Family

To turn a great line from literature on its head, "It is the worst of times. It is the best of times."

It's been a year and a half since my last post. To say the least, it's been an eventful time. Some of it I'll write about, some of it I shall not. I said in the beginning that this is to be a blog about the intersection of art and guitars, and that is still my intention. Stay tuned.

But first, please indulge me as I write about something more wonderful than art.

I returned to my beloved hometown of Atlanta a year ago, unexpectedly, unemployed, and unprepared. It has been the most amazing year of my life. My parents long-ago deceased, I tumbled into the warm embrace of my siblings and our extended family.

And I found that the answer to my needs lay more in theirs than it did in my own.

I'm the youngest of six by a country mile, 12 years junior to the one they called "baby" before I was born. I have little use for the term "in-law". My brothers and sisters married when I was a kid, and "in-law" implies a degree of separation which simply does not exist in my heart.

I came home to see my sister "in-law" sliding into the terminal stages of ALS (better known as Lou Gehrig's Disease), and my eldest brother "in-law" afflicted with chronic conditions too numerous to list here, my brother and sister exhausting themselves as caregivers, and...

...Beauty in the face of adversity.

While our television networks search far and wide to broadcast the most dysfunctional families imaginable, I witnessed, from within, a truly functional family. The phone rings. "I'm coming over. What do you need?" A child flies in from halfway across the continent to "hang out for a few days, just to visit". My brother is dragged away for lunch so he can experience a bit of normalcy amid a week of hell...

I have the honor of being a part of this.

Our beloved sister (not "in-law") Robyn succumbed to ALS on Thanksgiving Eve. Our beloved brother (not "in-law") Charlie faces major surgery, again, tomorrow at age 80.

With them we stand. If this be not art, what is?

George Jetson- Bluesman or Shredder?

I was a young boy in the late 1950's and early '60's. I remember Sputnik orbiting our planet, the advent of NASA and true space exploration, and the wide-eyed wonder with which my pals and I looked to the future.

Predictions were everywhere, from artists' renderings of cities to come on the covers of Popular Science Magazine, Futurama expos at world's fairs, and amazing bubble-roofed show car designs, to even the cartoons we made a part of our weekly lives.

I don't recall cartoon dad George Jetson playing any type of musical instrument. If he did, it was probably a bunch of buttons connected to an oscilloscope. But if he had been a guitar player, his axe would surely have been as evolved as his flying car.

Thanks to J. Backlund Designs, you can have George Jetson's guitar today, without enduring a risky round trip in a time machine. I met designer John Backlund and his partners at the Newport Guitar Festival several weeks ago. Their guitars hit the overgrown kid in me right where I live, in a soul rooted in yesterday, and excited about tomorrow.

Cool, but will it play?

Turning the discussion back to the meeting of guitars and art, two weeks ago I was invited by Ft. Lauderdale luthier John Dell'Isola to attend the Newport Guitar Festival. The occasion for us was the debut of a new model for John, which I had covered in hand-stained cowhide.

John is a relatively new presence on the custom guitar-building scene, but the reaction his guitars garnered from numerous seasoned players at the show indicate that he is off to a terrific start. He has had a vision since starting his business of making a leather-covered guitar. One of John's friends spotted my work at a nearby art festival, and passed my card along to him. We met and exchanged ideas, and agreed to try the concept out, the goal being to have a finished guitar done in time for the Newport show. Here, you can see the result.

The big debate among some of John's fellow builders as we got into making this piece was whether or not the leather "skin" would dampen the tonal characteristics of the guitar. The consensus was that the relatively porous cowhide would muffle the sustain. I chose a very dense, thin tooling hide for the job, and laminated it to the unfinished body with contact cement to minimize counteracting vibrations. I sniffed enough glue in the process to render me legally stupid for awhile, but it was worth it. The look on Josh "The Pitbull of Blues" Rowand's face when he test-played our creation at the show said more than any written gear review could ever express.

I don't get it.

I bought a new car the other day. I've been wanting a ride that hearkens back to the glory days of the American muscle car, a politically-incorrect, fire-breathing monster that can melt a set of new tires in a single weekend. I found the embodiment of my dream in the new Dodge Challenger SRT, over 400 horsepower's worth. But before I took delivery, I paid the dealership an extra $500.00 to run some medium-grit sandpaper over the paint and dent the right front fender, so nobody would think I was a novice at driving a serious V8. They were so grateful for the sale that they threw in a modest crack in the windshield, at no extra charge.

