There had been another thing about living in Rockford that I felt miserable about: my parents’ continued expectations that I become someone they could be proud of. Here I was, 25 years old, and going nowhere. The even traveled to Rockford for a week to visit me! I couldn’t ignore their subtle-but-constant pressuring.
I dealt with that in the traditional way: I ran away from home. Really. I quit that job in late December of 1969, packed up my things into my car, and left the Midwest to return to Northern California. I still had some friends there. And I did this without telling anyone – and certainly not my family. I just disappeared off their radar. Interestingly, as I was driving to California in the dead of Winter, I made several overnight stops during that trip; I parked the car, kept the ignition going and the heater on (it was freezing outside) all night long, and slept in the car. It was a 1968 six-cylinder Dodge Dart, a stick-shift car that NEVER let me down. I wish I still had it.
I arrived in the San Francisco Bay area just after Christmas of 1969, without a plan, job, or lodgings. I was 25 years old. I stayed on various friends’ couches here and there for a few months. I thought I’d be able to find a job fairly easily . . . but I didn’t. I applied for all kinds of jobs but didn’t get hired for any of them: I was overqualified, underqualified, outcompeted, etc. every time. I was running low on savings; so I got a job as a paperboy for the Oakland Tribune — delivering newspapers to people’s porches. It was an “Adult Paper Route” in which I delivered 200 newspapers in a section of Oakland, daily, seven days a week. I did that for 14 months.
That job took 2-½ to 3 hours a day. It wasn’t exactly stimulating work but it gave me enough of an income to survive, and a lot of free time. I was single and I could live on $300 a month. Lodgings-wise there were lots of inexpensive “communes”, rooms for rent, shared housing and such, for free-spirited (i.e., young and aimless) people . . . and I lived in a series of such places. I wasn’t exactly a hippie, but I could live like one. And I might add that though a lot of these “communes” were called that, they weren’t; they were comparatively cheap housing for people who had very little in common.
That was, however, my first experience of having any truly free time. Even in Peru my bosses always knew where I was. Now, no one knew where I was. I didn’t have to do anything other than that to pay my rent. It was as close to Heaven as I’d ever felt, even next to my rather unstructured and unscheduled day-to-day life in Peru. I audited some classes, played guitar, read, wandered around . . . and Art Brauner, the fellow in Wisconsin whom I’d met and who had so impressed me by making a guitar, came to mind. I’d liked the guitar since High School; and if he had made one . . . maybe I could too?! I certainly had the time to engage in a hobby. And I was utterly unaware of what would come out of this one.
So, I decided to give it a try. I made a workbench with some 2x4s and half of a ping-pong table, got some guitar woods, a few hand tools . . . and Irving Sloane’s book Classical Guitar Making . . . and, working in the dilapidated garage of the shared house I was living in at the time, I started to make a guitar! Sloane’s book was perfect for those times: it instructed the reader in how to make one’s own tools and parts — from purfling cutters to clamps to rosettes to bending forms to molds and jigs. I even made my own thickness caliper out of coat-hanger wire and a bolt and nut. Not all that long afterwards the need to make one’s own tools vanished, as supply houses sprang up that would sell you anything you needed and a lot of stuff you didn’t. That first guitar took me a year to complete. It wasn’t, honestly, the best guitar ever made . . . but it was 100% mine. I made it with an electric power drill and a few hand tools. As far as making the guitar mold itself I glued together a block of wood, took it to a woodshop, and paid them $9 to bandsaw my guitar outline out of it. I didn’t notice that that quickly-bandsawn mold wasn’t symmetrical, and for a long time my guitars were a bit lumpy and lopsided. (They may be collectors’ items by now.)
Making the guitar had been a hobby project. But friends of mine who knew about it started to ask me to tweak the action on their guitars, do fretwork, and to fix minor cracks and fractures, and to do various other not-too-complicated things that they were unwilling or unable to do by themselves. And they paid me to do it! Wow! I’d discovered a new source of income! With this newfound realization that I might be able to do something remunerative other than to deliver newspapers, I began to canvass more widely for guitar-related repair work. Using the guitar I’d made as a calling card, I went to all the music stores in my area and offered to do repair work for them, if they had any they were willing to let me do. Several of these accepted my offer to pick up repair work from their stores, do the fixes, and return them. And they paid me. I also put quite a bit of effort into driving to both the San Francisco and Oakland airports and visiting EVERY airline, with an offer to do repairs on any airlines-related guitar damage. I knew people who’d had guitars damaged during air flights, (United Airlines was at the time the worst in this regard). As for myself, I was so young and innocent that I didn’t even have business cards when I visited the airlines offices: I gave them xeroxes with my name, address, and number on it. I think I must have seemed very cute to them.
It also occurred to me to contact every jigsaw-puzzle company I could find, and ask them whether they’d consider turning out jigsaw puzzles of some of my guitars. None of them took me up on my offer . . . but given how I’d grown up not feeling permission to do anything of my own accord I’m astonished to know that I actually took the initiative to do any of these things. Wow indeed. In my childhood and young adulthood, at home, I’d not been allowed any initiative whatsoever. This was a new realm of life!!!
