For Joe

This is probably not the answer you are looking for but I remember Joe saying that he originally played to get enough money to buy some Nintendo games......or something like that.

PC

I came across this just a couple of days ago burried in the Gigliotti web site. This is a great indepth interview with Joe from his start to his equipment. The article also gives great information on Patrick Gigliotti and how he got started and creates his guitars. Also included are some neat photos of Joe when he was younger. It is in a pdf file.

http://www.gigliottiguitars.com/pdf/tqrfeb04.pdf

This is the best interview that I have read so far where Joe talks about his start with the guitar. Here are a couple of sections of the article:

TQR: When did you first begin learning to play, and what
was your first instrument?

My dad owned a guitar shop and he still does. It’s called
Bank’s Place Guitars in Hamilton, NY. There were always
guitars around the house, and when I was one or two years
old I might have been hacking at an old Brazilian rosewood
Martin D28. My dad was also a third-generation musician.
My great grandfather played trumpet in the ‘30s and ‘40s,
and my grandfather was one of the top trumpet players in
military bands, but my dad kind of rebelled against jazz and
went into the guitar and blues rock — players like Rory
Gallagher and Billy Gibbons — so I followed in his footsteps.
When I was around four, I asked him for a guitar for
Christmas, and he bought me a little Chiquita short-scale guitar
with a DiMarzio humbucker in the back and a matching
amp. My dad also had a lot of acoustics, so with all that I
started playing blues and some classical music. I remember
learning how to read charts, and when I was about six or
seven years old I was playing at home one day and my parents
heard me. They thought what I was playing was the
actual record, so, by then I guess they began to feel that I had
some natural ability to do this, and I continued to get heavier
into the blues. I was really influenced by the second generation
of blues players like Muddy Waters and Rory Gallagher,
Hendrix, Beck, Clapton… Tommy Bolin was also a really big
influence. So that’s how I got started. I had a huge amount of
music coming my way at an early age, and right off the bat I
had a knack for pulling stuff off of the records. I had an ear
for it I guess, but I also had to work really hard. I played six
hours a day until I was around 19, when I decided it was time
to go out on a date (laughs).

TQR: When did you begin playing in front of an audience?

Every Monday night my dad’s duo would play at an Italian
restaurant in Utica, and when I was eight I asked him if I
could come and play. He hesitated a little because he really
didn’t want me to be exposed to that whole scene, but I really
wanted to do it, so he let me play. I remember playing with
my back to the audience the whole night, and for the last
song everybody wanted me to turn around. I was a big kid for
my age, and I don’t think anyone realized that I was only
eight. There were about 40 or 50 people in the place, and I
still remember every eye being on me for the first time ever.
So I played there sometimes, and when I was around eleven
my dad started taking me to blues festivals. One day we were
at a festival and one of the bands put out an open call for a
guitar player — someone hadn’t shown up — and my dad
said, “Hey, you want to go up there and have some fun?” So I
waddle up there and the band is looking at me, a pudgy,
eleven year-old white kid, and I’m sure they were thinking
this was the low point in their careers (laughs). They said,
“We do “Pride and Joy” by Stevie Ray Vaughan — you
know that?” and I didn’t say a word — I just broke
into it. I ended up playing the entire set with them, and
afterwards, James Cotton’s road manager approached me
and said, “Hey, James really liked that — would you like to
sit in with him?” So I played with him that day, too. We went
to a few more festivals and people would recognize me from
that first festival when I played, and there was a ground swell
of interest that enabled me to play with other people like
Duke Robillard, Albert Collins, Keith Montgomery and
Gatemouth Brown. Gatemouth told my dad, “He’s good —
he’s real good — but he’s white and fat” (laughs). Then I met
Danny Gatton. I was only eleven years old, but he became
one of my best friends and he took me out on the road with
him on his northeastern tour. We would do this thing
where I would play guitar and he would play slide over the
top with a Heineken bottle. He sat me down and said, “You need to
learn jazz guitar, rockabilly, country…you need to learn all of
the classic American forms of music.”

TQR: And he taught you?

He taught me in his Winnebago. We’d sit in there and just go
back and forth, back and forth, and I really was the recipient
of a master class on the guitar during a six month period. He
was always very supportive of me and invited me to sit in at
his New York shows. After that period, we decided to put
together my own band and see what happened. I think my
main goal at that time was to make enough to buy a Super
Nintendo and some new pickups for my Tele.

~Rhonda

Thank you everyone.  That was a very good article, photogal.