"I don't recall getting a first guitar"
About this Quote
The line lands like a shrug, but it’s really a flex in disguise: the origin story refuses to be packaged. “I don’t recall getting a first guitar” dodges the tidy mythology that rock culture loves to sell - the sacred first instrument, the epiphany, the destined kid clutching a pawnshop Strat. Montrose’s amnesia isn’t about memory so much as narrative control. He’s saying the guitar didn’t arrive as a symbolic milestone; it was just there, already woven into the fabric of his life.
That matters because Montrose’s reputation is built less on celebrity confessionalism than on craft: a player’s player whose impact sits in tone, attack, and arrangement, not in a carefully curated persona. By skipping the sentimental “first guitar” anecdote, he frames musicianship as accumulation rather than conversion. You don’t become a guitarist in a single cinematic moment; you become one through repetition, osmosis, and obsession.
There’s also a quiet pushback here against interview culture itself. Journalists ask for beginnings because beginnings make legible heroes. Montrose gives you an anti-beginning, which forces the focus forward: not “How did it start?” but “What did you build?” The subtext is that talent isn’t a talisman handed to you by fate or family; it’s a long relationship with an instrument so continuous the starting point disappears. That’s a more honest story, and a colder one - the kind that leaves the romance to the listener and keeps the work with the musician.
That matters because Montrose’s reputation is built less on celebrity confessionalism than on craft: a player’s player whose impact sits in tone, attack, and arrangement, not in a carefully curated persona. By skipping the sentimental “first guitar” anecdote, he frames musicianship as accumulation rather than conversion. You don’t become a guitarist in a single cinematic moment; you become one through repetition, osmosis, and obsession.
There’s also a quiet pushback here against interview culture itself. Journalists ask for beginnings because beginnings make legible heroes. Montrose gives you an anti-beginning, which forces the focus forward: not “How did it start?” but “What did you build?” The subtext is that talent isn’t a talisman handed to you by fate or family; it’s a long relationship with an instrument so continuous the starting point disappears. That’s a more honest story, and a colder one - the kind that leaves the romance to the listener and keeps the work with the musician.
Quote Details
| Topic | Music |
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