In 1981 Lou Gramm and Mike Jones of Foreigner wrote a million-seller called “Jukebox Hero”. It’s the story about a kid who couldn’t get into a sold-out concert, but after hearing a great guitar solo from out in the alley, he went out the next day and bought his first guitar with dreams of being a star.

Some of us have never had illusions of grandeur, but everybody remembers his first guitar, like a first motorcycle or car.

Here’s my story. I had borrowed a friend’s rarely used guitar and had it just long enough to get hooked, and for him to want it back. So broke as I was, my urgent adolescent priority was to get a guitar. Like the jukebox hero, I looked in the second-hand stores, but never found anything I could afford.

One day I was in a Valu-Mart discount store, the 1970 version of today’s Walmart. There in the record department on a shelf was a lonely little Decca electric guitar and a small amplifier. It was love at first sight, but they both had $59 price tags.

I had a summer job and brought my entire cash savings of $75 with me. I must have looked pretty forlorn, because the department manager walked over and asked if he could help me. I told him I only have $75, and he said, “Tell you what, if you buy the amplifier for full price, I’ll give you the guitar for $16.” I didn’t ask why, I just bought it. Only many years later did I appreciate what that discount-store guy did for me.

I didn’t sleep much that summer because every night I was lying in bed with that little Decca across my belly, trying to play along with every song on KOMA, the hi-powered radio station in Oklahoma City. Remarkably, when you live at 5,000 feet elevation in Montana, you get nighttime AM radio stations from all over the place! But that’s another story.

The first song I mastered was “Dirty Water” by the Standells. I taught myself how to play some chords by ear, based on putting the right notes together. Then, with the help of a chord book, I “unlearned” those chords because I found I had the wrong fingers in the right places, which would make things more difficult as I progressed.

My mates in my first teenage band teased me mercilessly about my $16 Decca, and it wasn’t long before I bought a sexier, but still pretty cheap, guitar. I kept the Decca for many years. I mean, who would want it? Eventually I let my wife put it in a garage sale. Now, I have learned, there is quite a market for these early Japanese models made by Teisco.

It was also my daughter’s first guitar – long before she graduated to the bass. Here’s little Jenny, age 3, with my $16 Decca.