12-string blues

I'll elucidate (they can't touch you for it, as Doddy says).

I'm waiting for an operation on my left hand to make my fingers work properly again. No big deal. I can still bash my computer keyboards, hold menthol cigarettes and chocolate, open bottles of expensive wine and could probably handle sex with a stranger.

(No you couldn't, Sid, you'd be terrified!)

What I can't do is practise my new banjo or play guitar.

I didn't think this would be the end of the world. Since I stopped doing it seriously in pursuit of money and creative satisfaction my attitude has been very much take it or leave it.

Now, after an enforced lay-off of several months, I'm getting a terrible craving. David Crosby's name has popped into my mind many times. No, we're not back to sex with a stranger.

The ex-Byrd has lent (no, been paid handsdomely) for attaching his name to a quite expensive model of 12-string guitar. I have one in my loft. It's up there because it takes up space in my smallish flat and I thought I might never use it again.

Now I can't play it I miss it like mad. The chocolate thing. The wine thing.

The second guitar I ever bought, some 40-plus years ago, was a 12-string. As the name says, it has a dozen strings - like on a standard guitar but doubled up. I won't even start on the nerdish niche of strings sizes and tunings and all the rest. Wikipedia and Google will satisfy your curiosity if you really must know.

There aren't any famous current players in mainstream rock or pop. George Harrison famously played the first electric version and the sound has entered pop history with The Searchers.

It was the Hendrix preferred acoustic instrument of choice. Ry Cooder is a modern master, along with Leo Kottke, but it came to prominence in the hands of early blues and folk performers like Blind Willie McTell and Leadbelly. Peter Seeger pioneered its use.

You've seen 12-strings in the hands of David Bowie, John Denver, Roger Whittaker, Glen Campbell and, currently the highest profile rock user, Melissa Etheridge

I picked up on it through the recordings of Jesse Fuller (above), who worked as a one man band with a giant home-made double bass he played with his bare right foot. He's the guy who wrote San Francisco Bay Blues, known, if at all these days, through the unplugged version of Eric Clapton.

I met Jesse when he toured the UK back in the 60s folk boom and he showed me the chords to the song. It cost me a pint of cider. Because of the weird tunings of the 12-string I had learned it off his Folkways album in the wrong key. It never sounded right until he showed me what he was doing with it - different chord fingerings and voicings.

I suppose I've played it about three times a year ever since. It has to be on 12-string, of course.

Now I can't and I am going slowly mad. What am I going to do?

PS: I don't really smoke, eat chocolate or drink wine either ...