32

RY COODER
DANA BOURGEOIS
TK SMITH
JOLIE HOLLAND
 John Dee Holeman
Blues player, 69 years

Learn more about the Martin 000-42 and how the legend of the crossroads influenced music at martinguitar.com/crossroads.
 Take a Trip Back to 1923…
with a Kentucky Master
Model Mandolin!
T he KM-1000 Kentucky Master Model Mandolin
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Kentucky Master Models are still constructed
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Only the finest American spruce and maple
are hand-carved and graduated for
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like Deluxe 14:1 reverse gear tuners,
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Kentucky KM-1000 Mandolin
• Handcarved, graduated North
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• Original design Flower Pot
inlay of genuine abalone and
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P.O. Box 2841 • So. San Francisco, California
Connect with us on
 CONTENTS
Number 32. Winter 2013/2014.

PUBLISHER Jason Verlinde 2 OPENING NOTES

SENIOR WRITER Michael John Simmons
FIELD EDITOR John Thomas
4 PLUGGED IN Bill Frisell
DIRECTOR OF OPERATIONS Rachel Flotard 6 CASE STUDY Decorated Soldier
PROOFREADER Kim Runciman 14 VOICINGS Trans Carolina Express
MARKETING / CUSTOMER SERVICE Scott Krashan
128 TAILPIECE The Paris, Texas Guitar
DESIGN DIRECTOR André Mora
ART DIRECTOR Goretti Kaomora
PHOTO PRE-PRESS Justin Myers

TYPEFACES IN USE Cover Story

Anisette by Jean Françios Porchez, ff Balance
by Evert Bloemsma, Paperback by John Downer,
kltf Tiptoe by Karsten Lücke
50 LOOKING BEYOND
Ry Cooder’s globetrotting ways
by jason verlinde
The Fretboard Journal
2221 nw 56th St., Suite 101, Seattle, wa 98107
(206) 706-3252

FRETBOARDJOURNAL.COM
FACEBOOK.COM/ fretboardjournal
Features
TWITTER.COM/ fbjournal
The Fretboard Journal for iPad is available on the App Store. 16 BREAKING OUT
NUMBER 32. The Fretboard Journal (issn 1558-0326) is
Tom Crandall and Walter Carter pitch their vintage tents
published quarterly by Occasional Publishing, Inc., 2221 by brian fisher
nw 56th St., Suite 101, Seattle, wa 98107. Periodicals
postage paid at Seattle, wa and additional mailing offices.
All rights reserved. Reproduction without permission is
32 DESERT OASIS
prohibited. postmaster: Please send address changes The midcentury modern guitars of TK Smith
to The Fretboard Journal, 2221 nw 56th St., Suite 101, by nick rossi
Seattle wa 98107.

U.S. SUBSCRIPTIONS $40 for four issues (one year); $75 for 78 HANDS ON
eight issues (two years). Available at fretboardjournal.com How Dana Bourgeois became New England’s biggest
or (877) 373-8273.
guitarmaker by art dudley
FOREIGN SUBSCRIPTIONS Visit fretboardjournal.com.
96 HIGHWAY KIND
MOVING? Please email your new address to
subscriptions@fretboardjournal.com or call us.
The Texas roots of singer-songwriter Jolie Holland
The post office will not automatically forward by nathaniel riverhorse nakadate
your subscription.

ADVERTISING Contact Rachel Flotard

104 SUN VALLEY SERENADE
at rachel@fretboardjournal.com. Fletcher Brock and Lawrence Smart on making mandolins
in the Sawtooths by eli west
COPYRIGHT 2013 by Occasional Publishing, Inc.
All rights reserved. Printed in China.

COVER
Ry Cooder and his 1960 Martin D -18, originally owned by
gospel musician Ralph Trotto. Cooder purchased this instrument
from Retrofret in Brooklyn, New York. See page 50.
photograph by reuben cox
 Opening Notes
Several years ago, we reached out to Fretboard
Journal readers and asked them some questions. In
hindsight, survey experts made a point of telling me
that my questions weren’t pro-grade, but one thing
was clear: When I asked our subscribers what their
dream FJ cover story was, a certain Ryland Cooder
won by a landslide. Well, at long last, here it is.
The plan for this issue’s interview started out
simple enough: We were going to spend an hour or
two talking about some of the instrument gems in
Cooder’s collection, while Reuben Cox took still
photographs. But as Cooder began to describe child-
hood in Santa Monica, the records (and Pogo books)
that influenced him, the White Brothers at McCabe’s
and so much more, I realized there was a lot more
ground to cover than just Coodercaster pickup con-
figurations or cherished amplifiers. Here is a guy
who has lived and breathed all of the great music—
acoustic and electric, from bluegrass to world music
to the blues to rock ’n’ roll—that we love so much.
He’s made us hear slide guitar (and mandolin and
the Strat) in completely new ways, and for decades,
he’s been a bridge between cultures and eras, turn-
ing listeners on to the music of Cuba, Joseph
Spence, Gabby Pahinui, Bix Beiderbecke and so
many greats.
At over 9,000 words long, this issue’s interview
with Cooder covers a lot of ground. That’s one of the
many perks of the FJ format: We can run lengthy
interviews and features that aren’t broken up by
advertisements or product plugs. I did my best to
preserve the conversation and Cooder’s voice,
because, let’s face it, he can tell his story better
than anyone.
Since one of the gems in Cooder’s collection has
to be his original Bigsby pedal steel (built out of new
old stock parts that were assembled after the guitar-
maker passed away), somehow it seemed fitting to
include a profile on builder TK Smith in this issue.
Smith, a fellow Californian, is making some of the
2 T H E F R E T B OA R D J O U R N A L
finest new guitars and pickups in the Bigsby tradi-
tion. Writer Nick Rossi and photographer Jacqueline
Di Milia made the long drive to Yucca Valley where
Smith lives and tinkers in a workshop filled with cars,
guitars and midcentury modern furniture. Over the
years, the luthier has divided his time between surf-
board shaping, hot rods, performing and even work-
ing behind the scenes at Disneyland. If that isn’t the
California Dream, I don’t know what is.
And then, far away from the congestion and sun-
shine of California, there is Maine’s Dana Bourgeois,
continuing to make some of the greatest traditional
steel-string guitars money can buy. Though Bour-
geois instruments have shown up in the FJ over the
years, we sent writer Art Dudley to Maine for our
long overdue interview with the man himself. Bour-
geois describes how a fateful meeting with Eric
Schoenberg (and his vintage Martin OMs), helped
change the shape of boutique guitarmaking forever.
Three years ago in FJ #21, we had a great time
eavesdropping on Vermont electric guitar builders
Paul Languedoc and Creston Lea. In this issue, musi-
cian Eli West reprises that concept with his visit to
the Sawtooth Mountains of Idaho, where not one but
two great mandolin makers reside. Lawrence Smart
and Fletcher Brock are low-key guys who have built
instruments for some truly high-profile musicians
(just check out our recent video with Sarah Jarosz
and her Brock on our website). And West is no slouch
himself: In addition to playing with longtime music
partner Cahalen Morrison, he’s also performing with
Jayme Stone’s Lomax Project and with John Reis-
chman’s Pine Siskins. Check out his ever-growing
projects at elidoes.com.
As always, we do our best to provide you with
stories, photography and views you won’t find any-
where else. Thanks for taking the journey with us.
Jason Verlinde
publisher
 Lyle Lovett and
Collings Guitars.
Making beautiful music
together for more than
thirty years.

Lyle Lovett and his 1992 Collings Brazilian /Adirondack CJ41 SB

Serious Guitars | www.CollingsGuitars.com | (512) 288-7770

Plugged In
Bill Frisell performs “Embraceable
You” and “St. Louis Blues” for our
cameras at Fretboard Journal’s
Seattle headquarters. Watch both
videos at fretboardjournal.com/
frisell and look for a conversation
between Frisell and Wilco’s
Nels Cline in a forthcoming FJ.
Photograph by Jason Verlinde
 Case Study

Decorated
Soldier
Danny Michel walks us through Danny Michel’s battered Epiphone Casino is only a
decade old, but it looks like it’s lived for a century. Its
his battle-scarred Epiphone Casino nicks, dings and scratches attest to a hard life lived
Introduction and photographs on the road and in studios while the various scrib-
bles, stickers and cosmetic enhancements suggest
by Michael John Simmons that that life could sometimes be boring and needed
to be alleviated. Michel got his Casino, which he calls
the First Lady, in 2004, the same year he won the

6 T H E F R E T B OA R D J O U R N A L
 award for Best New Artist of the Year from the Cana-
dian Juno Awards. Over the years, the First Lady has
became his go-to guitar, and he’s played it on all of
his own albums as well as on various projects where
he’s appeared as a guest musician or producer.
“I had a good collection of guitars when I got the
Casino, including a vintage Tele, a great old Slinger-
land, a few Gibsons and a nice Larrivée,” he says.
“But over the years something about the Casino just
clicked with me. It’s not my most valuable guitar by
a long stretch, but if my house was on fire, that is the
one I’d rescue.”
Here, in Michel’s own words, he walks us through
the First Lady’s unique wear and tear. fj

My Casino still has most of its origi-

nal red finish. I’m not 100 percent
sure where the orange paint on the
lower bout came from. I have a
vague recollection of wanting to
have a sunburst guitar, so maybe
one day I tried to paint it and
quickly decided that wasn’t a good
idea. I added the Bigsby.

The neck pickup is an old hum-

bucker that was installed by
Capsule Music in Toronto. It really
sounds good, but years ago I de-
cided I didn’t like the white bobbin.
I darkened it with a Sharpie, but
over the years the ink has worn
off. About six years ago the pickup
started to rattle a bit, so I used
a matchbook to hold it in place.
I really need to get that fixed
properly one of these days.

8 T H E F R E T B OA R D J O U R N A L
 One day I took a Sharpie and
blacked out some of the Epiphone
logo and turned my guitar into an
“iphone.” I call my guitar the First
Lady because when I’m going into
the studio or on the road it’s the
first guitar I pack.

The case for my guitar was made by

Main Stage Cases, who make these
really heavy-duty cases up here in
Canada. It’s funny but the case cost
a lot more than the guitar that is
inside of it. But it’s worth it to me.

TH E FR ET B OA R D J O U R NA L 9
 So, it was New Year’s Eve a few
years ago and we were having a big
party at my place. Some of my
friends were shooting beer cans in
the back yard with a pellet gun and
someone joked that we should shoot
some guitars. As I was walking
back into the house, I said, “Sure,
as long as you don’t hit the neck or
pickups.” When I came back later I
think everyone back there was able
to hit it at least once. I couldn’t
The Pegasus sticker was the first modification
believe they really did it. There
I made to the guitar. The “Jan 08” is my old
are still a couple of pellets rattling
car registration sticker and the dancing girl is
around inside. This is really embar-
from an old English Beat sticker. They were a
rassing—I make us sound like crazy
good band from the 1980s. I’m not sure about
people, but in my defense alcohol
the musical notes, but below them there is a
may have been involved in the inci-
sticker from a banana, just because. Maybe it
dent. That squiggle to the right is
was a really good banana, I don’t remember.
about all that survives from a pretty
complicated drawing I did all over
the top. I’m not sure if it’s a good
idea to travel with a Sharpie.

I used the dice as a volume knob, because the very first

concert I went to was Brian Setzer and I thought his
Gretsch guitar with the dice knobs was the coolest thing
I had ever seen. I don’t remember when or why I changed
the other knobs. The words “This Machine” are the rem-
nants of the slogan Pete Seeger has on his banjo, “This
machine surrounds hate and causes it to surrender.” It’s
interesting to think of a guitar as a machine, because
really it is just a tool to do a job. Some time I think I’ll take
a Dreml tool and carve the words into the top so they don’t
wear off. The “Don’t Tease” sticker is part of the anti-bully-
ing campaign at the Ocean Academy, a school in Belize
that I do fundraising for.

10 T H E F R E T B OA R D J O U R N A L
 Orpheum Slope Shoulder
12-Fret Mahogany Dreadnought

guildguitars.com
©2013 FMIC. Guild® and Orpheum® are registered
trademarks of Fender Musical Instruments Corporation.
All rights reserved.

2013_Guild_Orpheum_Ad_Fretboard_v2.indd 1 5/23/13 11:07 AM

THE BEDELL TONEWOOD CERTIFICATION PROJECT

To live according to the values of responsibility and stewardship requires due

diligence and a commitment to a very different approach of wood procurement
and management. The Bedell Tonewood Certification Project sets rigid standards,
which are adamantly adhered to.

Every tonewood set is labeled with a Q code, and as much of its story as we can
uncover is attached in our newly developed Wood Management System software.
All required Lacey Act, CITES and Chain of Custody documents are included.

