I was living in San Diego, California when I was in High School — and the hottest guitarist/singer entertainers at that time were The Kingston Trio. They were big. Bigger than big. Huge. Everybody was singing their songs. And we young High School boys learned that if we got some cheap guitars, and learned three chords, and sang some Kingston trio songs, WE COULD GET THE GIRLS TO PAY ATTENTION TO US. That was a massively important discovery. San Diego is an hour’s drive from Tijuana, where there were plenty of cheap guitars to buy; My first one cost $22.
I did learn to sing a few chords and songs . . . but at the same time I also learned that I can’t sing. I can hear subtleties of sound in a guitar’s voice, but I can’t manage my own voice beyond just talking. That’s weird. But there went my singing career. However, I did befriend the guitar in a different way: I got attracted to flamenco — in which the traditional singing sounds as tortured and as bad as my own. I’ve been attached to that music ever since — I think because of its rhythms and cadences, and because of how they make me feel.
I pretty much ignored the guitar during my college years, as my classes took up most of my time and energy. I was on a pre-medical school track, but I kept on finding that I wasn’t really interested in that. I’ve always liked to read, so I became an English major. But I didn’t have a goal or aim in life yet . . . much to the disappointment and worry of my parents.
SOME CONTEXT
I’m going to detour a bit into some personal history that I’ve already written about elsewhere, and that has nothing to do with guitars or guitar making, but that I lived through, and that led me up to the making of guitars.
I graduated from college in 1966 and immediately joined the Peace Corps, and lived in Peru for two years. Those were two good years of learning some things about the world. When I returned to the U.S. I went straight into graduate school at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, where I’d chosen to major in Latin American Studies. What else might I have been interested in after two fascinating and broadening years in Latin America? As it turned out, I didn’t enjoy graduate school. I learned more about academic and interdepartmental politics than I did about Latin America – and what I did learn about Latin America was dry, with statistics obtained by observing things from a distance, and analyses of this and that on paper . . . and boring histories. I wasn’t all that interested in the academic politics, which differ from corporate politics largely in that there are diplomas instead of sales charts on the walls.
In any event, to my parents’ horror, I dropped out of grad school. I floated around Madison for a while, taking odd jobs of various kinds, including playing guitar in restaurants and coffee houses. I liked flamenco so much that I went to Spain for the Summer of 1969 to study it. I spent that Summer in Madrid and Granada . . . where I happened to visit some guitar makers’ workshops. There were some two dozen luthiers in Granada at the time. But I was just hanging out there; this was still before any idea of making guitars ever hit me.
I MET A MAN WHO’D MADE A GUITAR
One of those little-things-that-eventually-turned-out-to-be-important happened to me while in grad school. I had met a man, Art Brauner, who with the help of Irving Sloane’s recently-published book Classical Guitar Making had made a guitar all by and for himself! I was impressed. I’d been an artsy-craftsy kid when I was young. I had done a lot of creative and craftsy thingies with modeling clay, plaster, paint, real clay, paper, etc. I assembled kits of all kinds; I did things in wood, etc.. I’d stopped doing all that artsy-craftsy stuff by the time I went to High School, though . . . and then College . . . and then Graduate School. You know, NO ONE EVER MAKES ANYTHING IN THOSE PLACES. Everything is on paper. One learns things that one is expected to regurgitate at test times . . . and then one gets another piece of paper at the end that certifies that one had done all that previous paperwork. But this fellow I’d met had made a real three-dimensional object that one could play music on! You bet I was impressed. I had no direction yet, though; and I had no thought to make a guitar. Yet.
My having met Art Brauner was going to become a turning point for me a bit later on; meeting him provided me with a clue as to what I’d been looking for all my life . . . but, as usual, without my having been able to find words for that at the time. I think that I’m still, even now, doing the same things I did when I was young — when I entertained myself with tinkering with things, making things, painting things, shaping pieces of wood, and assembling kits of tanks and cars and and model airplanes. I think I’m still assembling wooden kits of tanks and cars and model airplanes . . . and then putting strings on them.
THE MIDWEST
I floated around Madison and was thinking of getting a job as a taxi driver when I met a recruiter from a mental health center in Rockford, Illinois, which is about an hour away from Madison. He was looking for “enthusiastic and forward-looking young people who were willing to take on a challenge” and had done some real things (such as having been in the Peace Corps). So I accepted a job at the H.D. Singer Mental Health Center in Rockford, into a training program directed to my doing alcoholism rehabilitation therapy.
My stint in alcohol rehab work has been the only Institutional/ Corporate job I’ve ever had. I learned from it that such work was not going to make me happy for very long. I saw behind the scenes politics, personal agendas for advancement, incompetence, and dishonesty up close. I didn’t like the Winters there either, with the sun going down at 4:00 and the days being pitch-black by 4:45 . . . and the subzero temperatures along with that. Entire lakes froze over in Winter — and so thoroughly that cars would drive across it. Wow.
Overall, the vibe and culture of life in the American Midwest hadn’t really worked for me, either. I hadn’t worn a watch or carried a wallet while in Peru; it was liberating. Once I came back to the U.S. everything was now scheduled and looked at by bosses who had administrative – but not work – priorities. Coming back to the U.S. was like having walked through an orchard with all of its fruity and leafy smells, and fresh air, and then entering a house where someone had used too much Lysol and Clorox. I was not happy. So, at the end of 1969, I quit my job at the H.D. Singer Mental Health Center and drove back to California.