As I’ve been saying: when I began making my first guitar, in 1970, I was more or less a (clean) hippie — that is, a bearded and well-showered young man who was living on the edges of the mainstream culture, and not going in any particular direction in life. Looking back, I’m of the opinion that everyone ought to have such a period in their lives — a sort of gap year, even if it lasts more than a year — in which they are relatively free to bump into people and things that they would not have encountered had they been on some career track . . . in whatever form or forms such things tend to come in.
A BRIEF REITERATION OF WHAT I’VE ALREADY SAID
As I’d also said, I embarked on my first guitar-making project casually; as far as I knew it was going to be a hobby-project to tide me over until I got a “real” job. I didn’t know any American guitar makers in those days; I had not even heard of anyone outside of Spain or Germany to be making guitars by hand. Still, I’d spend a Summer in Spain and hung out around some of the luthiers’ shops in Granada. And earlier, when I was in grad school in Wisconsin I’d met a man, Art Brauner, whom I’ve mentioned before, who had built a guitar with the help of Irving Sloane’s pioneering book Classic Guitar Making. He did it just to have made one, after he’d taken his own damaged guitar into a repair shop to have his guitar re-topped; he wasn’t all that impressed with the work and he thought he could do at least an equally good job. I was mightily impressed; having been a student much more than anything else in my young life I’d not produced much of anything other than whatever could be put on a piece of paper — but this fellow had made a real three-dimensional object! And later, when I was making my first guitar, I met Denis Grace, a Berkeley luthier who was the first “real” guitar maker I ever met in this country. I got a lot of support from Denis and, overall, I am seriously indebted to both of these men.
No one in my family had ever puttered with hobbies, done woodwork in the basement, played sports, built models from kits, made furniture, or anything like that. Well . . . we were immigrants. From Hungary. And like immigrants everywhere my parents spoke their new country’s language badly, and started at the bottom, and worked very hard to survive. Immigrants (if they aren’t bringing money with them) and refugees (who by definition have no money) work very hard indeed. So, my parents never had time for a hobby, or even to just sit down and read a book. And they INSISTED that I go to school and get an education; I was going to redeem all the hardships they’d endured. Well, given their histories and life experiences, I can understand that they NEEDED something to tell them that it had not been all in vain. I’m afraid I disappointed them. And it’s too late now to tell them that I’ve achieved some success.
MY FIRST GUITAR
It’s amazing that I survived the first years of lutherie. Having been an English major in college, I’d had training in how to write grammatically correct sentences using properly spelled words, and correct punctuation. But, otherwise, I started with no training, no experience, no knowledge, few tools, no teachers, no work discipline, no professional standards, and marginal skills. Still, I survived, and made a few guitars each year . . . and along with that the repair and restoration work became my real education in musical instrument woodworking. Because I played flamenco music I was making mostly Spanish (classic and flamenco) guitars, as well as lutes, zithers, and dulcimers. I had made a few steel string instruments but, not knowing any better, I was merely making big Spanish guitars with metal strings, that didn’t hold up to such string tension very well. I felt more or less pleased to think of myself as a luthier. I think the romance of it kept me going.
Income-wise, I grossed $1800 my first year. I grossed $2500 my second year, and I grossed $3500 my third year. And I had a part-time job teaching guitar and wood carving at a nearby school, to supplement my income. It didn’t help that for my first two years the Telephone Company neglected to include me to the telephone listings and telephone books. I had a phone, but no one knew about it. I tried to sue the phone company but they put up a defense that made it o.k. for them to have done that. To “make up” for this oversight the phone company gave me a discount on the monthly telephone bill; so I got a 50%-of-cost telephone service and a 100% anonymity.
I didn’t really face up to how inadequate and amateurish my work was until 1977, when I was put in a situation where I could not ignore it. That year I was invited to display my guitars, as one of seven exhibiting luthiers, at the important Carmel Classic Guitar Festival. I’d been building guitars for five or six years by then and felt happy to be invited to show my work. I can tell you that while my parents could not begin to fathom what I was doing making guitars when I could have had such a promising career doing something reasonable, my friends had been supportive and encouraging to me in my guitar making efforts. Guess which set of people I put my faith in. In any event, I went to Carmel feeling a little cocky and smug, thinking to impress the people there just as I had wowed my friends.