A Bedell “Know Your Roots” Journal accompanies each instrument with the individual
Seed-to-Song story of the back and side tonewood, the soundboard, and the neck wood.
 Voicings

Trans
Carolina
Express
Carr Amplifiers’ unlikely musical influence
By Steve Carr

Synth bass—mechanized grooves—the scientific

future feel of robot toes tapping out rhythms: this is
my preferred soundtrack while soldering and proto-
typing what I believe are the most human- and
organic-sounding amps on the planet.
I discovered Kraftwerk in the late ’70s—mostly
because I was into science fiction and loved the idea
of man in space. Many of you may remember Omni
magazine and perhaps a more obscure space mag
I loved called Future. Future had music reviews, and
that’s where my introduction to Kraftwerk, Brian
Eno and other ’70s electronic pioneers began. I was
15 and already playing rock guitar and bass with a
local group of friends but the space music was food
for headphones at night.
Later, after many years playing live, I experi-
mented with vacuum tube guitar amps. The detached,
propulsive sounds of Kraftwerk and the other bands
they inspired were perfect for keeping me focused
as I tinkered late into the night. There are very few
vocals in this music, which leaves much room for
visions of circuits, sounds and tubes. Kraftwerk fuels
my 1950s pulp boy-genius workshop.
Serious rock, blues and jazz guitarists may find
my taste a bit odd or even blasphemous, and for
a guitar amp builder, this might be a secret best
kept. But if Rolf or Florian ever need a guitar amp—
I hope they read Fretboard Journal. Guys, I’ve got
you covered! fj

14 T H E F R E T B OA R D J O U R N A L
Photograph courtesy Carr Amplifiers 15
Tennessee musician Curtis Rogers
hand-painted a picture of his wife
on this National Duolian guitar,
just one of the treasures awaiting
restoration at Tom Crandall’s
shop in New York.
BreakinG
Out

T O M C RA N D A L L A N D
W A LT E R C A R T E R P I T C H
Text and photography T H E I R V I N TA G E T E N T S
by Brian Fisher

T
alk to the old-timers and ask them
how they found their old hoss. Invariably the discus-
sion will touch on buy and sell ads, shotgun trades
and just plain old horse-trading. And later, but not
by much, newsletters sent by a small handful of
vintage dealers began to find their way into dusty
mailboxes all around the country and beyond. These
catalogs became multigenerational bathroom
fodder/bedtime reading for all of those who ever
had a guitar hero, whether it was Grandpa or Lead
Belly. For many, watching Steven Stills fingerpicking
“4 + 20” on a prewar Herringbone created the ques-
tion, “ Why is this rich hippie playing an old guitar?”
But for those who read the Vintage News, the answer
was obvious: Stephen Stills was a guitar nerd. Enter
the era of “old” no longer meaning “worn.” Enter the
brave new world of “vintage.”
Without recapping all of the glory days of the
vintage craze, it’s safe to say that times are different
now. People who decide to part with their old
wooden companions are finding a market very dif-
ferent from a mere 10 years ago. Buyers are edu-
cated, frugal and, for lack of a better term, nitpicky.
With—in some cases—decades of vintage awareness
under their belts, these guitar buyers have to be
wowed to part with money that’s increasingly diffi-
cult to rationalize spending. As a result, vintage
18 T H E F R E T B OA R D J O U R N A L
dealers have been forced to change with the new
climate and bend so as not to break. A quick perusal
of vintage guitar sites will often find photography
that is professional and descriptions that border on
a postmortem, with the patient making a miracu-
lous, albeit expensive, recovery.
Two new vintage instrument shops distinguish
themselves, though. And it may be no coincidence
that these businesses have been established by
people who were longtime players in the success of
two famous vintage guitar stores: Matt Umanov
Guitars and Gruhn’s Guitars.
If you have played a guitar in the last 12 years at
Matt Umanov’s, it was probably brought to top retail
shape by Tom Crandall. It’s no secret that a key
ingredient in getting a good one is simply purchas-
ing an instrument with the same playability and
basic geometry it had when it was new. Experienced
luthiers can create shops filled with instruments
that can make believers out of anyone.
Tom Crandall’s new store is a joint venture with
his friend and business partner, Alex Whitman, who
also worked with Tom at Umanov’s. To walk into TR
Crandall Guitars is to get inside Tom’s head. The first
thing that greets you is an old McIntosh tube hi-fi;
take a few more steps and various lugged-steel bicy-
cles from the ’40s or ’50s casually lean against a wall.
The old storefront is nicely stocked with vintage
Martin and Gibson acoustics. Not a single one needs
a neck reset or frets. In Tom and Alex’s store, there
are no conversations about their guitars being
“borderline” in need of anything. Everything is
ready to go.
But the peculiarities are clearly something that
Tom and Alex relish: Have you ever seen a Marshall
Special, complete with a mountainous tropical scene
at sunset? There are only two in existence. TR Cran-
dall has one of them. And it’s clean. Very clean.
Although a relatively small group of players know
about Gibson Roy Smeck guitars and the attendant
joys of converting them, there are still fewer luthiers
who can accomplish a conversion that retains as
much of the spirit and feel of the original instrument
while also offering effortless modern playability.
Within months of opening, Tom had already com-
pleted two such conversions, with plans for a third
in the works. Not surprisingly, these are not the only
Smecks at TR Crandall: they also own two airplane-
bridged six-strings. With their light construction,
and Tom’s set-up so perfect, they have been ren-
dered rich and responsive with a harmonic palette
that is beguiling yet decidedly different from a clas-
sic Martin or Gibson.
Crandall works on a guitar’s set-up while Chris Eldridge of the Punch
Brothers tries a 1935 Harmony Roy Smeck Professional. “Critter was vis-
iting for the first time,” Crandall says about this photo. “He spent about
five hours playing a wide assortment of guitars. He had just made a
couple of major purchases, so as he was leaving he said, ‘I feel like I just
got married and then was invited to a party at the Playboy Mansion.’”
“I’ve always liked oddballs,” explains Tom.
“I mean, that’s if they’re a real instrument; it’s kind
of cool to approach them like that. That Harmony
Roy Smeck Professional is a real guitar. It’s X-braced
and the workmanship is as nice as a Gibson. You
wouldn’t put it in a category of a Martin, but it cer-
tainly is as nice as a Gibson.”
Alex adds, “It’s not like anything else. It’s certainly
very well made. It’s got beautiful wood and sounds
great. Even things like that Biltmore over there;
that’s from 1940. It’s a Harmony ladder-braced thing.
You know, you could say, ‘ Well, it’s ladder-braced;
it’s not a Martin; it’s not a Gibson.’ But, there’s defi-
nitely a category of musician who prefers that sound.
20
Just because, you know, most people would prefer
an X-braced sound. To blues guys, that’s the offend-
ing sound. That thing sounds really cool. And we
approached it very seriously and very carefully, as if
it were a Martin or a Gibson. And as a result, you get
something that plays fantastically. It has its own
distinctive sound.
“For Gen-Xers, trying to get them interested in
this is an interesting thing. Most of them don’t really
have the money yet to able to afford, you know, a
$10,000 guitar. So, part of the reason we’re having
cool Harmonies and stuff from the ’40s is because
they’re under $2,000, and it allows a younger person
who doesn’t have the disposable income to get into
the vintage guitar world. They’ll say there is a differ-
ence with this old stuff and get the bug in there.
Hopefully they come back in a couple years and they
made a little money, and they want to get a nice
Martin from the ’50s or ’40s, or something like that.”
T H E F R E T B OA R D J O U R N A L
 Every Gibson Acoustic
is built by hand, giving
each guitar a personality
as unique as each player.
Play one and discover the
difference between a gutiar
and a Legend.

The new 1934 Original Jumbo

Crandall works the frets on a Martin dreadnought. The store prides
itself on perfectly setting up each instrument before it leaves the store.
Customers are thus enjoying a guitar experience
that Alex and Tom have painstakingly orchestrated,
with as much education and discussion of an instru-
ment as there is the playing of it. Since many of
Tom’s customers have gone to him for his lutherie
for years, his guitar whimsy is more than a little
appreciated. This is evidenced by the people who
come just to hang out for a few hours, whether it’s
Steve Earle or the guy who plays the bar on the
corner. Of course, if you are a working musician,
oddities are just a small part of what TR Crandall
does so well: the walls are gorgeously lined with the
most spectacular bread and butter—1940s and ’50s
D -18s and J-45s abound, reminding the onlooker
of just what made many of the timeless recordings
sonic benchmarks for the modern musician, air-
plane bridges notwithstanding.
22
But this is a new climate, one that hasn’t resem-
bled anything in the last 30 years, as far as vintage
instruments are concerned. Tom believes that
“now there is just a higher level of sophistication
and emphasis on originality. When I started doing
this, you didn’t even have the Gruhn guide. Before
that, you kinda had American Guitars to use for
reference work.”
Alex adds, “ When I got into guitars, it was the year
that eBay started. That was back in the Wild West
when you could buy something and sell it a week
later for twice what you paid. So it was a lot easier
to get deals when I started doing this. And Gibson
guitars, comparatively, have gone up much more
dramatically than Martin guitars. We buy pieces
knowing that they’re going to be broken, even if they
say they aren’t. That’s actually our whole business
model: We buy stuff broken and Tom fixes it!”
Which brings up the motivation for many custom-
T H E F R E T B OA R D J O U R N A L
mcph-gallery_ftbd.pdf 1 8/15/13 12:58 PM

Create your own masterpiece.

Scan with a QR
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a video of the Picasso
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When you invest in a high-end instrument, it’s nice if you can make it your own.

A vast selection of tonewoods from all over

the world give you the option to not only
create a beautiful guitar, but choose
from a wide palette of tonal colors.
Give us a call at: 608.366.1407
we’ll guide you through the process. McPhersonGuitars.com
“The cases are from my to-do stack for our wall,” Crandall says of these
instruments awaiting repair. “We don’t want to crowd the walls, so as
something sells, I choose something appropriate from the stack.”
ers who have been flocking to TR Crandall guitars in
the few months the doors have been open: Tom Cran-
dall is one of the few full-service, vintage-enthused,
fanatical luthiers in New York City. In a town where
everything is on the menu, vintage guitar repairs are
often sent out in the mail. It would surprise many to
know that most of the top shops in New York send
out pieces for critical repair or simply leave that
responsibility to the customer. That does not happen
at Tom and Alex’s shop, because it’s not necessary,
and today’s market demands more. It also illumi-
nates why many vintage customers are often per-
plexed about instruments that have borderline
issues not properly dealt with before purchase.
For Tom, “It means that everything on our wall is
spot on. And since it’s just Alex and me, there is no
24
one else to blame. There are no layers of insulation.”
Alex adds, “There are very few vintage shops where
the luthier is the owner of the store. Our advantage
is that acoustic instruments are far more difficult to
repair. And with Tom’s skill—not that it’s wasted on
electric guitars—but he can come up with innovative
ways to deal with all the various issues that arise.”
Fans of Tom’s lutherie have found the perfect
home where all of his work lives, in a shop that has
a clubhouse feel. According to Tom, “Alex and I
decided that we wanted to create a refuge of sorts
where the emphasis was on acoustic instruments.
We chose a space with great acoustics on a quiet
street away from the crowds of New York City tour-
ists. We also decided to keep our collection very
tightly curated so that each instrument has an
impact; it’s like a palette of sounds to choose from.
Hence, our store has a clean, uncluttered look which
redefines the guitar shop experience.”
T H E F R E T B OA R D J O U R N A L
 R H R
where roots meet the here and now
GREG BROWN
THE IOWA WALTZ – RED HOUSE RECORDS
30TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION
A special reissue of Red House Records’ very first release in celebration of its three
acclaimed decades as a record label. Greg Brown is one of the great singer/
songwriters of our time and “The Iowa Waltz” is acknowledged by critics and fans as
his early masterpiece...a rustic, unsentimental, yet affectionate journey through the
heartland. Here it is again, still awesome, completely remastered with updated notes!
“his rich, rumbling voice qualifies as one of the wonders of the folk world”
ACOUSTIC GUITAR

MEG HUTCHINSON
BEYOND THAT
Boston’s acclaimed singer/songwriter and poet Meg Hutchinson dazzles on this long
awaited new release. Produced by the award-winning Crit Harmon (Martin Sexton,
Mary Gauthier, Susan Werner) and her first album in four years, the project is a rich
tapestry of Meg’s melodies, soothing vocals and words of profound depth.
“After you hear Meg, you feel you’ve been somewhere!” JOHN GORKA

ROBIN & LINDA WILLIAMS

BACK 40
The Americana pioneers celebrate their 40 year partnership in life and music with fresh
newly recorded versions of over-looked Williams classics (most from albums long out
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 How do guitars find a new home in Tom and Alex’s
shop? With vintage guitar shows appearing leaner The Carter Vintage Guitars crew with some of their favorite
instruments (from left to right): Justin Nash, Beau Hudson,
than in years past, the Internet and decades of con-
Joshua Alexander, Walter Carter, Christie Carter, Suzy Newton,
nections often provide more meat on the bone. Matt Sellars, Aaron Pearson and Tom Stadler.
According to Tom, “Both of us have connections that
go quite a ways back, like connections back to the
Midwest. These are people who love to wheel and
deal, you know.” Alex mentions, “ We recently turned
up a 1954 Martin D -18 that was a one-owner guitar.
It never had any work done to it, other than someone
cutting the saddle down, and we had to reset the
neck on it, but it’s the type of thing that you don’t
expect to find anymore. It has the original receipt
and hand-tooled leather strap with the original own-
er’s name and all that stuff. It still happens.”
That said, the economy has made things more
challenging, as Alex notes when discussing his first
years in New York. “ When I first came to New York, it
was 2007, and the recession really hadn’t happened
here yet. It had happened in America, but New York
was a little bit insulated. The big banks hadn’t col-
lapsed yet. Bonuses were still happening. And the
conversion rate for the Euro was pretty strong for
the Europeans. As a result half the guitars we were
selling were going to Europe. Whether it be shipped
or people walking in the door. Then the bonuses
dried up here, which killed a lot of local business.
And then the conversion rate when the European
crisis happened, a little bit delayed from ours, killed
a lot of that business. But I think it’s come back.”
The future is always unwritten, but TR Crandall Gui-
tars could just as easily become a vintage amp shop
(considering Tom’s skill with a schematic and a hot
soldering iron), or a showcase for his collection of
30 lugged-steel bicycles in a convincing vintage
store of another designation. Flexibility and talent
are not lacking, making this shop truly of the city it
resides in.

