Loyd Grossman

He’s a renowned gastronome, but not a lot of people know Loyd’s also a pretty tasty guitarist – so how will he digest the 10 questions we ask everyone?

1 What was your first guitar?

“The very first one was a pretty useless acoustic whose only merit was that it had a very nice painting of a Hawaiian hula girl on it. By the time I was 13 I was desperate to get an electric and I fancied a blue Strat that was in the window of one of the local music stores, but I was encouraged to get something that wouldn’t just limit me to playing rock ’n’ roll. The result was what I felt was not a very good compromise, a Gretsch Tennessean, which I got when I was about 15 or 16 years old.”

2 Suppose the building was burning down, which guitar from your collection would you save?

“I would probably take my black, double-cutaway Gretsch Duo Jet. That was the first guitar that I bought that I totally fell in love with. I’d been to see Humble Pie and Frampton and Marriot were both playing Duo Jets and they looked so fabulous and they sounded so great that I said, ‘I have got to get one of those.’ Then, about three or four months later I found this beautiful secondhand black Duo Jet in a music store in New York and I got it home and it sounded nothing like Frampton or Marriot!”

3 What’s the oldest guitar that you own?