Everybody has at least one vivid childhood memory of seeing someone on the TV that they wanted to be.
Maybe you wanted to swing around New York city like Spider-Man, or maybe your dream was to be the next contestant on Britain’s Got Talent. Personally, I wanted both of those things, but more than anything, all I wanted was to play guitar just like Johnny Cash
But learning to play an instrument is hard, harder than that is the entry cost to even acquire one. But when I was a kid, I had no understanding of the complexities of money. So, every year from age four to seven I begged for a guitar – whether it was from my Mum, Dad, hell, even Santa wasn’t exempt from my pleas. But finally, I was given my first acoustic guitar.
And I don’t remember anything about it.
That’s the sad truth about my relationship to playing music: I’m in a constant loop of learning and un-learning. All I recall about my first guitar was that it was a blue, full-sized acoustic behemoth that matched my seven year old height. For the sake of brevity, I’ll call my first guitar Bluey – for obvious reasons.
My time with Bluey was cut short when she was smashed to bits in front of me, less than a year after falling into my tiny hands. Did I mourn her? No, not really. What I mourned was my desire to play guitar ever again. The truth was I never played her much anyway. She sat in the corner of my childhood bedroom and gathered a thick coat of dust before my friend spread said dust across the carpeted floor of my hallway.
Years would go by before I felt the urge to pick up a guitar again. My childhood continued into puberty, it was then when I decided I was going to be a guitarist – and that was that.
Do you remember when the first trailer for Marvel’s Logan came out? I do, after all it was the reason I decided to truly learn how to play guitar. The somber trailer is backdropped by Johnny Cash’s iconic cover of Hurt by Nine Inch Nails, this song became my personality at the age of 12.
All I wanted to do was play like Cash, I mean look at how he used to play guitar. He was never the best of his time, and is rarely brought up as one of the greats today. But there’s some kind of simple beauty behind how he plucked those 6 strings.
My first real guitar was given to me when I was 12, it was an acoustic Fender Squier SA – 105. This instrument was my dream realised – its massive rosewood body felt alien when I first touched it, but after months of painstaking effort, I learned how to handle the thing.
The minute I was able to play the Squier I made it my mission to learn how to play Cash’s Hurt. This too was not without its challenges, I remember struggling to switch between strumming and picking like Cash was able to do with seeming ease. I wasn’t without help in learning to play though, I had one guy looking out for me at the time.
My first guitar teacher was an odd guy. He was a metalhead through-and-through, refusing to play anything that wasn’t at least a wee bit heavy – but I was playing an acoustic guitar, learning from a man that preached the gospel of Metallica.
I didn’t spend too much time with him. He taught me the basics though: chords, power chords, and of course, how to play the bass part of For Whom The Bell Tolls – again, I was learning to play the acoustic guitar. At maximum he taught me for six months. During my time with him I learned one other important lesson about playing guitar, if you don’t practice then you’ll learn nothing.
It was a tough but obvious lesson, the calluses on my fingers grew thicker day-by-day yet I wasn’t making a lot of progress by myself. This led me to my second guitar teacher, a man that didn’t play a guitar during our lessons. Again, I didn’t stick around with him for too long – I left his lessons after performing on stage for the first time.
After my departure a new guitar fell into my hands, one that now is near unplayable due to the amount of abuse I put into it. My black Harley Benton D-120CE (as seen in the featured image).
Wielding the Harley just felt right, it let me live out my fantasy of being Johnny Cash at the reasonable price of £77 – how could you say no to that! I learned how to play everything from Green Day to Slaughter Beach, Dog on it, but it was Hurt that I truly refined.
It was 2018 when I got on stage by myself to play guitar, can you guess which song I chose to play?
Hurt was my song, it is still my song to this day. Ask any guitarist about what their song is and you’ll get a plethora of answers: maybe the metal head will tell you that Slayer’s Raining Blood is what they play all the time, or perhaps the folk guy can’t get enough of Bob Dylan’s Outlaw Blues. We’ve got the songs our fingers drift to play out of comfort.
Performing on stage just wasn’t my thing – I had barely played in front of my family before I took the stage, but it is a memory that means a lot to me. Will I ever do something like it again? I’m not so sure I will, but maybe one day.
So by 2018 I had; owned two guitars, performed on stage for the first time, and cycled through two guitar tutors – it was a pretty big year for me. The years after aren’t as notable as I didn’t accomplish as much, though I did get given my first electric guitar.
This beautiful beast, my guitar of choice, an instrument that stirs up distant hopes and dreams every time I stare at it – my walnut coloured Les Paul Special VE, or Woody if we want to keep things catchy.
She’s the only guitar I’ve never slapped a sticker on, and that’s saying a lot coming from a guy that loves attaching stickers to just about everything he owns. Woody is everything I ever wanted in an electric guitar – from the Les Paul shape, to the ease at which the neck allows my fingers to slide, she had it all.
Yet, Woody was my least played guitar up until earlier this year. It’s hard to lug about an amp every time you move, so after a while I decided that I wasn’t going to. I took Woody from Glasgow to Stirling, and then back to Glasgow, and finally let her rest in Dollar where she sat ampless for two years.
Those two years, 2023 to 2025, were pivotal for me. I had given up my dreams of being a musician, or being a guitarist in any way. Instead I decided that writing was what mattered to me now. But like every interest I’ve ever had my focus waned on that too. I traded my fret board for a key board, and all I got out of it was a university degree.
We’ve all got to have dreams, the more unlikely the better. I gave one up on being Johnny Cash to be someone else – Connor Peebles, the journalist.
As I write this Woody stares at me. I recently fitted her with new strings and have yet to trim the ends off, her head-stock is hidden behind a mass of strings but I can still see the dent I accidentally put on her when I dropped her in my first year flat. The dream remains, even if it’s obscured.