T here will always be a mystique about purchas-

ing a vintage instrument from Nashville. Thoughts
immediately wander to the Grand Ole Opry, Music
Row and, without fail, Gruhn Guitars. If you have
purchased a big-ticket item at Gruhn’s, chances
are that you dealt with one of the Carters: Walter
Carter has teamed with George Gruhn for years,
including co-authoring the essential Gruhn’s Guide
to Vintage Guitars; Christie managed Gruhn’s,
dealing with the very musicians who created the

26 T H E F R E T B OA R D J O U R N A L
Photograph courtesy Carter Vintage Guitars 27
Crandall’s partner, Alex Whitman, holds
a 16-inch Gibson L-10 from 1931.
 “That’s actually our whole business model:
We buy stuff broken and Tom fixes it!”
initial interest in old guitars. Just a quick listen to a
few of her stories would make most sensible people
question their chosen line of work. There are few in
the world who have the knowledge and customer
experience that the Carters possess.
It was quite a surprise when Walter and Christie
announced their split from Gruhn Guitars, immedi-
ately creating speculation of a musical Hatfield and
McCoy scenario in Nashville. Thankfully, this has
not been the case, and their shop, Carter Vintage
Guitars, has proven that there is more than enough
room in Music City for two great emporiums.
One of the first sights that greets visitors to Carter
Vintage is a kitchen. Yes, a fully stocked kitchen,
often with a fridge full of craft beer from the brewery
down the street. Not surprisingly, much like your
own kitchen, this is where people hang out. That
kitchen is often a veritable who’s who of local musi-
cians and national acts. And it’s not all that rare to
see epic figures like Vince Gill sniffing around the
old woodpile. From that kitchen perch, the store—
all 8,000 square feet of it—sprawls out before your
eyes. The casual observer will no doubt notice the
maple-bodied TV yellow Junior from the mid-’50s,
a full collection of shade-topped ’30s Martins and a
showroom dripping in three-dimensional flametops
from the good people down the street at Gibson’s
Custom Shop. There are practice rooms, a luthier
department and local art. The Carters did not skimp,
and the neighborhood is a stone’s throw from down-
town Nashville, in an area that is blooming with new
businesses and great places to eat. Most have never
been to a vintage shop with a vibe that’s so close to
home, yet filled with such treasures. This suits the
Carters’ taste and is also, obviously, done by design.
“ When we first started in the vintage guitar busi-
ness 25 years ago, there were only a few dealers with
a bricks-and-mortar store and a nationwide (or
TH E FR ET B OA R D J O U R NA L
worldwide) clientele,” Walter Carter says. “That gave
the dealer the upper hand in negotiating, whether
he was buying or selling, because the buyer or seller
had fewer options. You couldn’t just Google ‘vintage
guitar dealers.’ There was no Vintage Guitar maga-
zine. My personal experience as a customer in the
1980s was that I couldn’t get the time of day out of a
salesperson in the vintage instrument store where
I tried to buy instruments. With the advent of the
Internet, anyone with a computer and an old guitar
can be a dealer and enjoy the same exposure as
dealers who have been around for decades. Buyers
can comparison shop, so the tables have turned. One
way we’ve been able to distinguish ourselves from
other dealers is in customer service—making sure a
visit to our store is an enjoyable experience.” And it
goes without saying that nothing is less enjoyable
than paying top-dollar for a great piece, only to
discover undisclosed issues that make a solid deal
a headache.
Of course, anyone who has ever purchased an old
guitar from Christie knows how she likes to conduct
a deal. “ We aim to have full disclosure of all repairs
or alterations clearly described on our website, along
with photos, including black-light photos, when
applicable, of repairs,” she says. “This way folks
know up front what they are looking at. In addition,
we are in the process of loading up video/sound clips
of each instrument. We live in an electronic world.
You don’t need a computer to get connected any-
more; you can do everything from a cellphone. It’s
all about the audio-visual.
“It is very important to have instruments that are
set up and ready to play,” Christie adds. “ You don’t
want to blow that first impression. It is a drag to grab
a guitar off the wall and find old strings and a bad
set-up. We find it important to have a luthier on
hand to accommodate the client’s set-up preference.
29
Walter Carter plays one of the many gems found at Nashville’s Carter tage appeal, if for no other reason than their age.
Vintage Guitars, a 1924 Lloyd Loar-signed Gibson H-5 mandola. “The instruments made by individuals or small
shops will be rarer than regular-production instru-
ments from the big makers, but they will have to
We have an in-house repair shop; we take walk-in be recognized as high-quality instruments for them
repairs.” to achieve vintage values,” Walter says. Christie is
With the ever-increasing knowledge-base of cus- also focused on some of the acclaimed small makers
tomers comes a heightened responsibility to present who have come into the spotlight over the last
instruments that display their full potential at first decade or so.
strum. Many have said that this points to a shift in “No doubt, the influential small makers will
values as Generation X moves into the cultural always have a cult following. Wayne Henderson,
pole-position. But will Generation X appreciate and Stephen Gilchrist, John Monteleone are three exam-
buy vintage guitars as voraciously as their parents ples that come to mind. The small builders are a very
did? In other words, what does a Herringbone mean exciting part of our business. We have reached out
to someone weaned on Nirvana? and are working with builders like Stephen Gilchrist,
Walter thinks “that’s the scariest question for Paul Duff, E.J. Henderson, Paul McGill, Mark Lacey,
vintage dealers today, as we see Baby Boomers turn- Caleb Smith, John McGuire, Red Mountain, Dan
ing from buyers to sellers. I think some dealers have Voight, Don Wilson, Kevin Kopp and a long list of
relied so heavily on the Boomers that younger exciting makers. I don’t see an issue there—the
potential buyers have been ignored. We see enough demand for these builders will continue to grow.”
young people with a strong interest in vintage Not surprisingly, questions abound. Yet none are
instruments that we’re optimistic about the future.” more qualified to hazard a guess than Tom, Alex,
According to Christie, “ Women and Gen-Xers are Christie and Walter. With buyers armed with knowl-
the biggest untapped market. Some of the younger edge, today’s successful vintage shops are no longer
buyers and women have been ignored, and honestly, simply run by guitar-loving entrepreneurs. These
in some cases, pushed away by the old-school men- men and women are talented, multifaceted and
tality. I’m hell-bent on changing that! We’ve devel- focused on delivering exactly what it takes to satisfy
oped a nice little following of young folks here. They a market that is sometimes elusive. That’s where the
come in and are a little gun-shy at first. It can be beer and bikes come in handy. But never, of course,
really intimidating to go to some vintage stores if at the same time. fj
you don’t have a contact. We’ve all been there. Don’t
count the Boomers out! They are still a very healthy
part of the business. Many are streamlining their
collections today by selling some things and replac-
ing those items with pieces that are more in line
with the core of their collections. The Boomers have
become sellers as well as buyers. It is pretty cool to
see these pieces come up for sale after being in a
collection for years.”
For the most part, vintage dealers still struggle
with the same questions as consumers: What will
be the next big vintage model? Will guitars from the
’70s ever be appreciated like the classics from the
’50s? Which modern guitars will be future collect-
ibles? Walter observes, “If your investment adviser
really knew what the stock market would do, he
would be so rich he wouldn’t have to work as an
investment adviser any more. The same is true for
vintage guitar dealers. It’s safe to say that as long as
the guitar is prominent in popular music, the classic
vintage models will continue to be classic vintage
models. Some models from the ’80s and ’90s, which
don’t seem old today, will probably gain some vin-

TH E FR ET B OA R D J O U R NA L 31
By Nick Rossi • Photographs by Jacqueline Di Milia

TH E M I DCENTURY MODER N
G U I TA R S O F T K S M I T H

deSERT
OAsis

T
he high-desert town of Yucca Valley,
California, is a solid two-hour drive due east from
the Los Angeles coast and the Pacific Ocean. In
between the two points are most of the locales that
have helped build the Southern California music
mythos: Hollywood, El Monte, Fullerton, Downey and
Pasadena, to name but a few. Much of TK Smith’s life
story criss-crosses this relatively small but musically
and historically rich geographic area, stretching
from the desert to the sea.
Many first heard the name TK Smith in the early
1990s after his cometlike rise in reputation as a first-
rate rockabilly lead guitarist with Big Sandy and the
Fly-Rite Trio. Hailing from the Los Angeles area, the
group’s arrival heralded a new era of roots-music
authenticity. Between a long-standing residency at
the legendary King King in Hollywood and the kind
of do-it-yourself touring that seemingly only twenty-
somethings can pull off, the group managed the rare
pairing of popular acclaim with respect from their
fellow musicians. But two records (yes, I said records)
and dozens of nights on the road later, Smith had
had his fill and was ready for something else.
Two decades later, Smith is making a name for
himself as a specialist guitar builder and customizer.
Any fan of mid-20th-century Californian western
music will quickly recognize the tradition in which
34 T H E F R E T B OA R D J O U R N A L
TK is working, as he proudly wears his influences on
sleeve. And much like his guitar playing forced the
cognoscenti to sit up and take notice years ago, he
has quickly captured the attention of some very
discerning musicians the world over.
In many ways, where Smith is now signifies a
return to where he began. While he did have a nota-
ble interest in music and started casually playing
guitar at a young age, of almost equal importance
was his exposure to the pleasures of working in a
shop. His father was a mechanical engineer, and as
a teenager, TK followed some of those footsteps.
“My dad worked for a company called NTS, just until
recently. They had a few locations, but when I was
in high school, they had a machine shop in El Monte
and that’s where in high school he hooked me up.
He worked in Fullerton, actually right by Fender.
They did environmental testing and did a few tests
for Fender.”
His father, who restored boats and built motors
in his leisure time, also maintained a well-outfitted
garage, which provided the right kind of laboratory
for an inquisitive and somewhat fearless mind.
His paternal grandfathers also provided some
important background—one was a carburetor and
PT boat mechanic, while the other was a cabinet-
maker. Coincidentally, both were drummers of
varying degrees of note.
TK’s early guitar exposure was quickly eclipsed
by the quintessential West Coast teenage suburban
pursuits of BMX, skateboarding and surfing. It was
only after a high school career spent listening to
punk rock that Smith says he got hipped to the music
of the 1950s that would soon become an obsession.
“A friend gave me a tape of some Huntington Beach
punk bands, but on the other side were all these
’56 Gene Vincent recordings with Cliff Gallup,” he
recalls. “At that point of time I started playing guitar
again.” With the renewed interest in playing the
guitar came a desire to capture not only the feel but
also the tones he heard on those old records. Vintage
instruments were a natural first step, but TK’s ears
heard something more—and unlike many, he was
not afraid of pulling an old pickup out of an instru-
ment and taking it apart or even replacing it.
In pursuit of the sounds of his growing record
collection—rock ’n’ roll, rockabilly, hillbilly and
Smith’s personal guitar features the body of a 1950s Kay-161 (also
known as a Thin Twin or Jimmy Reed model). Smith renecked this
guitar, routed the body slightly to fit his own pickups and gave it the
personalized pickguard. In the background is Smith’s 1956 Gibson
Country Western GA-70.
TK Smith plays one of his signature instruments,
which he’s dubbed a pancake model guitar.
These chambered maple guitars pay tribute to
the guitars of Paul Bigsby.
 Western swing music—he admits, “I started messing
with guitars pretty early on. I had heard Joe Maphis
and I loved his tone. I heard he had those Carvin
pickups and bought an old Carvin guitar from Mark
Neill that had the black pickups. Somehow I ended
up with some white covers and put them on my
guitar.” Such attention to detail proved to be part of
the learning process. “It still didn’t sound like
Maphis!” Smith says, laughing. “I think I had the
pots wrong. I think that sparkly sound that he got
was probably a one-meg pot. I didn’t really know at
that point of time to change the pots. I probably just
kept what was in there.” With these experiments
and a succession of minor revelations, TK had
chosen his path.
In early 1993, after nearly five years making music
with Big Sandy, Smith dropped out. Sort of. His
interest in surfing was rekindled when he focused
on surfboard construction and on longboarding,
those icons that graced the covers of early Beach
Boys LPs, 12-inch advertisements for the California
Dream. While he and his father both had made a few
boards for family and his friends during high school,
Smitty’s Custom Surf Boards was his first commer-
cial enterprise of any sort, and as was characteristic
of the man, something that Smith delved deep into.
“I always liked the idea of doing stuff for myself. It’s
fun. Even if you aren’t making a ton of money, you’re
your own boss and you have your freedom.” Guitars
and guitar playing took a temporary backseat as
TK found that surfing took a toll on his hands. But
the guitar was never far from his mind.
Soon after this period came a stint in the machine
shop of Walt Disney productions. Although the envi-
ronment was nothing new, it was at Disney where
Smith really honed the art of imaginative fabrica-
tion, being tasked with creating components of the
Walt Disney amusement park empire. He reveals
that this contributed greatly to his current, imagina-
tive guitar-related work. “A lot of it, I learned at
Disney,” he says. “I did a lot of router jigs for odd
shapes. So that first batch of pickups, I actually cut
those using a wood router. Most people would say
you can’t do that.” Oddly enough, the shop was
chock full of musicians, who spent much of their
break time playing music together—a latter-day
Firehouse Five (for those who know their musical
history books) in spirit if not in music.
Smith’s second commercial venture showed a
couple of hallmarks that have come to be part of his
current operation. A partnership with his now-wife
of several years and his ability to draw upon all
aspects of his fabrication experience launched a
38 T H E F R E T B OA R D J O U R N A L
lampshade business. Of course, these were not aver-
age lampshades by any means, but rather meticu-
lously recreated 1950s lampshades, the originals of
which had long deteriorated but have remained in
high demand in the vintage furniture market.
Smith’s handiwork was so impressive that when
paired with an actual lamp from the era and labeled
with a dead-stock price tag, many self-styled experts
could not tell the difference. Such attention to detail
clearly winds itself through this story.
But the City of Angels eventually began to lose
some of its luster for the Smiths. Endless hours sit-
ting on freeways in traffic eventually led them to
their current home of Yucca Valley, located in San
Bernardino County. Situated in the high desert a few
miles north of Palm Springs, Yucca Valley is known
to many simply as one place on the way to Joshua
Tree National Park. Setting aside the fact the fellow
pickup wizard Curtis Novak is another denizen of
the small town, one still can’t help asking: Why
Yucca Valley?
It turns out that Smith’s roots run long and deep
in the desert. His paternal grandfather homesteaded
land in neighboring 29 Palms back in 1923. Smith’s
Ranch not only gave its name in part to one of TK’s
most admired recent musical ventures, but it actu-
ally exists and is still in the care of the Smith family.
Perhaps it seems only right that Smith would end
up back in the area. He clearly loves the desert and
being situated between hip Pioneertown (a small
settlement north of Yucca Valley that was built in
1946 as a set for film and television westerns) and
the expansive beauty of Joshua Tree suits him well.
According to his wife, Jill, he never seems to tire of
photographing the desert, finding inspiration in the
details that dot the deceptively barren landscape.
It is also a reflective space, a quiet part of the world
that allows Smith to focus on the sounds in his head
and his handiwork.
The close proximity to Palm Springs spotlights
another source of TK’s inspiration, namely the mid-
century modern architecture and design that gives
the area much of its character beyond the vestiges of
the Old West that the more desolate reaches of the
desert hint at. Over time, Smith has refined his
tastes and a quick tour of his home shows an eye for
good design usually reserved for architects. Up until
recently, a major portion of Smith’s shop time was
spent fabricating furniture and furnishings that
owed a significant debt to the 20th-century masters
of form following function. Clean and organic lines,
along with top-notch craftsmanship, are hallmarks
of his work. But of course, some have argued that it