THE CARMEL CLASSIC GUITAR FESTIVAL
Carmel is an upscale vacation community four hours’ drive from San Francisco. The guitar festival — the first one I’d ever gone to — was a prestigious event that drew important people from all over this country and even a few from overseas. It had been organized by a prominent local classical guitar teacher, Guy Horn, to whom I remain indebted to this day. Among my fellow exhibitors were Jeffrey Elliott, Lester DeVoe, Randy Angella, and John Mello — all of whom went on to support themselves by making Spanish guitars.
The festival was a disastrous failure for me. I had expected the public to respond to my work with admiring approval, as my friends had. But what really happened was that my work was publicly revealed, in its full and splendidly careless amateurishness, as the worst and clumsiest work in the entire show. Visitors to my table looked at my work and asked “why is your bridge on crooked?” and other subtle questions like that. The three-day long event was a dismal, humiliating, and sobering experience and I came back from that event severely shaken and depressed. My friends had, in fact, been no help to me at all with their uncritical kindness: I hadn’t learned anything. I stared at the fact that I had been more or less wasting my time living out a sixties fantasy. It stared back at me. It wasn’t exactly that I’d been doing bad work . . . but I’d thought my work was good enough and let slide things that I should have known better than that; I was really lacking any sense of professional standards. Understandably, I experienced a crisis. It became clear to me that I should quit making guitars and do something else, or buckle down and do better work. It was a stark yes-no sort of realization. It took me several months of unscrambling my brain, and re-evaluating, to get in touch with the fact that I actually liked making guitars, and that “good enough” wasn’t really good enough. Oddly enough, I hadn’t really known this before. But I saw that I liked the work enough to stick with it and do it better. That was my real start in lutherie.
MY REAL START IN LUTHERIE
I still remember the day that I had my epiphany. It’s odd, I think, to not have known that before, even though I’d been doing it for a while. But I remember that I was struck by that thought suddenly . . . several months after the Carmel disaster. It had the impact of clarity comparable to that of finding out that your wife has been lying to you. And that epiphany was my real starting point as a guitar maker.
It was within a year of that decision to do the best work I could, and not let things slide, that I started to make “real” steel string guitars. The timing worked out: I was starting to meet a lot of steel string guitar players in that period — and specifically the first of my Windham Hill contacts, which were to become important for me.
The timing was fortuitous in a larger sense too: that was when the making of better steel-string guitars was beginning to make a blip on the cultural radar. The folk and rock (and other) movements of the sixties and seventies had certainly sparked the playing of guitars . . . by white people, and in the bigger coastal urban centers. Jazz and blues had been around since at least the 40s, rock’n’roll had been around since the 50s, and cowboy and country-western had been growing since at least the 1930s (when the radio came into being) . . . but these had been incubated in the American heartland, not the big cities, and the first of these wasn’t mainstream or white enough . . . but all the famous folk and popular singers, players, duets, and groups who sang and played “folk music” (i.e., not jazz, ethnic, or rock’n’roll) in the 1960s and 70s — such as Peter, Paul and Mary, the Mamas and the Papas, Bob Dylan, the Weavers, Dave van Ronk, Johnny Cash, the Carter family, Simon and Garfunkel, Roy Orbison, Ricky Nelson, Ian and Sylvia, the Limelighters, the Beatles, the Everly Brothers, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Kate Wolf, the New Christy Minstrels, Phil Ochs, Joan Baez, the Kingston Trio, etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. — all of whom were white and no one thought twice about any of that — were bringing their music to other white people in the larger central and coastal cities. And they were all using store-bought guitars; handmade ones had not quite yet come into the picture. But they soon would.
A PEEK AT THE LARGER CONTEXT
Enter the Windham Hill music label. It started something new, in the early 1970s: the first recordings of solo guitar music that were of the quality and clarity of classical and orchestral recordings. And that was when recording steel string guitar artists started to notice that their commercially made instruments had limitations: they didn’t play perfectly in tune, and they were also difficult to record in high fidelity; their sound was so uneven that the guitars needed a lot of studio equalization. Translation: they were a pain to deal with.
