5.


You will fall in love with a guitar out of the ordinary, hanging behind the counter of your hometown favourite music shop. It will be mistakenly introduced to you as a Cobra model by Ovation (a company famous for their trademark carbon fiber roundback acoustic guitars), being part of their solid body series of the mid 1970s. It will be actually the Breadwinner model with its unique and characteristic shape – often referred to as ‘shark fin’ or ‘battle axe’, both being pointlessly and juvenilely too aggressive to describe and render its perfect ergonomic design. You will go to this shop regularly for many years and buy most of your early musical instruments there, quite often spontaneously – though you’ll almost never try one instrument there since you’ll never feel the urge to learn how to play Stairway to Heaven – and you’ll start to notice a strange dismantled body laying on the workbench behind the desk or hanging on the wall, always in a different stage of restoration – it will be in the small shop with just 2 or 3 cool guys doing everything, before it expands and relocates in a bigger building with ateliers, rehearsal rooms and a big crew.
Cobra will not sound as a bad name for this guitar and you will use it for many years – it will happen in a pre-internet time and for a couple of decades you will limit your involvement into guitars to practice on the few models you’ll gather mostly by chance (later turning into a complete geektarist will be a major strike in your life – and this guitar will much likely have been the seed of it). Without ever reading any kind of guitar magazines or books, without hanging with a guitarists community in rehearsal studios or music shops exchanging information, you’ll know nothing about this guitar but how good it plays, sounds, looks, feels.
People who will often come to you after a concert to ask about it – or even ask to play a few notes on it – won’t fill you with condescending pride, but really get on your nerves: guitarists don’t want to hand over their instruments to strangers, ever, ever, ever! When you’ll join the experimental music scene it will blur your reputation for most people, for they’ll often mistake its ergonomic design for a heavy metal look à la Kiss – they won’t notice that it’s loaded with versatile and subtle splitcoil mini-humbuckers and that the high armrest spontaneously puts the guitar in the most classic and comfortable position – nothing a poser would ever enjoy… Well, for a long time you won’t know that either. OK, and you being dressed mostly in black leather in that time won’t help (experimental musicians are expected to sport no more specific looks than greasy hair).

To buy your first serious instruments you’ll borrow money from a bank, a classic student loan split in 2 – half will be spent right away to get a Rickenbacker 620 white limited edition, a Peterson 620 amp and a nylon string Ovation, plus gear; the other half will pay for the rent and the university tuitions. You’ll get your first teaching job at 20 – some of your high-school students will be older than you, but you won’t tell – and teach 10 years until the money is reimbursed totally, then you’ll never get a regular job again, and you’ll never borrow money from a bank again. Six months after this investment, you’ll see the Breadwinner finally renovated and for sale in your music shop – the very same where you signed your first big check – and your eyes will pop out of your head. You’ll claim that the guitar is yours, though you don’t have the first cent to pay for it. The day after you’ll go back to the shop and boldly propose to the shop-owner to give you the guitar and you’ll swear that you’ll pay for it within 3 months. As a total Grand Seigneur and Protector of the Arts, he’ll laughingly accept and you’ll bring this baby home. The next 3 months you will do anything to get the money – it will be before Christmas and you’ll mostly paint ugly holiday decorations on shop windows on every evening and weekend on top of your teaching job, and restrain your food to a mere survival rate – you’ll also develop a vicious shoplifting technique – exclusively for food – that you will always keep for yourself.
Then the Breadwinner will be rightfully yours: it will win you a little bit of bread, but not so much, for you’ll never be so good at earning money anyhow, and you’ll have many adventures with it. One day your flat will be robbed, they’ll take your original Schott buffalo leather motorbike jacket and your Yves Saint-Laurent suit (a gift from your mother), your stereo and all your CDs when they were still luxury items (including your first digital edition of P.I.L’s metal box), but they’ll miss the guitars stored under the sofa… You’ll sleep amongst homeless people on the Breadwinner case in front of the Shinjuku railway station the day before going back home from Japan, because you’ll be so broke that not only you cannot take the cheapest hotel room for the night, but you can’t even pay for a locker room big enough for it! You’ll play all kinds of music on it, insert metal plates between the strings and hammer them with a rod and feed the sound to loopers and samplers via extreme distortions for your ultra noise projects, or you’ll scratch the strings with the tip of your nail in your minimalist phases, and even play songs on it at some point!

For many years you won’t even know that the most famous user of the Ovation Breadwinner – amongst others including Marc Bolan, Steve Marriot, and the guitarists of the Wailers and Abba – will stay Robert Smith when he’ll shortly join the Banshees – the ultimate post-punk band and the soundtrack of your adolescence! It’s not at fault of being documented, since it will appear on the Nocturne concert video – you will see it only 20 years later, though you’ll have listened avidly to the album… You’ll be more aware of these kind of things later, and you’ll be happy to learn that Kim Gordon uses a Musima Eterna – another of your special guitars – on the Free Kitten first album you’ll enjoy so much, or see Devi Ever demoing her fuzz-boxes on a Fender Jaguar Special HH on her YouTube channel.