In addition to building beautiful electric guitars for pros and amateurs,
Smith is himself a stellar player (he performed with Big Sandy and his
Fly-Rite Boys for nearly five years). He’s a huge fan of vintage Gibson
amplifiers and the Gibson EH-185 on the right is his absolute favorite.
“Of all the amps I’ve owned, this one comes closest to my ‘dream guitar
tone’ that I hear in my head,” he says.
is not a far stretch from a ’50s-style blonde boomer-
ang table to Leo Fender’s Telecaster shape.
Fortunately, TK has had a significant amount of
hands-on experience with the instruments and
pickups that he is so capable of reproducing and
expanding upon. Thanks to his excellent reputation
as a skilled musician and craftsman—and a dedi-
cated enthusiast—his path has crossed several times
with items that many have only ever read or heard
about. Friendships with people like Deke Dickerson
and R.C. Allen have afforded him additional oppor-
tunities to glean the kind of first-hand knowledge
that has proven essential in cracking many of the
codes that make up this vernacular.
Of course, knowing what to look and listen for is
key. And here is where another one of TK’s talents is
evident. Sure, it’s due in part to his relentless curios-
ity and willingness to experiment, but there is no
doubt that Smith possesses a certain ability to hear
details critical to the essence of these sounds. A
survey of the amplifiers he uses to test all of his pick-
ups and guitars points to this as well: an early ’50s
Magnatone Troubadour, a Gibson GA-70 Country
Western model and an early ’40s Gibson EH-185—
the latter a favorite that he has lovingly restored.
In casual conversation about guitars and guitar
building, Smith mentions the names one would
expect him to: Fender, Paul Bigsby and Les Paul.
But John D’Angelico is an oft-mentioned inspiration
and perhaps a more subtle influence on his work.
In many ways these four men are very much repre-
sented in Smith’s shop philosophy: the pragmatic
approach of Fender, the sure-footed confidence of
Bigsby, the ceaseless curiosity of Paul and the
music-minded craftsmanship of D’Angelico. Smith
also remains an astounding guitar picker, capable
of reeling off something in the style of Chet Atkins,
Merle Travis, Barney Kessel or Charlie Christian as if
it were second nature. In spite of the spiritual com-
pany he keeps and his obvious talents, he remains
extremely humble and down-to-earth.
TH E FR ET B OA R D J O U R NA L
A
n entire article could probably be written
about his shop alone. Entering the side street com-
mercial space is like stepping through a portal to
another time. The front office is meticulous. In fact,
the entire shop is meticulous. A small, functional
front office provides the welcome, tastefully deco-
rated with a well-curated selection of midcentury
modern furniture and complementary pieces that
Smith has fabricated himself. A very early Magna-
tone Troubadour (yet another semi-obscure but
important Southern California amplifier company
with Bigsby connections) sits in the corner, waiting
to give a voice to the latest batch of pickups that
need to be tested. There is a small desk with rows
of drawers, the contents of which Smith apparently
keeps in a detailed mental catalog. This small cham-
ber opens up into the main workshop, lined with
vintage tools of the trade. The entirety of the shop is
imbued with a pale green hue that so many commer-
cial and institutional buildings adopted in the post-
World War II era.
When queried about the vintage workhorses that
provide the brawn, Smith is candid about his love
for old machinery. But clearly there are other factors
at work here that help create what amounts to all
the hallmarks of a museum, except that this shop
is a bustling, productive workspace producing
high-quality guitars and guitar parts. Many of the
machines came to him with relative little expense,
thanks to endless flea market and pawnshop digs.
TK’s working knowledge of machinery and mechan-
ics (yes, he works on vintage automobiles, as well)
has also enabled him to keep his repair costs down.
As often happens with these things, once word
spread through the grapevine that Smith was inter-
ested in vintage machinery, some pieces all but
showed up at his doorstep. The fact that several of
the items date back to the 1920s speaks to the qual-
ity and workmanship of an era since passed, but
whose spirit is alive and well in Yucca Valley. Sure,
there may be new machines that can do the job, but
why bother when your shop is outfitted with func-
tioning classics?
Although many of his early production pieces
were created in the shop, Smith has since located a
Los Angeles-based foundry that can satisfy his
demands and meet his high expectations. He works
with a local plating shop for all of his nickel hard-
ware (including the screws), because there is just no
point in going “almost all the way,” as Smith says,
cutting corners on the small details. In fact, his
41
Most of Smith’s creations have bound fingerboards, so the builder has
to nip the ends of each fret. This set-up keeps things organized.
 entire output is proudly made in the USA , with the
current exception of the tuning machines. Finding
that most fans of the Bigsby- and Telecaster-style
guitars that Smith most often is called on to work on
prefer the Asian-made Kluson machines, TK is eager
to use Waverley tuners in conjunction with a head-
stock design of his own. Accented by fret-markers
styled by TK, these guitar necks will represent a 100
percent original product completely US -made, but
still in the style for which Smith is gaining notoriety.
Among his most demanded product offerings: his
custom-made black Bakelite pickguards, now seen
advertising the names of their owners on stages all
over the world. Firmly in the western music tradition
of 1950s, these guards are made of high-quality
materials (again, something painstakingly sourced
by Smith) and lettered entirely by hand. Smith draws
out the names himself and spends hours on each
inlay. The topic and tradition of customization is one
that Smith does confess a strong affinity for, reach-
ing back beyond his first “good” instruments and
connecting with his sidewalk surfing days. Easily
one of his most popular items, TK has enabled a
whole new generation of latter-day hillbilly boppers
and western swingers the opportunity to follow in
the footsteps of bygone heroes such as Hank Gar-
land and Hank Thompson.
Equally impressive to the eye but even more so to
the ear is his line of pickups. Smith currently offers
two outstanding pickups: his C. A .R. (cast aluminum
replica) and the C.C.esque. The first is a jaw-drop-
ping reproduction of the Bigsby’s second design
pickup with pole pieces. The latter, as the name
suggests, is his take on Gibson’s legendary bar
pickup design of 1936. Both need to be heard to be
fully appreciated. After years of endless experimen-
tation and the application of his obviously charac-
teristic unending curiosity, Smith seems to have hit
upon his magic formula. Of course, he’s done a lot of
homework, which included getting his hands on
original examples of some of his favorite pickups.
He says the key seems to be a significant amount of
mass coupled with a significant amount of power
from the Alnico magnets. The result in both pickups
is a remarkable pairing of clarity and warmth rare in
even the best single-coil pickups. And due to the
shielded metal casings, both are also extremely
quiet. In a relatively short amount of time, Smith has
delivered an electric guitar pickup that establishes
him as a true force to be reckoned with.
Smith is also often called upon to make custom
Partscasters. Like anything he sets his sights on,
these guitars are unique. In conversation (and on
44 T H E F R E T B OA R D J O U R N A L
one of his Pinterest boards), TK extolls the cool
factor of customized Telecasters, another California
tradition that reaches back nearly to the time an
Esquire rolled out of Leo’s Fullerton shop and first
played “ Twin Guitar Special.” True to form, a Smith
Special Partscaster is assembled of only the finest
parts, often customized like many of the small-name
lead guitarists did back in the day, and finished off
in nitrocellulose, Bakelite pickguard and all.
His most exciting projects are his first fully con-
structed electric guitars. Affectionately named the
“pancake guitar,” a term Smith adopted from an
old-timer he once worked with, the basic design is
loosely based on a Bigsby-built guitar owned by
Deke Dickerson but with plenty of refinement cour-
tesy of TK. The guitars are chambered maple, with
beautiful birds-eye figuring on the top and back.
Although flat and giving the appearance of a solid-
body, the chambering not only lightens the load, but
also gives the guitar some of the resonance of an
archtop. The necks, like most of the necks TK pro-
duces, are modeled on a couple of ’40s Epiphones he
is rather fond of, putting him in the good company
of legends Chuck Wayne and John Pisano, who have
extolled the virtues of the same-era Epiphone necks.
With cumulative details that proudly display his
influences, these Smith Specials are clearly his own
handiwork. They are beautiful instruments, both to
play and to look at. They also clearly represent a
significant milestone in Smith’s personal goals. “It
was always a dream of mine to make a guitar. I just
never thought that I would have the time.”
When asked about his exceptional attention to
detail, Smith confesses to it, but with some qualifi-
cation. “If I am going to do something, I am going to
try to do it right,” is how he puts it. But this is a big
part of what drives him. He continues by saying,
“A lot of it, I just had to kind of figure out by trial and
error.” Fortunately the right background, the right
influences, and a willingness to pay his dues have
put Smith at a point where much of what he does is
done right. The level of the work is remarkable in
person and more than lives up to the promise of
online photos and endorsements.
Thinking back on what has contributed to his
success to date, Smith is quick to give proper credit
to some of his earliest mentors. “I think I’ve been
lucky in that a lot of the guys that I’ve worked with
were super good at what they did. I didn’t realize it,
but those machinists were really, really good. I real-
ize it now, but back then I had no idea how good they
were. They always told me to do your best at what-
ever you do.” The last piece of wisdom is obviously
Smith modeled his pickup winder after the one Bigsby himself used,
right down to the same Singer sewing machine motor from 1930.

“I always liked the idea of doing

stuff for myself. It’s fun. Even if you aren’t
making a ton of money, you’re your own
boss and you have your freedom.”

