Still Playing

There is a photograph of a man in a white polo shirt at an outdoor gig sometime in the 1980s, playing a pink paisley Fender Telecaster on a tooled leather strap.

There is another photograph, taken this decade, of Graham Nicholson at the bar of the Cadillac Ranch Restaurant in headphones, playing the same guitar, on the same strap.

It is him in both. The strap settles it — the tooling spells out his own name, and you can read the tail of it in the older frame.

Nothing written about him mentions that instrument. It took the family's own photographs to establish it, and it may be the truest single fact in the archive. Fifty-two years, one guitar.

Where it came from

In 1974 his friend Larry Cox — a well-known steel guitar player — telephoned and told him to bring $400 over, or he would be sorry.

He went. He opened the case. Inside was a 1969 Fender Pink Paisley Telecaster.

He knew exactly what he was looking at, because James Burton played a Pink Paisley in the TCB Band behind Elvis Presley. In his own words: James was my hero.

He took it to the gig that same night. Every guitar plays slightly differently, so he worked the first set on his black Telecaster, which was the sensible thing to do. Curious, he put the Paisley on for the second set.

That was the last time he played anything else at a gig.

Smokey Tyler made him the strap that goes with it: custom pink, silver striping, his own name tooled into the leather.

And the rest of it

Starstruck karaoke still runs at the Cadillac Ranch Restaurant every Wednesday and Thursday, now on a digital system with more than 220,000 songs. Which is to say the thing he carried home from Kyoto is still running, in his own room, forty-odd years later.

He held a 200-ton Merchant Marine officer's licence and ran charters out of Stamford for years before coming ashore — that is its own chapter.

In December 2025 the Southington Regional Chamber of Commerce board selected him as the 2026 Gail DePaolo Community Service Award recipient. He collected it at the Aqua Turf in March.

He is in his eighties.

And he owns a sweatshirt that reads: Never underestimate an old man who still plays guitar in his eighties.

He wears it to the Ranch.