How to go
Who: Noah Wotherspoon
When: 9 p.m. Friday, Aug. 13
Where: Buckeye Sports Lodge, 126 W. High St.
Cost: $5
SPRINGFIELD — It’s a friend.
It’s a confidant.
It’s his guitar.
“I can’t imagine having a bigger bond,” Noah Wotherspoon said of his Stevie Ray Vaughan signature-model Fender Strat. “It’d be hard to find another main squeeze.”
Oh, he has a girlfriend, too, but he and that guitar are meant to be together.
He got the guitar when he was 14, and it helped him to become Dayton’s adolescent king of the blues at just 16.
Now 28 and living in Cincinnati, Wotherspoon will naturally have the SRV Strat in tow when he returns to the Buckeye Sports Lodge Friday, Aug. 13, for just his second-ever Springfield gig.
“This show will definitely be a blues-rock sort of show,” he said. “A lot of guitar.”
And if you don’t believe in stuff like true love, consider that around 2003, six guitars were stolen from Wotherspoon’s home.
The only one he ever got back was the Stevie Ray Strat.
Wotherspoon started playing at 11, and rid himself of video games at 13.
When he first heard the blues, “Something just resonated,” he said. “And it still does.
“Still when I hear Hound Dog Taylor or Albert King or even Stevie, it’s like an ongoing revelation. It goes to your core.”
Initially, he might have been seen as just a kid who could play astonishingly good guitar — Dayton’s version of Jonny Lang or Kenny Wayne Shepherd.
Now he’s a guy who can, well, still play astonishingly good guitar.
“I’ve never had any big material dreams,” Wotherspoon confessed. “The guitar I have, I can’t replace.”
Contact this reporter at (937) 328-0352 or amcginn@coxohio.com.
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