TH E FR ET B OA R D J O U R NA L 45
The perfect ride for tooling
around the California desert?
Smith spent nearly a decade
working on his roadster pickup,
which features mostly Ford
Model A parts along with plenty
of fabrication and personal
touches.
something TK heeded early on in his development,
as it has clearly shaped who he is as both a musician
and a craftsman.
Recent developments in the shop include both
major and minor refinements to his ever-increasing
personal guitar design. Smith can now lay claim to
both fret-marker shapes and a Smith Special head-
stock design. Again, the influences are apparent if
one knows where to look, but the lines have grown
organically into something he may proudly call his
own. With the guitar side of the operation taking up
more of his time and Jill assisting more and more
with the administrative, communications and mar-
keting side of the business, Smith Fabrication is
definitely picking up speed. Their website is regu-
larly updated, both with current product offerings
as well as one-offs such as T-shirts.
Smith also maintains a blog that gives some addi-
tional insight into the process of his work, and
showcases musical inspiration both from past mas-
ters and young-bloods demonstrating the potential
of his creations. He is also active on Pinterest and
Instagram, where the eager can often catch a
glimpse of their project in progress. These photos
fuel the fire for those yet to test the waters. YouTube
clips often feature Smith himself casually demon-
strating his latest guitar or pickup while at the same
time proving himself to be one of best guitarists on
the West Coast.
What’s next? He has a desire to get his instru-
ments in the hands of the “Chet Guys,” as Smith
affectionately calls the fervent Atkins-style guitarists
all over the world who continue to surface on You-
Tube. “I think my stuff ’s perfect for them,” he says.
“Once I get it in their hands, I really think they will
dig it.” His focus has also widened to include acces-
sories such as a vibrato unit of his own design. “I
want to do my vibrato for a Tele, because right now
the only option is to take a B16 and cut it down.”
It’s easy to see how the organic nature of the Bigbsy-
influenced lines and curves can lead to further
inspiration, and Smith has already started indulging
in some minor flights of fancy. A headstock here and
an armrest there show more and more of his own
imagination coming to the fore. There is something
thrilling about an individual who clearly loves gui-
tars and respects the history and traditions of the
craft. In his small shop, just a bit off the main road
through Yucca Valley, Smith is painstakingly carving
the lettering of his own name into the great myth
and dream of Southern California. fj

49
 LOOKING By Jason Verlinde
Photography by Reuben Cox beyond
RY CO O D E R’S G LO B ETR OTTI NG WAYS

51
Ry Cooder says his 1960s Guyatone LG-200T is
in a “class by itself.” Cooder modified the
wiring to mono and usually pairs it with his Dr.
Z. EZG-50. “These things are insane, they
sound so good,” he says of the rare Japanese
guitar. “It’s beyond twang. It’s ridiculous. It’s
real rich, muscular, like a big weightlifter…
Charles Atlas, Vic Tanny…”

