It’s not the first time 12 string guitars have been in vogue and it won’t be that last, I mean we can thank Paul Weller’s ‘Wild Wood’ and the Red Hot Chili Pepper’s ‘Breaking the Girl’ for making 12-string guitars cool again during the nineteen nineties. Most of us who, back then, couldn’t even handle more than four chords on a 6-string, suddenly wanted to double our string count and street-cred.
Playing them was a challenge. The headstock was also double in size and unless you were wearing a shirt with rubber lapels, the top of the neck always started slowly towards the ground as you tried desperately to push down eight, of the twelve strings, with enough force to cleanly play that barred Dm7b5 in Wild Wood.
Suffice it to say that trying to retain credibility amongst your friends and bandmates whilst grappling with a top-heavy 12-string jumbo acoustic guitar was difficult enough, but paled into utter insignificance against the challenge of restringing the f**king thing!
As if 6 strings weren’t enough to wince at, winding the tuning pegs and imagining the pain of the string snapping a whipping across the back of your hand, or even worse an eye! But now there were six more of the slinky, little sh*ts, and some of them had absolutely no desire to be part of a budget guitar that was swapped for £25 and a quarter of weed. And, just as you got the damn thing under control, a string would indeed snap halfway through a dodgy but very public rendition of Pink Floyd’s ‘Wish You Were Here’ (you didn’t), leaving you to try and restring, mid-set on some extremely cosy stage with questionable lighting as the rest of the band meandered through an impromptu instrumental.
If you’ve ever wondered why I am pretty proficient at restringing guitars … this is it.
Footnote: Although the recorded version of Wildwood was played on a 6 string Ovation, Weller often played Wild Wood on his Gibson B-45 12 live.