After winning a guitar on the radio Paul tuned his ears to rock and learned the ins and outs of amps, pedals, and guitar tones.

I won a guitar off the radio when I was 15, and they were actually, this will also show my age, they were having a contest to show how fast the yellow pages were. So you call in to the radio station they would say, “look, we want you to look up Forty-one Fifteen, and if you can do it under 30 seconds, you win the prize.” And the day that I called in it was a guitar. And so that's what it was like. You know in the Simpsons when it's like “the Simp-sons?” It was like the guitar came down, so from then on, it was everything else in my life just kind of went away.

“Which guitar was it? Do you still have that one, from the contest?”

Oh no. In Mississippi, there's Peavy, and it was like a Strat copy, probably terrible, I think it was a Peavey Predator. I wish I still had it, it would probably be cool now. That guitar lasted a few months. I ended up getting... so the store that the radio station partnered with, it kind of felt like an inside job once I got in there because I had the guitar, but it's like, “well you need an amp you know...you need some pedals” or whatever. So I started working at the guitar store. The guy that was kind of the head of the department after hours he would be like, “hey pull that guitar down. This is what a Tele sounds like. This is what a strat sounds like. This is what, you know, a Marshal or a Fender, or whatever” And I started to hear that stuff on the records I was listening to and then it was like, “okay, well I want to be able to do that.” And so I just started kind of collecting with the money I was making on the road.