A
s with all things
Southern California, the Santa Monica Airport is
stuck at a strange intersection of old and (mostly)
new, working-class and (mostly) affluent. It’s a his-
toric place, for sure, and the oldest airport in all
of Los Angeles County. The 200-acre facility once
served as the Douglas Aircraft Co. factory, churning
out both civilian and military planes. These days,
it serves the needs of affluent air travelers with
private planes, as well as random high-end restau-
rants, a car collection or two (Jerry Seinfeld used
to house his Porsches in a hangar), red carpet
parties and others.
And here, not far from where the greatest genera-
tion riveted together DC-3s and C-47s and where the
affluent now house their private jets and supercars,
Ryland Cooder keeps an unassuming storage unit.
Despite his legendary (and ongoing) global travels
and music collaborations, Cooder hasn’t strayed
from the town he grew up in. Santa Monica—“about
as dull a place as you could ever imagine,” he says
about his childhood neighborhood—is still home.
A four-hour conversation with Ry Cooder can go
in many directions: There are the obvious topics to
discuss, such as the Buena Vista Social Club and the
Coodercaster, but that barely scratches the surface
of his music knowledge. As he reminisced about the
54 T H E F R E T B OA R D J O U R N A L
merits of “Cousin Jake” Tullock in Flatt & Scruggs,
getting fired by Lee Hazlewood, the alternate tunings
of Gabby Pahinui, oddball Japanese electric-guitar
pickups, famous rock sessions and more, my only
goal was to keep the recorder running. Despite
winning Grammys, changing the course of rock ‘n’
roll and inspiring his fair share of future guitarists,
Cooder is still self-effacing. As he describes a new
amp he’s ordered, he says with a laugh, “It’ll be built
for all of these giant jobs that I have now. All these
Vietnamese weddings...”
But to start, I tried to figure out the impossible…
just how does a kid from sunny Santa Monica, Cali-
fornia, turn into Ry Cooder?
FRETBOARD JOURNAL: You were just in Nashville,
presenting a Lifetime Achievement Award
to [Arhoolie Records founder] Chris Strachwitz.
Can you describe the impact Arhoolie had on
you growing up?
RY COODER: That will take some time to tell. It’s real
simple. When I was 13 or 14, there weren’t record
stores then that carried much folk music, except for
this one place. It was in downtown L . A .—all the way
downtown. It was run by two older sisters. It was
mostly kids’ records, Folkways and stuff like that. I’d
get on the bus right near here [in Santa Monica] and
head down. At a certain point towards downtown,
you’d transfer to the electric bus with the overhead
[lines]. And then you’d go a distance more, and then
get off and walk a few blocks. And there was a very
old residential neighborhood. And in this old Crafts-
man house, there was this record store.
I’d go in there and they had a little Webcor [turn-
table] where you could play anything that looked
good to you. At a certain point, I saw the Arhoolie
stuff because it was black & white and it was inter-
esting, a big picture of some old guy. The first one
I saw was Big Joe Williams’ Tough Times. And I put
that right there on the Webcor. Everything else they
had was Woody Guthrie songs, the Weavers, Pete
Seeger, everything was what you’d expect it to be,
little 10-inch LPs and some 78s...
But Big Joe Williams is another story. A sloppy
drunk comes on, and you’re at that age, it’s like a
whirlwind. That’s emphatic, it’s fabulous. He was
playing this nine-string, which I didn’t understand,
I didn’t know what it was, except it had extra keys,
’cause of the photograph. And he’s alive.
I had met people hanging out at [McCabe’s] here
in Santa Monica. One guy had a 78 collection. And
that was all very good, but those are ancient people,
all dead for the most part. As far as I could tell, if you
Cooder owns far more valuable (and older) instruments, but one of his
favorite guitars is a relatively recent acquisition, a 1960 Martin D-18
formerly owned by gospel musician Ralph Trotto. “This is officially
the most ruined D-18 in the world,” he says, “but it’s really good. You
can read a magazine through this thing it’s so beat.” The pickup came
from a Gibson F-12 mandolin that Paul Bigsby himself had modified.
“It had no high end,” Cooder says of the Gibson when it had a pickup,
“so I put it here.”
Cooder’s first electric guitar is this 1967 Fender Stratocaster in Daphne
Blue, an instrument he picked out when he began working with Captain
Beefheart at the age of 20. The instrument has undergone numerous
modifications over the years. “It had a tighter, boxy sound I never
liked,” Cooder says. “I didn’t understand electrics in those days. I didn’t
get what was really happening and how you were supposed to play
them even. I just hadn’t done that much, except put a DeArmond on my
Martin dreadnought.” The Strat now sports a Guyatone neck pickup
and a clone of a Bigsby eight-string steel guitar pickup created by Paul
Warnik. Of the Guyatone, he says, “It has a fabulous sound, open and
extended, with none of that heavy magnetized midrange that every-
thing has. It has no midrange at all, it just seems to have only top and
bottom, but it’s completely transparent.” The jack ferrule was inverted
to accommodate a Dan Armstrong Orange Squeezer.
saw them on a 78 record, it must mean they’re dead.
It’s like the past is so impenetrable, you can’t reach
into it. At least not at age 14.
But it fascinated me to think, “This is a guy alive
right now, doing this right now, making that sound,
playing like that.” So it must be possible. You see,
if it’s too far back, it’s impossible to access.
At the same time in L . A ., because of this aircraft
factory that was here, all these hillbillies had come
out from the South to work in the defense plants.
So they had a radio station that played all that stuff:
Joe Maphis, Merle Travis, of course, Bob Wills.
Wynn Stewart was my favorite; Hank Snow was my
first favorite.
But I didn’t know anything about who those
people were; I didn’t know they were actually here.
Hank Snow was in Nashville, of course, but Travis
and Maphis, they were all out here…Speedy West.
I didn’t know that. All I knew was Santa Monica
and aircraft workers and their kids that I went to
school with. It was about as dull a place as you
could ever imagine.
But on KXLA , they would say, Y’all come down ’n
get with us. This is Cliff Stone, now y’all come down and
get with us at the Riverside Rancho. And I’d say,
“ Where?”
Merle Travis is gonna be there, I’m gonna be there,
Speedy West is gonna be there and tonight we have
Cousin Joe Maphis. And I said, “ What? They’re in a
place, and we can go to this place?”
“ Where is this?” Must be local because it’s on the
radio. He’s saying that it is, it must be so. I said to my
dad—and we just lived two blocks from here—“Can
we go to his place?” “Absolutely not! Bunch of red-
necks, white trash, hillbillies!”
FJ: Was your father a musician?
RC: Heavens no! But he understood music, his
father had been a musician. My grandfather played
piano and he could write operas—this man could do
TH E FR ET B OA R D J O U R NA L
anything, apparently. I never met him. But he had
taught my dad, from the cradle up, about classical
music: who all the conductors were, who the soloists
were and all that stuff. But as far as country music,
my father just despised that shit. He wouldn’t take
me to the Riverside Rancho.
But when I got on the bus, I could go where I
wanted to go. And I got this Joe Williams record. I
took it home and I said, “Now this is something. This
is a big thing...to know how this guy is playing this.
What is he doing? What’s it all about?” He just sounds
like he’s about ready to blow a fuse, you know?
And I went on from there. Then I began to pay
attention to Arhoolie. I started buying these things,
$6.99.
Years later, just to telescope the whole thing, I met
him. By that time I was getting out of high school. He
came down to the Ash Grove and he was there, and I
was introduced. “This is Chris Strachwitz.” He was a
very elegant, sort of European cat. A count he is…an
ancient name, the Schloss, the chateau and all that.
But he escaped the Nazis and came here, and look
what he did! It was amazing.
I’ve spent a lot of time with him, especially on the
border in Texas, down around the Mexican border
there with the Tex-Mex guys in the ’70s hanging
around. His life story is unique. He made great
records and everybody loves him and respects him.
He cuts you a square deal. Honest and totally dedi-
cated. Musicians always recognize that.
If it weren’t for him, I would never have met Flaco
[Jiminez] and I wouldn’t have had that whole involve-
ment there, even though I knew I should, I wouldn’t
have. It would have been closed to me…some white
kid showing up in San Antonio? Forget it.
FJ: How did he broker that relationship?
RC: I told him, I said, “I want to get with somebody
who can do this with me.”
“ Well,” he said, “come on down. Me and [film-
maker] Les Blank are going down on the border,
we’re gonna film and talk and take a look.”
So my wife and I went down and we went around
to the different little towns—McAllen [Texas] and
other places—where theses characters were. He
knew who they were; he had the records.
Some of them wouldn’t talk to you. And some of
them didn’t like white people at all, which is per-
fectly all right. Totally understandable. But Flaco had
been with Doug Sahm already.
So I said, “OK, this guy, he’s interested, curious
and his world is not just West San Antonio and the
joints. He’s looking beyond.”
Then I started going down there and teaching him
57
“This is like having a brand new ’49 Cadillac,”
Cooder says of his triple-neck Bigbsy pedal steel,
which was assembled with unused original Bigsby
after the designer/guitarmaker passed away (the
maple is the only “non-Bigsby” element). Cooder
purchased the instrument from Paul Warnik.
 my tunes that I knew, putting his framework of refer-
ence such as “this is a Bolero” or “this is a waltz” or
whatever you call it. These R&B tunes worked real
well. And then I got his band together and taught
them how to do it, which wasn’t very hard to do.
And then we went out on the road. If I had had a
film crew on that tour, nobody would believe that
tour. That was ’75? And four black guys singing from
here…on a bus? Shit happened on that tour that no
one would believe.
People didn’t like it or they didn’t understand it,
but now they know. It would be ordinary now, al-
though this new thing with the Banda horns, that’s
not ordinary. [Cooder collaborated with 10-piece
horn and percussion ensemble La Banda Juvenil for
his 2013 live double-album Live from San Francisco.]
It’s a hell of a sound.
FJ: So the question remains: you grew up two
blocks from here [in Santa Monica], why didn’t
you become a surf rat? What was it that got you
on a bus to downtown L.A. to find records?
RC: Well, I had the guitar. That was given to me
when I was 4.
FJ: Who gave you that?
RC: A friend of my parents, a guy who was black-
listed. This was in the McCarthy time. He’d been a
violinist with the L . A . Philharmonic.
He got blacklisted like a lot of people did and the
L . A . Philharmonic was an uptight, fascist organiza-
tion. I don’t know what it’s like today, it’s not the
same, but in those days, the Chandlers ran it and you
were not going to show up if there was any kind of
suggestion at all.
So he was out of work and he became a camp
counselor—it’s the typical story. But he knew I liked
music. They gave me this little four-string, tenor
guitar. It was a good one. It was a Silvertone. I still
have it.
My dad could finger the thing: “G-chord,
D -chord, C-chord.” Pretty easy on the tenor.
So I did that. And then I found that this same
family had all the Woody Guthrie and Lead Belly
records, ’cause they were left-wing people and you
had those in those days.
FJ: And your dad was cool with that?
RC: Oh, they were all right with that. They were all
part of this milieu, so to speak.
My mother was in the Communist party, as far as
that goes, until the FBI started coming around and
my dad made her quit. He didn’t want more FBI guys
coming around; it was pretty scary. There were two,
they were always in pairs.
FJ: You witnessed this as a child?
60 T H E F R E T B OA R D J O U R N A L
RC: Yes, they had a dark blue Ford, it was a ’54
sedan, midnight blue. And this thing would pull up
and then they’d just sit there.
FJ: In front of your house?
RC: Yeah, and then they’d get out. It was Joe
Friday, man…dark hat, dark suit.
They’d come to the door and my dad would go into
a rage. We just want to talk to your wife about some
friends of hers. “ You are not coming in here,” he said.
“And if you step one foot in this house, I’m gonna do
the following… ” And, of course, he is talking to the
FBI! I went and hid in the closet. It was terrifying. I
still dream about those two guys.
They finally stopped; he got a lawyer involved. He
had a friend from the Army who was a lawyer and
they did something. And she quit the party, but it
was a nervous time.
But these people, the Bregers, their name was,
they had three things it turned out I needed: there
was a guitar there, the folk records and Pogo books.
That’s the whole childhood image of the world right
there. It’s all you really need.
It was a tremendous thing to see this stuff. Kin-
dergarten was miserable…and so was first, and
second, and third, and fourth, and fifth, and sixth,
and seventh grade. So I go over to their house, after
school, and they just let me run through the place.
I get the Pogo books and memorize those. Then I get
the Guthrie records and memorize that. That’s how
it went.
FJ: Why was school so miserable?
RC: Fuck, what do you mean? Why was school
miserable? It was their regimen and conformist-
based, fascist organization!
They told us, “ You are going to be an insurance
salesman. You will run furniture stores.”
I still resent every minute. That’s a lot of time
when you break it down in hours.
I never learned anything at school; I didn’t even
know how to read. What were they doing?
The whole thing was a pack of lies anyway, it was
all lies. The day Kennedy was shot, the civics teacher
goes, “ Well, that’s too bad. Let’s have a test.” He was
so happy, this guy, he was in ecstasy. His eyes just
popping out of his head. I hope he is down there in a
toasty corner.
Then time went on. Many, many, many years later
I actually got a letter from the English teacher, this
woman who was a pretty nice person. “I’m sorry you
had such a bad time.”
I could’ve been really good, I think, if I’d a had a
clear path... I could’ve been a contender. I could’ve
been somebody [laughs].
 “But these people, the Bregers, their name was,
they had three things it turned out I needed:
there was a guitar there, the folk records and Pogo
books. That’s the whole childhood image of the
world right there. It’s all you really need.”
I work harder now than I ever had before at play-
ing this stuff. ’Cause I see what it has to be now. And
I see how to do it better than I used to. But we can’t
all be [flamenco guitarist and composer] Vicente
Gomez, let’s just put it that way. There is some sort of
weird confluence of circumstances that produces a
guy like that.
And opportunity was great here, of course, in
recording. If I’d been from Grand Island, Nebraska,
I’d be sacking groceries. It’s obvious.
FJ: When did you graduate from the tenor to
a six-string?
RC: I was about 8 or 10 years old.
FJ: Were you able to find like-minded kids in
music in school?
RC: Nah. And then, after a while, it became obvi-
ous, this Ash Grove place was the place to be. [Ash
Grove founder] Ed Pearl knew: Get these traditional
players out. And they were being discovered, redis-
covered or reactivated, shall we say. “Discovered”
is a bad word. They were always there, just nobody
cared. But then it was possible to bring them to Los
Angeles. That might be the Stanley Brothers, Flatt
and Scruggs—without Jake Tullock on bass, which I
am sorry about. “Hylo” Brown was good, but he was
no Jake Tullock.
But I wanted to hear the singing all the time. And
you’ve got John Hurt and then you got Doc Watson
and Fred Price and Clarence Ashley on banjo. These
are the people.
FJ: Do you remember your first concert at the
Ash Grove?
RC: Oh sure! It was Brownie & Sonny.
FJ: And who did you go with?
RC: I think my mother, because I couldn’t drive
and didn’t have a car.
And then there was a friend at high school that
liked folk music. He had a Chevy, we used to ride
TH E FR ET B OA R D J O U R NA L
down there. Then I got a car; that was a big thing. I
sold my [archtop] Mastertone banjo, which was too
loud, and got this ’47 Packard. Beautiful car. Big,
huge automobile…straight-eight motor, big seats,
enormously heavy. I’d drive down there and just sit
and watch these guys.
And most of them were pretty friendly if you
asked them, “How did you just do that?” Or not ask
them and just watch and see and absorb what you
could. [With the] Reverend Gary Davis, it was not
clear to me how he was doing it, but the effect is
the thing.
Carter Stanley would be drunk and he would stick
his tongue out at the people coming in. “God, what’s
up with that guy?” I used to think. “ What’s wrong
with him?” He was a hillbilly guy who was loaded
half the time. But then they’d get up on stage and
they’d sing their heart out. It was so gripping that I
almost didn’t breathe the whole time that they were
on stage. I never missed a night. It was fabulous.
FJ: So, at a relatively early age, were you
dabbling in guitar, banjo and mandolin?
RC: At McCabe’s they had mandolins on the wall.
I didn’t understand it at all, I didn’t know what they
were for. A guy came in one day, I don’t know if he
was professional. A lot of bluegrass players are, of
course, semiprofessional, so to speak. They might
be part-time fender fixers or have another gig; it’s
sort of a heightened amateur calling, I think, with
a few obvious exceptions. Not everybody can be
Don Reno…
But this cat could play that stuff. Then the White
Brothers came to town, they started showing up. And
they’d come in to get a string or a pick. You could
drive all the way from Burbank to get a pick.
I said, “ Who are these cats?” Clarence wouldn’t
talk. You could see they were from somewhere; I
didn’t know they were from Maine or Nova Scotia or
61
Cooder has been playing Martins throughout his entire re-
cording career (there’s a great YouTube clip of him playing
“Vigilante Man” on a Martin D-45 in the ‘70s). Included in
his collection: a 1937 Martin D-18, a 1937 Martin D-28 that
he’s dubbed “Boris,” the Ralph Trotto guitar and a 1929
Martin 000-18 that came from Mike Seeger. Not surpris-
ingly, Cooder doesn’t shy away from modified (or modify-
ing) guitars. The D-28 sports a 1935 neck courtesy of T.J.
Thompson and a non original top.
Over the years, Cooder has used several guitars built by Danny Fer-
rington, but this specimen has to be one of the most unique. It was built
in under an hour, with parts Ferrington had on-hand in his workshop: a
bass pickup from one of Joe Osborne’s Fenders, an old Kramer neck and
a piece of plywood. Even though it has difficulty staying in tune,
Cooder has recorded with it numerous times. “I dig it,” he says. “It’s
just that it can’t tune to anything else, that’s all.”
The black combo amplifier behind the guitar is a Howard, built in the
‘60s by guitar and amp maker Tom “Howard” McCormick of Phoenix.
The black amp head behind it is another Howard, originally belonging
to Duane Eddy. To find the combo amp, Cooder subscribed to a Phoenix
newspaper and scoured the classifieds. Eventually, in the ‘80s, this one
turned up for sale. Just out of frame is another favorite amp of Cooder’s,
a Panaramic [sic] 2x12", which is essentially a mono Magnatone. “That’s
all you need in this world,” he says of his Panaramic.
wherever they were from. I didn’t know that. But
Roland could play that stuff, and I thought, “Oh,
brother!” And I looked at his chord position and I
said, “OK, they keep moving this one position
around…if they play out of that form, I could do
that.” So I started doing that.I’m not good, but I love
the mandolin. Then, of course, blues mandolin, it’s
completely unstructured. You just beat on it.
And when I started doing session work, it
occurred to me one day: It might make a good back-
beat with the snare drum, ’cause it’s so high and
punchy, they might like it in the booth.
“ What’s that thing?” said the, uh, producer. “Oh,
it’s called a mandolin.” “ Well, let’s hear what it
does.” “ Well, I think if I go like this, chop…on this
backbeat.” “Oh, that’s pretty good.” And the engi-
neer, I see him turning some knobs in there. You had
your earphones on. Something’s happening to the
sound. What is it? Sounds like it’s gonna blow up. It
was some kind of compression.
I didn’t know what it was. I thought, “This is awe-
some what this thing is doing.”
So I went into the booth. “ You’re not supposed to
be in here.” “Oh, oh, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry,
but what is that thing you just did?” “ Well, that’s a
Pultech. Now go back out and sit down.” You never
went in the booth in those days.
FJ: What session was that?
RC: It was probably Paul Revere and the Raiders.
It was Earl Palmer on drums, so I’m not sure. It was
mostly Hal Blaine on those dates, but they alter-
nated.
Of course, to me, this is living! You get to hear the
effect of what the process is doing. ’Cause ordinary
sounds like we sit and play and hear, that’s all right,
I guess. But when you hear it through the process,
then it’s awesome!
Then, it’s like I’m motivated. I’m going to really do
TH E FR ET B OA R D J O U R NA L
this! But then you take the earphones off, you’re
back to normal again, it’s boring. Put the earphones
on, “Oh, my God, listen to that! That’s tape compres-
sion! That’s tube compression! That’s Pultechs!” and
that kinda shit.
Twenty-four-track was never the same. It was
dull, I thought. Pretty dull, pretty dry.
FJ: Was it hard for a kid who didn’t want to be
a conformist at school to be a session musician?
RC: I loved it, because these people were so good.
They were incredibly good and some were great. Earl
Palmer was incredibly great.
I didn’t know anybody. On that first session, I was
sitting there, you have baffles—three-wall deal—so
you couldn’t see anybody.
So you’d put on the phones, you’d sit down. I
couldn’t read the chart so I didn’t bother to look at it.
I just figured, “ Well, I’m going to listen and see what
this is so I’ll know what to.” I better do something
based on what I think other people are doing so I
don’t copy or get in the way. And I hear this skippy
drum stuff happening, like warming up.
“Oh, oh,” I said. “ What the fuck is this?” So I took
the earphones off, put the thing down, and got up
and went over to see. “ Who’s that out there?” “Sit
back down!” “Hey, we’re gonna roll a tape, what the
hell is going on out there?”
Well, it is Earl with his flattop hair and cigarette.
“Oh, my God,” I said, “That’s the shit right there.”
And whatever we recorded that day was industrial
grade pop music. But what he played warming up
was life-altering right there. ’Cause you could say,
“OK, that’s possible, I might hear that again and I
might do something about that.”
Joe Osborn was often the bass player, I liked him
very much. He was very friendly. I would play bass
lines on the guitar like Lead Belly used to do. He’d
look over and he’d do it, too. Now we got something
going. And then the producer might say, “That was
actually good.”
I see. So if you contribute something, then you
find a way in. ’Cause charts were meaningless, it was
just chords mostly. Although there were times when
I didn’t know what it was and you were supposed to
play an add-nine or a diminished eight, and I didn’t
know what it was. And there would be problems.
They didn’t have time for that shit. Mike Deasy,
mostly the lead guitar player, was always trying to
tell me, “Man, can’t you just catch on to these?”
“OK, OK, I’ll try harder,” I’d say.
One day, everybody had a Fuzztone. They’d just
been made and I got one. I brought it down because
somebody said, “ You better have it.” And then,
65
 “Guitar Player Number Three, we need to get a Fuzz-
tone.” It was Lee Hazlewood, just a hard-ass guy.
Well, I plugged it in to the amp and nothing hap-
pened, it didn’t work. So I took it and I said, “Sorry,
it doesn’t work.” He didn’t like what I was playing.
He didn’t like it at all.
At the end of the day, I took the Fuzztone and put
it in the trash.
Now, Mike Deasy saw me do that and he took it
out of the trash. “ What did you do that for?” “ Well,
it doesn’t work,” I said. He took it apart and he’s like,
“No battery inside.” A battery? I didn’t know you
needed it! “Oh, for God’s sakes,” he just shakes his
head. You know, “This guy is too ignorant…can’t
read the chart, doesn’t know how a Fuzztone works.”
FJ: What session was that?
RC: I don’t remember, I just remember how horri-
fied I was. The attitude there, it was different than
what I was used to. [Hazlewood] was a hard-nosed
guy, tough cat. It might have been Nancy Sinatra?
FJ: And you were pretty much self-taught?
RC: Pretty much, although I had seen a lot of
things. I had people showing me things. Fred Ger-
lach tried to get me to play the 12-string, but I didn’t
like it. Too many strings. It was just too hard to
handle, and no matter what you did, it always
sounded the same. Then I got with Tom Paley when
the [New Lost City] Ramblers started coming out.
And from him I really learned a lot of things. Open
tunings and banjo, too. He was great at it. He was
very nice to me and Mike Seeger was very nice to me.
Records are good teachers, but records are hard
to understand if you can’t see it done. So you end up
doing something different. But that might be good,
as in the case of John Lee Hooker, which I did not
understand until one day it occurred to me, “It’s
banjo tuning. The guy is in G tuning, not all the time,
but this boogie thing everybody was trying to play in
A , was not in A , it was in fucking G tuning with the
capo on the second fret, as any fool could see.
So then I tuned the guitar to G—the bottom two
strings were D and G. And there it was.
Now Hooker put on a capo on and played in A ,
’cause he liked to sing in A ; he wouldn’t want to sing
in an open G, I don’t suppose, it’s not too bluesy.
But I could see these banjo chords sounded par-
ticularly good on the electric guitar, the way you
make the IV chord, in particular. I heard Tom Paley