At one point, in late 1971, I was living in two rooms in a shared house, and had very little going for me other than the fact that I’d made one guitar. As I’d mentioned, I used that guitar to solicit repair work. A few stores were willing . . . although I didn’t get enough work from them. So I went down to City Hall and bought a Business License for $20, and became official. I put up an “L” shaped post made of 4×4 wood, in front of that house (it was zoned for business) and suspended a beaten-up guitar on the horizontal bar, with some screw-hooks. I painted the word “repairs” on both side of that guitar and I was off and running like a herd of turtles. And I repeat: no one had told me to do this; I did it on my own! That I could do so was a revelation.
It was in this period that I met Denis Grace, a classical guitar-maker in Berkeley. He was the first guitar maker I ever got to know. I did some repair work for him that he was too busy to get to. And I think I did it well. He offered me use of one of his workbenches at his shop – which was a step up for me because my workbench space was minimal — and Denis had a bandsaw, sander, and drill press that I could use! I made my second and third guitars in his shop – and as it was an established business to which customers came, I got to meet some actual guitar players. And a few makers: Gabe Souza, Mario Martello, Campbell Coe, Richard Bruné, Eugene Clark, and Warren White, who were some of the earliest American guitar makers. Actually, Gabe Souza was Portuguese and Mario Martello was Argentine, and Campbell Coe was a guitar repairman. But as makers of guitars, Clark and White were two of the very first American pioneers.
[SIDEBAR: I should tell you that for an American to have turned to guitar making before 1965 was an act of foolish optimism. As I’ve mentioned, NO American was doing artisanal guitar making work at the time. There were a few Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, Spaniards, etc. doing such work in this country . . . but they all came out of cultures that had long histories of support for artisanal work. The United States had almost NOTHING of that type then. No American guitar maker was in any position whatsoever to know anything about guitar making aside from looking into some handmade Spanish or factory-made steel string guitar soundboxes. It should not be surprising, then, that every one of the very early American guitar makers I ever met was a bona-fide oddball and/or misfit who could not have tolerated having a regular job and a boss to be responsible to. I’m not passing judgment on these pioneers; I’m just describing them as being far outside of the mainstream. And, to be honest, I myself meet those criteria. Today, however, an American lutherie tradition does exist, and people who are attracted to the work no longer need to be weirdos.]
After I’d known Denis Grace for about a year, he told me that he was leaving the guitar making business to go back to school in Oregon . . . and would I be interested in taking operation of the shop over? I’d never done anything remotely similar to that, and I really had no idea what that entailed. But I was a lowly and inexperienced itinerant luthier/repairman at the time, and I literally didn’t have anything better to do. I agreed. And as of March 1, 1972, I took over the running of The Guitar Workshop in Berkeley, California. Looking back, I owe Denis for a lot of my start in lutherie.
1972 was also the year that I signed up to be a member of the Guild of American Luthiers, the first such organization anywhere that served (mostly) the guitar-making crowd. The G.A.L. was headquartered in Tacoma, Washington, and it was a Godsend for me – and every aspiring luthier around. It was a national organization of people who shared my passion and interest. It was, in a way, my professional family. I was a member until about 2005, until which time I attended almost every convention that the G.A.L. had. I also wrote articles for its newsletters, gave lectures, did workshops, had discussion sessions, and donated equipment and materials for the G.A.L.’s fundraising auctions. The G.A.L. has since the beginning been under the leadership of Tim Olsen, whom I admire for his tireless efforts over the past 50 or so years in holding together an organization that was dedicated to the furthering of my profession, dissemination of information about this work, and also guiding the organization through some pretty rocky growing pains. I take my hat off to him. I would not be the luthier I am today without having everything that I’ve known and done having been filtered through repeated and faithful attendance at the conventions over a long span of time. Both Tim and the G.A.L. have been important to me past my ability to verbalize.
Attendance at G.A.L. events notwithstanding, I still had a lot to learn. I mainly wanted to make guitars, and I did make a handful of them in the early years; but they were not very good. Plus, no one knew me. This was waaay before being able to spread the word through the internet, discussion sites, or even magazines to take out ads in. I got most of my income for about the first eight years through doing repair and restoration work, supplemented by a part-time job teaching, and by countless (mostly unsuccessful) backstage meetings with guitar players who came through town – from Tony Rice to Leo Kottke to Emmylou Harris to Bob Dylan to Julian Bream to Paco de Lucia . . . and zillions of others . . . as my way of advertising myself.
I should say that while my association with the G.A.L. carried me through the lean times, it wasn’t so much an education for me as it was a reason to keep on working. The two most important educational experiences I had were, first, doing every possible kind of repair and restoration work you can imagine, for some eight years. I worked on guitars of all kinds, banjos, mandolins, harps, dulcimers, zithers, balalaikas, sitars, sarods, kotos, African stringed instruments, thumb pianos, bandonions (they’re small accordions), drums and drumsticks, and whatever else you could possibly think of. I learned a hell of a lot about woods and strings and fixes and instruments and how their parts worked together. I also learned a lot about what happened to a guitar’s sound when you did this or that to its top or back. But along with that, I have to tell you that it was a hard way to make any kind of living. I grossed $1800 the first year. I grossed $2500 the second year. I grossed $3500 the third year. I had a part-time job teaching guitar and wood-sculpting at a nearby school, to supplement my otherwise low income. It would be impossible to survive at that level now.
The second most educational experience I had was at the Carmel Classic Guitar Festival of 1977 which was, for me, one of the best disasters I’ve ever had.