The appearance of individually made guitars was just starting to get off the ground when the Carmel Classic Guitar Festival happened. It was the first event I’d heard of that was any kind of showcase for luthiers’ work. The Guild of American Luthiers, which was to be the first meeting place for (young) Americans who were interested in this kind of work, was formed in 1972 and became THE lutherie event for all of us young guys. In fact, the president, Tim Olsen, decided pretty early on in the game to not have an interest in inviting the public; he wanted this to be an event by the lutherie community and for the lutherie community. One of the fortunate doors that opened up for me at about that time, as I said, was the Windham Hill door; it turned out to be one of the most important ones that had ever opened up for me. I want to stress that that would not have happened had I not had such a disgraceful showing at the Carmel Classic Guitar Festival. That turned out to be one of the most-horrible-and-yet-beneficial things I’d ever experienced.
I was lucky in just being able to have a relationship to the Windham Hill musicians. The epicenter of that musical ferment was in Palo Alto, the site of Stanford University, and I was living only an hour away from it. It helped that I’d figured some things out about guitars by then; I’d had six years of experience that I finally began to pay serious attention to after the shock of the Carmel Festival; and my instruments were by then finally good enough that people could consider playing and buying. I had figured out a few things about guitars by then. I had, for one thing, done many “tuning compensation” adjustments to increase a particular commercially made guitar’s ability to play in tune; none of them play perfectly in tune. And my work was cleaner.
Ironically, it all concerned steel string guitars, which I did not play. And my connecting with the Windham Hill musicians started accidentally, in much the same way that you meet your future wife at a party that you’d been casually invited to. A friend had invited me to go with him to a guitar concert; the featured performers were two guitarists whom I’d never heard of, Will Ackerman and Alex de Grassi. And I was thunderstruck by Alex de Grassi’s music: it rang in my head for days afterwards. It got TO me and INTO me. I eventually made contact with him; he was starting to make recordings and his guitar couldn’t be gotten to play in tune, and he needed that fixed. I corrected that problem with some intonation work (as I said, I’d done a lot of it by then) . . . and he told his friends about me . . . and that started me rolling toward specializing in intonation work. And if you’re going to be making a recording (for Windham Hill or anyone else) one of the most important things to make sure of is that one’s guitar plays in tune and has no tonal unevennesses – which all commercially made guitars (that have not had work done on them) have trouble with.
It’s sobering to know that none of any of this would have happened had I made a good showing at the Carmel Classic Guitar Festival. Once you have had a few of these kinds of experiences, and think about them, you start to believe that the building blocks of the Universe are carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, and luck . . . and racial culture. This element of cultural life niggles at me, always, because I’m aware of how racist a culture I live in. Most of the homeless people I see on the street are Afro-American. It is the kind of factor/fact that is NEVER mentioned in reference to any notable person or accomplishment. If Albert Einstein and the Beatles hadn’t been Caucasian . . . would we ever have heard of them? Most authors are white. Most actors are white. I think that half of American athletes are Afro-American. Even the few women luthiers I’ve heard of have all been white. That’s almost as jolting to me as my experience at the Carmel Classic Guitar Festival of 1977 was. Yeah: I don’t know what or how my life would have turned out, had I merely had pigmented skin. Not like it did, for sure. One might point out that I’m smart and educated too; but guess what role the color of my skin played in that. For a long time in this country dark-skinned people were not allowed into any of the “better” schools.
Like I said, this kind of thing is something that niggles at me a lot. I think that this is on account of how I grew up in other countries in which people spoke other languages than English — and for partly that reason I never felt I “belonged” there. I carry the feeling of not belonging with me everywhere I go; I learned that early on. The fact is that while I look and sound American . . . I’m not. I didn’t grow up here. I grew up mostly in Spanish, German, and Hungarian-speaking countries. It’s possible that because I’ve always felt “different”, and because my guitars are personal to me, instead of business . . . maybe that’s why my guitars are “different”. It’s an interesting thought. And, given how the human mind works, there’s probably something to this. I don’t think that “normal” people make all that many contributions to society.