do this, too, when they used to come through with
the New Lost City Ramblers all the time, and I’d get
banjo lessons from him.
And this business of barring with your first finger,
and playing IV-chord against the bar, it gave a nice
66 T H E F R E T B OA R D J O U R N A L
feeling. And it was a nice chordal thing bouncing
around, and it sounded just like John Lee Hooker.
I said, “That’s the deal. Those are the positions.”
I did the same thing on guitar, and made the
banjo chords work on the open tuning on the guitar
pretty easily. You just play all the banjo chords and
then pick the ones you like the best, that being the
more open ones, rather than the more closed ones;
you get more open strings.
Then the advantage to this was, it gave a nice
chord voicing against playing with other people.
Because when I started doing these sessions, you
see, all the guitar players on the date would be tuned
to standard, of course. So what’s the damn point of
going and doing that? I mean, you’ve got already
there’s two guitar players, maybe more, and they’re
all tuned standard, it’s horrible. There’s no har-
monic, it’s just like all the same. The thing about
electric guitars is, you get too many of them going at
once, it sounds just like chickens in the barnyard
scratching.
But with the open tuning, it opened it up. So then
I would have something nice to go against what they
were doing, and, of course, it also lets you play
bottleneck.
Once I got going with that I saw this was a good
method for me. And the thing I liked the best was in
the banjo when they play in D in the G-tuning. On
guitar it sounds fabulous, because you have the two
bass strings ringing open, and you just do all kinds
of things. So that opened up a whole range of possi-
bilities for me, and that’s when I concentrated on all
those years and still basically do.
I said, “I know those are the same chords. I hear
it.” And then from the banjo I could see. That worked
out real good. That was my first and probably best
idea.
FJ: What were some of your other good ideas?
RC: The mandolin back-beat was a good idea. And
playing the mandolin as though it were a guitar or a
rhythm instrument—pop, but not country.
After you hear John Duffey, you say “No. Leave
that alone, there’s no way.” I was so stricken by him
and his singing and those songs of that group —
that’s actually when I sold that banjo and got the car.
’Cause I said, “I cannot ever do this.” There was no
point in trying. You should do what people aren’t
doing and then at least you might have a place to
occupy.
But if John Duffey can play mandolin like that,
I don’t know. I’m never gonna get there, nobody can
beat John Duffey.
You should forget about it. Just love it and appre-
 “I learned to be quiet, listen and
pay attention. I said, ‘Oh, I see what I can do.
There’s room for back-beat along with
the snare.’ And the mandolin’s perfect.”
ciate it. Lester Flatts’ thumb swinging loose. I don’t
understand it, it’s the greatest thing in the world, but
I can’t [do it]. I’ve tried to be like that…and [John
Lee] Hooker’s thumb comes out to here and then
goes in, a blues thumb.
I realized, “ Well, you know, I compensate in other
ways.” You know, you end up compensating. And
from doing that, you might come up with something
at least halfway good—useful anyway.
You’ve got guitar players already there, and
they’re playing and they’re doing things. I don’t
remember exactly what happened. I think [it was
with] Terry Melcher, the producer who I was working
for. I would bring these things to the session, and he
would say, “Play that. What’s that?” “That’s a mando-
lin.” “Play it.” “Oh, okay.”
So then you have to think of something to do. You
can’t doodle around on a mandolin in the middle of
a rock tune, they won’t like it. It’s messy.
So everybody has to be clean and tight. Everybody
has to occupy a little space, and keep it that way.
You don’t wander around like you do in folk music.
That’s the other thing you have to learn. Nobody
says anything like what they want you to do, but the
charts were there, I couldn’t read ’em. I didn’t know
how to read charts. I didn’t know what the fuck it
was all about.
They would pass these things out, and I would go,
“My God, what is this?” And then they’d count off
and I’d say, “ Wait. Count what off ? What are we
playing?” People looked at me in horror. You know,
“This guy’s stopped the date. He must be insane.”
I learned to be quiet, listen and pay attention. I
said, “Oh, I see what I can do. There’s room for back-
beat along with the snare.” And the mandolin’s per-
fect. It’s way up high. As long as they didn’t play in flat
keys, ’cause that didn’t sound good, but they didn’t
much, not on rock songs. Most of it was in A or G.
TH E FR ET B OA R D J O U R NA L
It worked out pretty good. And then, of course,
with the trick of limiting the thing and compressing
it, which is sensational. This was just out of a neces-
sity or the need to improvise something. If you can
improvise based on what you know, and the more
you know, the more you can improvise and then stay
in the mix, and adapt to whatever the situation is.
Of course, along the life’s path, that’s what it’s all
about: Being a musician is being able to improvise.
Especially for me, because I can’t read; I don’t know
any—not harmony and theory. I don’t know shit
about it. I can hear it, but I don’t understand—you
know, and they used to say, “substitute chords,”
I said, “Oh, no. What’s that mean, now?”
But I learned from open tunings there are those
infinite possibilities for wonderful substitutions that
would sound nice. If you were judicious and clever
about it, you’d fit in, and people liked what I played.
And I didn’t get fired all of the time!
FJ: How did you cross paths with Taj Mahal?
Was that an Ash Grove connection?
RC: Yeah, Ed Pearl liked him and had him [at the
Ash Grove]. He’d come out from the East Coast. And
we tried to put a little group together and it was,
obviously, totally unsuccessful, but that’s what got
me over to Columbia Records. We got signed and it
came to nothing, but from that he went on and made
records for Columbia. And Terry Melcher, who was
incredibly hot right then because of the Byrds,
started saying, “ You know, I like that mandolin, I like
that thing on your finger [the slide]… ”
FJ: As a young session musician, what gear
would you bring to the studio?
RC: Well, I had my blue Stratocaster. It was stock
in those days. I didn’t like it, but I had it. It never
occurred to me to change the pickups until some-
body suggested I do that. And I started on this suc-
cession of attempts to broaden and soften up the
67
Cooder’s main Stratocaster is a ‘60s Fender Buddy
Holly reissue. The bridge pickup is an Oahu while
the often-duplicated goldfoil pickup came from a
Teisco. “I got it from Lindley,” Cooder recalls of the
making of the “Coodercaster.” “Nothing special.
But the thing is so dynamic and so resonant that
it’s amazing. Everybody wanted one, so people
started cloning these things off, but I haven’t
played one yet that’s as good as that one.”
“New instruments for me are kind of a hard thing,” Cooder says
of his recent Michael Heiden mandolin. “At my age, I’m not
going to be around by the time that thing is ready, but it’s nice
to have and play.” The blonde Gibson “Fern” mandolin came
from Mike Seeger and originally belonged to Bill Napier of the
Stanley Brothers. “He shaved all the finish off and thinned the
top,” Cooder says. “You’re never supposed to do that but the
result is amazing. Then somebody changed the fingerboard.”
When a musician left this 1934 Gibson Roy Smeck Stage De Luxe at a
storage facility in lieu of paying his bill, the proprietors called Ry
Cooder up. A deal was struck, and Cooder has had the guitar for nearly
20 years. “It’s really good,” he says of the Smeck he’s used on numerous
recordings, “a pure sound.”
sound. I still don’t like it that much, although now I
like the pickups I’ve got in it pretty good.
And I had a little amp—a little Fender Princeton
or some damn thing, which I didn’t like.
But it takes a lifetime to figure this shit out. What
are you going to do but keep trying?
FJ: How did you end up with that Strat?
RC: It was with the [Captain] Beefheart problem!
They sent me down to Fender in Fullerton.
Bob Krasnow and I were there, because they were
getting the Beefheart guys all these instruments.
They didn’t have nothing. They were guys from the
desert, they didn’t have shit.
I went down to Fender, drove down there, and I’m
supposed to see so-and-so. They just handed me this
thing and I left, and I didn’t know what to do with it.
And I didn’t like it at all, but I thought, “ Well, if Mike
Deasy plays a Strat, everybody plays a Strat, I guess
I’m gonna have to do something with this.” You have
to make something happen. It was no good for bot-
tleneck, ’cause it would just die away, the notes
would just disappear. It’s a flat pick guitar.
So I started changing the pickups. Somebody gave
me a pair of P-90s, I didn’t like it. Then I tried the
dugout thing with the lap-steel pickup, but it didn’t
work. It did work wonderfully on the other [Strat],
that’s the good guitar. But this now has this
Guyatone—this is the shit here. This thing is beauti-
ful, it sounds like heaven.
FJ: What made you think a Guyatone pickup
would work on a Strat?
RC: I had the Guyatones. Funny little cheap gui-
tars, like junk. Tiny, three-quarter size, but it has a
fabulous sound, open and extended, with none of
that heavy magnetized midrange that everything
has. It has no midrange at all, it just seems to have
only top and bottom, but completely transparent.
I said, “Okay, we’ll rob out one of these things,”
’cause I’d never gotten anywhere with that blue
guitar. I tried everything and different Strat pickups.
It wasn’t good.
The brown Strat took to the swap immediately.
But the blue one had a more rigid sound, like a
tighter, boxy sound I never liked. I said, “Okay, I’m
going to try one more time.” It worked really good, it
sounds really beautiful. It’s very pretty. And Strats
aren’t pretty; to me they’re very harsh. They’re okay
TH E FR ET B OA R D J O U R NA L
for hillbilly music, but you can’t get any warmth out
of them. It’s just hard to do. You have to play real
hard, and you have to bear down real hard. I don’t
like to do that.
So the Guyatone worked and I knew it would.
People pick on me for hot-rodding that guitar like I
did. But man, it sounds good, with the Bigsby espe-
cially. The Bigsby relieves the strings a little, and the
angle’s nice. It isn’t so hard sounding.
FJ: How many pickups do you think that first
Strat has seen on it?
RC: Well, I had the stock, took those out. Tried
different Strat pickups, so that’s one time through.
Then the P-90s was another time through. There was
a Les Paul [pickup] for a while, I got rid of that in a
hurry.
Then, let’s see. Then I had the Oahu lap steel
[pickup] on the bottom, like the brown one does. It
was no good at all. It just didn’t—it sounded like
shit. Got rid of that. So the Oahu pickup went away.
Not a lot of times.
FJ: Why didn’t you just part ways with the
guitar?
RC: Oh, never, no, no, no. It’s a great guitar. I like
the guitar and it’s sentimental. It’s the first electric
I ever had.
Secondly, the neck is fabulous. It’s a good shape.
It’s real comfortable to play. I’ve played it for so
many years that when you play a guitar that long,
you’re joined to it in a way. The left hand knows
where everything is. I don’t have to think about it at
all. And it really plays good. It just never sounded all
that right. But I knew.
FJ: You were never a Les Paul player, right?
RC: No, I can’t get any sound out of those things. I
just don’t understand them at all. I don’t know what
they’re all about. People love ’em, I just don’t get it.
FJ: In your head, has there been a guitar tone
that you kept trying to emulate? Was it Elmore
James?
RC: Sure, of course. I tried very hard to do his Chi-
cago sound. But then, of course, finally it dawned on
me, it must be Japanese. That squeezed [tone]—
there are some Italian guitars that make that sound,
but the Japanese, there are a couple that definitely
do it. But the sound I always liked was just to make
a resonant sound.
I don’t even like solidbody electrics, particularly.
The Mosrite has the chamber; the Joe Maphis model,
that’s a beautiful sound. I love that guitar. And I’ve
got a Mosrite stereo that’s pretty dimensional, but
it’s only because it’s so goddamn powerful that the
output is insane. But I really prefer a hollowbody—
73
 anything where there’s air.
FJ: Speaking of hollowbodies, can you tell me
about the process of doing the Jazz album?
RC: That was a horrible experience.
FJ: The playing was awesome.
RC: Those [Bix] Beiderbecke things are interest-
ing. I can’t play them now. I blocked it all out. Hard
as hell. It was impossible. Ridiculous.
But it was a vehicle for Bill Johnson to come out
of obscurity, which is another story entirely. That’s
a great story. We went to Carnegie Hall where he
made Spirituals to Swing with the Golden Gate Quartet
in 1939.
He was one of these genius great guys, and his life
story, which nobody will probably ever write, was
incredible. I mean he’d done everything. He knew
[Black Vaudeville star] Bert Williams. As a child he
was on a roll with John Hammond and Guthrie and
had a law degree, for Christ’s sake. He ended up a
custodian in Jefferson High School. Willie Johnson…
on and on like that. Amazing story. Amazing guy.
He really showed me a lot about singing. How you
do it rhythmically—because of all the Gates records,
which were really perfectly done.
What it did for me was, Walter Hill heard that
record and said, “Okay, get that guy. He can come
and work on films for me.” That was the job.
I didn’t want to tour anymore. I didn’t want to
travel, because [my son] Joaquim was little and I
didn’t want to leave him. That would be stupid. His
little childhood was sitting and drawing crayons,
endlessly drawing on the floor of the control room
while Walter sat there telling me what to play. It was
amazing. But he absorbed all of that and he got it.
Now he can do that stuff himself.
Joaquim would always like the funny cords, those
weird suspensions. And anytime I would do that,
he’d look up and want to know, what was that?
Straight stuff didn’t affect him. He liked Johnny
Smith. When he was a baby, Stan Getz put him to
sleep, Moonlight in Vermont—thank God for that.
FJ: What other legendary guys were you able to
reach out to?
RC: Well, one guy I paid a lot of attention too was
this Hawaiian cat, Gabby Pahinui. From him, I
learned a lot. If you were to say, “ Where’d you most
learn from, other than Joseph Spence records?” [it
would be Gabby]. We went to see [Spence] in the
Bahamas when he was still alive.
FJ: You met Joseph Spence?
RC: Yes, went to his house.
FJ: What was that like?
RC: A little pink house. He made it himself out of
74 T H E F R E T B OA R D J O U R N A L
single blocks. It was painted that Bahamian pink
with a little blue in it. His wife was there. Her name
was Louise. And he knew we were coming and had
sent word. We were on a boat. Landed in Nassau.
FJ: For the specific reason of going to Spence?
RC: No, it was a boat that went to Cuba. The one
that did [in 1977]. On the next [voyage], they found
bombs attached to the hull so they didn’t go. We
went on the one that made it. Dizzy Gillespie, Earl
Hines, all these guys were on this boat. Then many of
the passengers wanted to go to Nassau, which was
where they thought they were going in the first
place. It hadn’t been announced. “ We’re going to
stop in Havana.” It was amazing. It was like we knew.
FJ: A boat from Miami?
RC: No, it was from New Orleans.
FJ: Who did you play with?
RC: Well, I didn’t play with anybody. Nobody would
play with me, are you kidding? That was Dizzy Gilles-
pie and his Big Band. There was Earl Hines. That was
Stan Getz. These are the masters of their day.
The fellow who booked this thing was a husband
of an acquaintance of a friend. And through that
family I just begged and pleaded. I said, “Look, I’ll
swab the decks, I don’t care.”
I’m not a jazz player, which is what’s been asked
for by Castro. So the guy just sort of put me there,
you know, and I played a little hour show by myself.
It was a big boat and they had different social rooms.
And eight people sat there…six of ’em wandered
away. And that was all I had to do.
But the main action was, when we got there, there
was going to be this great big concert at the Karl
Marx Theater [in Havana]. All the players. As a group,
the musicians were taken to the Musician’s Union in
the van and there was a show in a park.
The show at the Musician’s Union was interesting
because there were two young guys, Paquito D’Ri-
vera and Arturo Sandoval.
They were younger than me or about my age. No
one had heard of them outside of Cuba. And they got
up to honor Dizzy and everybody. We were all sitting
there in this little room. It was like a little recital
hall. And these cats got on stage and they absolutely
ripped that place to shreds and Dizzy Gillespie got
under the table and wouldn’t come out. Sandoval
blew him under the table! He played a whole concert
in the third octave. I know Dizzy, as great as he is,
couldn’t do that. Nobody out of Cuba can do shit
like that.
Then they said, “And now Mr. Dizzy Gillespie will
please come to the stage.” And he didn’t. He
wouldn’t come out.
 That was interesting. And then they had this big
show at the Karl Marx Theater, invited dignitaries
and bureaucrats came down. What was I gonna do?
We had the introduction to this woman, who was
the head of the music museum that was there and
a scholar. She was an older woman, who lived in a
beautiful old apartment in downtown Havana. We
went to see her. It was interesting and scholarly,
academic and very friendly. Like everybody is in
Cuba.
We’re going to do this big show at the theater. I
said, “ What am I going to do? I can’t get up there
and do a set. They don’t really have room for me, but
I have to do something.” So what would you do if you
were me, you know? I’m not going to play some
blues song, that’s stupid. They don’t know or care
what blues is in Cuba. They had some of the most
advanced, intricate, fascinating music on the planet.
Why the hell would they care who Blind Blake is?
She said, “ Well, this is an anniversary this week of
a famous songwriter in Cuban history. And he wrote
one of these anthems during the [Jose] Marti Era,
which was during the Spanish-American War. It’s a
very famous, patriotic song. And everybody knows
this song. It’s pretty simple, I’ll hum it for you.”
I had a little cassette machine, she hummed it
into the cassette machine. I went back to the boat
and practiced this thing. She says, “ You won’t sing
it. Just tell them in Spanish what it is you’re going to
play, like a Joseph Spence tune” Which I did, and by
God, I got a standing ovation. You could have heard
a pin drop. It was the scariest thing I’ve ever done
on stage. I did not know what was going to happen.
These people, they were going to eat me alive.
FJ: How much time did you have to learn that?
RC: That afternoon. It wasn’t hard, though. It was
pretty easy. It’s a pretty little song.
So then I did that and I did some other silly-ass
thing. I was so young. I just did not know anything.
But what I really wanted to do was hear old son
music, which we did hear that afternoon in the park,
and there was an old guy with his little group, who
was fascinating, who was incredible.
I knew what to look for. I was asking, “Is anybody
playing this old way?” You know? But they wanted us
to be aware of their Afro- Cuba stuff. That’s what they
were hot for in those days, fancy Afro- Cuba jazz. It
didn’t interest me at all. I wanted to hear old son
music, cigar makers and stuff. And we did for a
minute, in the park, and it was real. I thought, “ Well,
we should move here. We can live here for a couple
years, and I could study this with these old cats.
That’s the way to do it.” But then our son, Joaquim,
cuban
synchronicity
Ry Cooder describes the
cassette tape that helped plant
his love for Cuban music:
In the ’60s, all these people came down there to be
in the Venceremos Brigade to help Cuba. They were
very poor at that time, of course, and needed all
kinds of help. All these volunteers went there.
And KPFA, actually, sent somebody down there,
and they had a concert at the end of the time that
the volunteers were there. There was an outdoor
concert like there always is. This girl from KPFA—I
have no idea who she was—had a cassette machine
and recorded the concert. That cassette—this is in
the ’60s now—went back to KPFA. A friend of mine
later on in the ’70s was working there. He made a
copy of it and he gave it to me. He said, “Listen to
this stuff.”
And I heard something on it, some beautiful,
different things: some with horns, sometimes a little
mambo thing, and you could hear the audience,
people talking, the wind in the microphone. You
could tell it’s not a big crowd, somewhere out-
doors. But then this thing came on, this string
band—like a three-piece—and they just ripped it
up. “Oh, that’s a mandolin of some kind. It’s a
double-string thing. Listen to that guy just shred.”
I had this thing with me and I said, “Does any-
body know who this is?” And nobody could say
for sure.
So I kept that cassette in a box. We went down
to do Buena Vista. And one of the players in the
studio that had asked to come down, the people
had recommended this guy, Barbarito Torres, this
super laud player. One day we’re sitting there, and
I could see he was fantastic on this laud, this funny
little short-necked thing with 12 strings…obviously
Spanish-derived. I said, “You play this thing. You
remind me of this thing on this cassette. I’m going
to play it to you.” He says, “That’s me. How’d you
get that?”
So I told him the story. He said, “That’s me and
my first band.” He could not believe it. He just
tripped out. —As told to Jason Verlinde
75
was born very soon after, and we forgot all about it
until Buena Vista time.
FJ: How did you first discover the music of
Gabby Pahinui?
RC: In the early ’70s, my wife had a good friend
there who was living in Honolulu, a Hawaiian-Japa-
nese friend of hers. She wanted to go visit her. I
couldn’t go for some reason. I said, “Ask ’em—I know
there are good guitar players over there. Find some-
thing good and bring it back.”
Suzie called me on the phone from Honolulu and
said, “I’m with so and so, and we’re at the record
store,” ’cause it’s still LP days. “Is this something like
what you’re talking about?” And she played it to me
over the phone. I said, “Oh, that’s awesome! Who’s
that?” “ Well, I don’t know, someone named Gabby.”
I said, “Buy all his records and bring them back.”
So she bought some LPs and brought ’em home.
And I listened. I look at this character sitting in his
yard with all these other guys. I saw that it was a
modern label, it wasn’t a reissue, it wasn’t old. It was
something being done right then.
It was easy enough to get an address, and I wrote
him a letter. I said, “ To Whom It May Concern, who-
ever you are”—Panini Records, they called them-
selves, in Honolulu. I said, “My name is so and so,
and I make records for Warner Brothers, and I play
guitar,” and this and that. “And I really think this is
great music, and Gabby Pahinui is fabulous. And can
I please come and say hello some time?” And that’s
how it all happened. I got a letter back—not right
away—that said, “Sure, come on out and we’ll intro-
duce you to him.”
And it turned out to be. We’re all still friends.
Although, of course, Gabby and most everybody that
I knew died. The sons are still alive.
I would say from all the people I’ve known, I’ve
learned the most from him, just playing and hanging
around. And he was Mister Open Tuning, real fasci-
nating repertoire. Not only the tunings, but the style,
the way he played, the beautiful touch that he had—
tremendous relaxation and the beautiful languid
sense. But a big sound on the guitar. It fascinated me
how he made the thing sound large rather than little
and picky. And he was an incredible steel player.
We spent a lot of time there, trips and sitting
around and soaking it up. That was a big inspiration
for me. And the final trip to Havana with Buena Vista,
which was like going to master class, where you had
to get good in a hurry.
You had to really get sharp about rhythm, and get
that clave thing in your mind, because I didn’t have it
in my mind. I knew what it was, but I didn’t feel it,
TH E FR ET B OA R D J O U R NA L
but after 10 visits to Cuba, it had been implanted and
now it’s fine. It’s a much more sophisticated way of
looking at rhythm. If frees you up instead of every-
thing on the back-beat, which is fine too, but I mean,
it’s not all there is to life.
I like Latin music anyway, so now I can play it,
you know.
I can sit down with anybody. I may not be Nino
Rivera, but I won’t be left behind in the dust, which
is a nice feeling.
FJ: What’s your next project?
RC: We’re going to go to Japan and do a record for
Fukushima survivors. It takes a bit of planning, but
that’s the next big thing. They call it Kawachi Ondo.
It’s a social thing where they play this music and
people dance this folk-style dance where everybody
does the same move. So thousands of people going
around in circles. It gets very intricate, very beauti-
ful. Really fun to do. I do it myself, as a gringo.
But I thought since this is a music widely known
and easy to improvise lyrics over top, everybody
knows the melodies, we can play it real good. Me
and Joaquim just play it like mad. It’s fun. Then get
these singers, these old-time cats to do songs about
Fukushima.
The [Japanese] language is allegorical. It’s not
“My baby done left me.” That’s our thing. They would
just haiku everything based on that concept. So you
could take the idea that the farmers can’t grow food,
that the fisherman can’t fish, that the nuclear reac-
tor’s poisoning the earth and turn this into allegori-
cal, visual statements and then make songs out of it.
There is no protest music in Japan, never has
been. The people are in total denial about this thing.
And the government’s lying to them 24/7 in ways you
wouldn’t even believe, saying that it’s not a problem.
Of course, now they have to do more admitting this.
So what we’re going to do in December [2013],
we’re going to go to Fukushima and start talking to
farmers and people, get some stories. fj
77
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By Art Dudley
Photographs by Amanda Kowalski

