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Here is the story of the strangest acquisition in my gear collection.

(This shouldn’t be confused with the weirdest piece of gear I’ve owned – there are many contenders for that title – but the Gibson/Maestro Rhythm N Sound – a one man band box that I was able to play the most horrific / glorious Shaggs inspired bongo, bass and guitar travesty of the intro to Stairway to Heaven imaginable on takes that title.)

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Back when I was at Berklee, I took a job at a music store in Cambridge called Sandy’s Music, which is still owned  by Sandy Sheehan.  Sandy is one of the greatest guys I have known and I have a full book’s worth of wonderful and strange stories from various experiences I had working there.

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The store had some new inventory, but it’s specialty was in funky used acoustic and electric guitars.  We used to get no name guitars in all the time and set them up to put them out the door.  We’d get really nice pieces in sometimes and then some real (cough) challenges.  In the beat to crap strap of one of these, I found a pretty cool guitar pick.

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Here’s the front:

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And here’s the back:

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At the time I was experimenting with a number of heavier picks and thought I would give this one a try.  The pick’s edge really dug into the strings.  I noticed that the pick helped a lot with clarity.  The little grip in the back worked really well and the pick didn’t slip out of my fingers at all.  There wasn’t a lot of clearance past my finger:

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but it worked really well.  And the “Speed King“ label was really amusing to me as I just assumed that it was supposed to designed to assist with fast playing.

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Soon it was my go-to pick.  I just absolutely adored it and found myself using it over and over again.  I started trying to research the pick and couldn’t find out anything so I contacted Pickboy in New York directly and asked about ordering more of the same pick.  The person I talked with informed me  that the pick is based on a Ritchie Blackmore pick (“Oh…THAT Speed King“).  He had been making his own picks for years and then worked out a deal with Pickboy for a pick line.  Once they were done, apparently Blackmore decided that he didn’t want them distributed and bought up the inventory.

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There are a series of articles on Blackmore’s picks on Pick Collecting Quarterly.

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Here are links to : Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.

Here’s a quote from Part 3, “Finally there is an extremely rare version of the embedded metal plate nylon pick that is nearly impossible to find anymore.  It is called the Speed King pick.  This term refers back to the early days of Deep Purple when their record album entitled ‘In Rock’ contained a song called ‘Speed King’.  Blackmore was sometimes referred to as the Speed King on guitar since his early live shows and Deep Purple records contained guitar solos that were considered very fast for that time period.  This pick is not only rare for what is printed on the plate, but the color of the plate was the copper finish.  This pick came in two versions with a slight difference.  Both are white with the copper plate and have Speed King printed in a script style font on the front.  On the back of one is the familiar phrase “THIS IS MY F**KING PICK”, but on the back of the other version there can be seen the Pickboy logo with Tokyo printed under it in all caps in a small font.  Even though the Speed King picks are promotional, some collectors still consider them the holy grails of the nylon Blackmore picks.”

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It’s bizarre to me that something so physically small can be the rarest piece of guitar related “gear” I own.  Truth really is stranger than fiction.

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