Okay, so I'm not selling enough Seventh String Guitar Straps yet to afford a new hot rod. And if I was, I'd be waxing it twice a week, not trying to make it look abused. So I'm missing the point of master-built, custom-crafted guitars with expensive lacquer sanded down to bare wood in key areas, nicks and gouges in others, and the best available hardware corroded with carefully-applied acid.

I am an accomplished and experienced leathersmith, and I make the nicest guitar strap you'll ever use. But I cannot string three chords together on a guitar. If I buy an artificially aged instrument, will you believe I used to jam with Hendrix? Will you look at the wear and tear on it and say, "Hey, this guy's got some heavy stories to tell"? Or will you think I fished it out of the dumpster behind a nearby pawn shop?

Guitar collectors and aficionados, God bless all of you for the energy, the enthusiasm and, yes, the capital you are infusing into the premium musical instrument market during these lean times. May your passion somehow pay you back a hundredfold. But when you buy a nice new guitar, buy a nice new guitar, and let the battle scars come from the times it enjoys with you.

Elegant Simplicity

From the visually complex Goldbug Hombre, I turn here to a guitar that I think is beautiful because of its flawlessly-executed minimalism.

Obviously, the primary objective for any serious guitar maker must be "playability", the physical properties of the instrument which allow it to effectively translate the intentions and skills of the musician into music. Only within the confines of playability can form be fruitfully wedded to function.

Collings Guitars in Austin, Texas has been well-known and respected for its acoustic guitars and mandolins for quite some time. They are now offering electric models as well, my favorite of which is the 290. Bells and whistles are conspicuously absent here. The design itself is hardly revolutionary. What is evident to me is the lengths to which the Collings team went in the preparation and finishing of this guitar.

Some of the guitar straps I make are quite elaborately tooled, like the Celtic Classic pictured on this page. But I love making the harness-leather straps at least as much as I do the fancy ones. On these, I'm able to focus completely on the basics of the craftsmanship, and the resulting product gives me a great deal of satisfaction. I imagine the folks at Collings get similarly warm feelings from the sight and feel of a completed "basic" Model 290.

Don't Mess With the Guitarist

Some of Cousin Dennis' stories from his earlier club-playing days lead me to think that the bottle-throwing, redneck bar scene from The Blues Brothers is not entirely fictional. For playing in the roughest of roadhouses, perhaps this offering from Goldbug Guitars is the way to go. This is a very limited-edition model, and one of the most unique and imaginative guitars I've seen.

Though I do make custom leather guitar straps, I did not have a hand in fashioning the cartridge-belt strap or any of the other leather adornments on "The Hombre". Looks to me like the work was done by a good holster maker.

The price? $11,900.00. Only 56 are projected to be made.

The Job I Wanted to Turn Away

"Are you sure you want to do this?" I asked our customer.

I was the gunslinger, the lead custom shop guy, for the leather goods shop I worked for in Doraville, (Cue Atlanta Rhythm Section), Georgia. The customer was a really nice guy, and he said so little about his music that I figured he was a good enough guitarist to let his playing speak for itself.

Seems he had a new gig, a good one, in a country band, and he had it in mind to "countrify" his guitar. What he wanted was a custom leather piece added to the face, with inlays and multiple rows of closely spaced stitching like you'd see on a pair of good western boots.

Now, I had done my share of that type of design when my old partner and I had worked with Ralph Lauren's folks on his Polo Western line, so I told the customer that it would be no problem, just bring his guitar in and we'd see what we needed to do.

He did. I'm still no expert on guitars and their relative quality and value, but what this guy brought in was a Gibson Les Paul that appeared to my untrained eye to be more than an entry-level model, and it was in flawless condition. The problem? The only way I could see to add the leather panel was to cement it to the face, and that meant (I can feel you guitar aficionados cringing even as I write this) scuffing the gorgeous lacquer finish so that the glue would have a good surface to bond onto.

My job was to encourage customers to have custom work done, the fancier the better, but oh, that guitar; I tried, quietly but earnestly, to talk the guy out of having me do the job, really more for my sake and the guitar's than his, but yes, he was sure he wanted it done.

So I painted a mustache, albeit a carefully-crafted one, on the Mona Lisa. The customer was delighted when he saw the completed work, and my boss was delighted when the customer paid with cash, but I still feel guilty.

I never saw the customer or the guitar again. I hope they're still making beautiful music together.