My friends were very proud of me as a guitar player and could come to blows with anybody who didn’t think their boy Steve was the best guitarist for ten towns. About 6 months after this gig at the park, my partner in crime Joe Despagni & I were waiting on one of those endless 4-hour lines to get into the midnight showing of “Rocky Horror Picture Show”. We started to talk to this group of guys that were in front of us on the line. One was a musician and naturally Joe started telling them that I played guitar. Not only did I play the guitar, but I was the blah-blah best guitar player blah-blah-blah etc. (Things like that are very important to the territorial mindsets of Long Island adolescents with barely any pubic hair).
Well this other guy started telling us about a guitar player he had seen who was better than me, and that even though he’s never seen me play, there’s no way I could be as good as this other guy. “He could blow my shit away!”. You know, teenage testosterone stuff. Well, this started to get Despagni a little angry and some words were exchanged. Right when the verbal dynamic was just about to get out of control and a rumble might have started, the guy says “fuck you man, this guy was playing the guitar behind his head and with his teeth and….” I said to the guy “wait a second, was this at Eisenhower Park, about 6 months ago, and the guy played a white Ventura double-neck guitar?” The guy says “yeah, what’s it to you?” I said “That was ME, dude!”. There was no fight that night.