CHARLIE PICKETT: I guess it has 480's and 490's. You got a 480 in the back and 490 in the front I guess, but I'm not sure about that. This is a '72. It had the Bigsby on and I pulled that off after probably six months of trying to keep it in tune.

PATRICK OGLE: And that was the problem with just this one.

CHARLIE PICKETT: Miserable. Miserable thing to keep in tune, and that -- the vibrato is not even good, you know. I mean it's just like doesn't -- it's not -- it doesn't jump up and down. It's just a weak vibrato. So anyway, I just pulled it up, took the spring out, and let it be a hard back, hard tail, whatever you call it. This one has been on tour with me ever since. This one I've had since '72. I learned how to play on it but it was the first Gibson I got. I snapped the neck at least three times because it had the old 14-degree lay-back and.

PATRICK OGLE: And that's the common thing.

CHARLIE PICKETT: Yeah, and it's just a shame. I was dumb. I just left it laying up against the wall and it just did that and bang it was gone. I just felt so awful because I've been thinking could it ever be repaired, and I was thinking it's going to be laying up on the wall now, but the glue and stuff tha they used unbelievable how it can be that solid a fit, but it is just perfect. It's actually just the same as to me as when it was new.

PATRICK OGLE: And no problems with adjusting when you're bringing it and you get it set up and stuff? They just do it?

CHARLIE PICKETT: No.

PATRICK OGLE: Not at all.

CHARLIE PICKETT: Just as if it was the same, and you know they covered it up with some paint but you can still see the cracks. And like I said, it's been broken at least three times at the top but it hasn't been broken in 20 years. As you can see, it's a working person's guitar, a working musician's guitar. Got the belt buckle stuff. It's a little bit, getting a little bit funky here, a little bit green in the back. Lots of stories with this guitar but my favorite one is this. We were playing the Seventh Street entry in Minneapolis. We had been added pretty hard that night, and so I got done, I left the guitar up on the rafters because so that you can reach up and get the rafters from the stage there, and I left it there hanging on the strap from the rafters. And of course, with the volume wide open and the amp wide open so it's screaming feedback, a nice feedback, probably rolling out of the D string and I turned around as I left. At that place, the way they had the stage set up at that point in time, you would walk through the crowd to ge to the dressing room. so I walked back to the dressing room door. And the crowd had parted and they had remained parted, and everybody was still sort of cheering and stuff like that and the guitar back there has feedback, and I was sitting here with my slide in my hand and turned around and just fired it right back at the guitar. I happen to hit it, and there's that little ding because I threw it pretty hard, and it changed the feedback, so people thought that was the wildest, neatest -- Well, not the wildest but a great ending because it changed the feedback and people thought it actually blanded out a little sort of an impromptu moment. So, the ding here is a sort of a nice memory. I never did it again because when you throw that slide that hard, it bounces and I'm afraid I'm just going to smack somebody off the rebound, so. This one has had no work done on it ever. It's a little obviously a little bit worn on the frets, but like I said this is just -- It's been a great guitar for me. I've done a lot of -- Most of the recording that I've done was done with this guitar and another guitar which was a Kalamazoo which, Patrick, you probably know is the third bottom-of-the-line Gibson from the old days. There was the Gibson and then there was the Epiphone and then there was the Kalamazoo. And, at least for a while, I don't know where the Kalamazoo line came from, but anyway, long point, story short is that the Kalamazoo was a Fender ripoff. It had a bolt-on neck, it had real tiny sort of body to it, and it had what looked like a Fender at the top, only it said Kalamazoo. And this particular Kalamazoo was owned by Steve Alaimo, which is a big Miami guy from the early '60s and we used to cover a song of his -- by him called "She's My Baby", but back to the thing, it was owned by him and had those weak imitation Fender single coils in it. Like everything else, I ruined the value of that by stripping it out and putting in a set of P90's, and so once I got the P90's in it, that was a heck of a recording guitar. It just had the thing for recording. I mean you can just get tone all over the place, and of course to me, tone, in guitar music is everything. It's as important as the performance itself. I mean listen to the -- What was it? The little sticker on Cosmos factory? It says, "Lean, Clean, and Bluesy". If you look at one of those signs, it’s on the cover, and so to me, when you go into recording, you think first almost, the first thing is what tone do I want from the guitar today? And of course tone on the drums and everything else but what tone do I want today? And, you know, work until you get that tone because you can put down a fabulous performance, if you've got nothing bu buzz and rattle it's not releasable. Those are the two main components. Then after that, of course, you know it's mic spacing and what mic are you going to use or you’re going to go these days, are you going to go analog or full Pro Tools but that’s I think a little less important than amping the guitar.

This is just a real stock SG. It's kept -- I think of the SGs of its day, somebody made a mistake and made it a little thinner. That's why it's a little more narrow this way but it could be my imagination. It seems like most of the SGs are little thicker that way.