back on, so I searched around in some old boxes of forgotten things and found them.
The pick guard still fit!
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And yeah, that's the same guy I started out with so long ago. Which says something about
persistence maybe. May your bass carry you on a journey to good places, not the smokey
dives mine dragged me to for so long. For a bass player, persistence might be all we got.
Here's the same trio, forty four years later. Fender bass has lots of sustain...
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BOOM 
