Power Chord: One Man's Ear-Splitting Quest To Find His Guitar Heroes, by Thomas Scott McKenzie

"She's my shovel," Brad Gillis said when I asked about the battered Stratocaster his guitar tech had shown me on the side of the stage. It's a 1962 model that he obtained in 1979 when a friend abandoned a project to paint the guitar. It wasn't a huge acquisition at the time because the guitar player had a black Les Paul Custom that he adored. But he started customizing the Strat on a bit of a lark.

"I had a Datsun 240Z that was custom painted with red-orange paint," he said. "I had an extra can left over for touch up. I sold the car, but still had the paint. I thought, 'Shit, I'll paint this guitar in car red.' I took it to a body shop."

He then had the neck and headstock painted black, which was an unusual treatment back then. He added a Floyd Rose tremolo, changed the pickups, and made numerous other alterations.

"Whatever the hell I wanted," he said. "An extra fret, locking nuts, tuners, I changed everything. Then I started playing and I thought, 'This is a fucking great guitar.'" The instrument has never been far from his side for the last thirty years.

The interesting thing about workhorse guitars is how they are treated with both reverence and abandon by their owners. These instruments contain decades of memories, successes, and failures. They carry the scars of tens of thousands of miles on the road. They often have the dried blood of musicians caked in cracks and crevices. On his website, Steve Vai writes movingly about one of his instruments that he calls Evo:

Although Evo is just made out of wire and wood, I'm afraid of how much emotional investment I have in her. I think when you play an instrument long enough it becomes an extension of yourself in ways that run deeper than anyone may understand but you . . . For me, Evo has been the voice of my heart and seen the depth of my most depressed emotional frames of mind to my most euphoric moments of joy and divine love, and she usually gets the brunt of it all. I have cried, screamed, prayed, and bled through that instrument, and like I said, although she is only wire and wood, there is an emotional investment in her. I'm afraid at how much I love her

Musicians aren't the only ones to cherish their guitars. As fans, we invest tremendous sentimental value (and therefore, a cold hard cash value) in the instruments that produced our favorite songs -- enough value that celebrity-owned guitars fetch huge amounts at auction. Eric Clapton's Fender Stratocaster, nicknamed Blackie, brought an astounding $959,500 at a Christie's auction in 2004. Slowhand sold the instrument, along with many others from his collection, to raise money for his drug rehab program in the Caribbean. The idea of parting ways with the guitar didn't seem to bother him, at least not when compared with the good work the money would make possible. But I went out and purchased a lottery ticket, hoping to win enough to buy the guitar. My plan was to win the auction and then loan the guitar back to Clapton. It just didn't seem right -- in my mind -- that he should be without the guitar. After his passing, maybe it would come back to me or to a museum.

But in spite of the fervor with which the instruments are honored, the musicians still manage to thrash them around every night. I've seen Vai play his cherished Evo with such abandon and fury that I thought he would rip it apart onstage. It felt like watching a cheetah tear into a gazelle on Wild Kingdom.

Brad Gillis was no different with his beloved '62 Strat.

"I still beat the shit out of that guitar," he said. "I'm still playing it hard."

Mr. Gillis, with shovel.