bobwise said:My first guitar was a Penco bolt-neck SG that I got for Christmas in '73 when I was 14 years old. Penco was a house brand for Medley Music (a retailer in the Philadelphia suburbs). What little info I've been able to find suggests that Penco's were made by Matsumoku. My first "amp" was a Westinghouse solid-state stereo receiver driving Altec speakers. I promptly blew the horn tweeters (Altec replaced them under warranty) and the next Christmas I got a Fender Deluxe Reverb.
I had always been in love with guitar music but I never considered learning to play. Then friends of my parents who had been living in Japan moved back to the US and we went to visit them. Their son was my age and had brought back a Univox Hi-Flyer and a Yamaha amp (one of those weird wedge shaped ones with the huge rectangular white polystyrene foam speaker) and he showed me how to play "Secret Agent Man". Then he played a cassette of "Band of Gypsys" for me. I must have heard Jimi before that but I never paid much attention. But after messing around with his guitar and then listening to the first few minutes of "Who Knows" I had a burning desire to get a guitar and start playing.
I begged my parents to buy me a guitar. But I had slacked off taking piano lessons when I was little, and I had begged for a drum kit for Christmas a few years earlier and never learned to play it. So they figured guitar was just another passing fancy and told me I had to prove that I really wanted my own guitar by learning to play a song on my sister's crappy Kent classical guitar. I had a Beatles songbook left from my piano days and learned the chords to "Flying", and at that point they said they'd get me a guitar for Christmas.
Dad took me around to a bunch of shops looking at guitars in the $100 range. The only name brand we saw at that price point was a used Fender Musicmaster in a baby-blue color and I thought it was hideous and cheap looking. Then we went to Medley Music and I fell in love with that Penco SG. They had a Penco Telecaster that was pretty nice too, but SG's were what I pictured in my head when I thought of electric guitars. Dad told me I couldn't see him buy my Christmas present and we left with him planning to return to get it without me.
A few days before Christmas he told me that the shop owner had discovered some problem with the SG and he had bought the Tele instead. I was a little sad but beggars can't be choosers so I was resigned to getting my second choice. Then Christmas morning I ran downstairs, took the ribbons off the case and opened it up. Lo and behold, there was the SG I really wanted. Dad had wanted it to be a surprise and had made up the story about it being defective so I wouldn't know what I was getting. My best Christmas ever.
A few years later I had the Penco and a Gibson LP Deluxe. The other guitar player in my band had his dad's old Gibson SG and we both thought the Penco was better than it (mostly because the Gibson wouldn't stay in tune, even though it was a hardtail and my Penco had a Bigsby-style vibrato), so he ended up always using the Penco instead of the Gibson.
As the years went by I got more "sophisticated" and sold the Penco because it was "just a plywood copy with a bolt-neck" and it had the "wrong" headstock (Epiphone shaped instead of Gibson shaped) and the "wrong" inlays (blocks with rounded corners). Now I kind of wish I had kept it, but oh well -- live and learn.
8) thanks for the tasty story wisebob. you had a fantastic american dad!
hope you meet the penco someday somewhere again........j