78
TH E FR ET B OA R D J O U R NA L 79
Though he runs a small factory, Dana Bourgeois is still definitely
hands on. On any given day, he can be found doing selecting woods,
doing quality control or, as shown here, scalloping braces.

T
he combined cities of Lewiston and
Auburn—referred to by locals as LA , with varying
degrees of irony—comprise the third-largest popu-
lation center in the state of Maine. They face each
other from opposite sides of the Androscoggin River,
on whose eastern bank is poised the Bourgeois fac-
tory: an austere 19th-century brick building that
was once home to a thriving textile mill.
This is the northernmost of three points in a con-
stellation that, for 30-odd years, has led the way for
small-volume makers of steel-string acoustic guitars
(the other two being the Santa Cruz Guitar Company
and Collings Guitars): Every bench-building, tap-
tuning shop in America owes a debt of thanks to
these people.
Among the most deserving of all is Dana Bour-
geois, an amiable, articulate man whose reputation
for sharing time and knowledge with other luthiers
is the stuff of legend. Accordingly, during a visit to
the Bourgeois factory on what had to have been
Maine’s rainiest day in all of 2013, my first question
was: Have relations always been so cordial between
contemporary builders?
“Oh, yeah. We all grew up at the same time, and
we’re on the phone with each other all the time. At
my old shop, I’d get the intercom saying, ‘Dana, call
from Bill Collings’—or Bob Taylor, or whoever. Our
82 T H E F R E T B OA R D J O U R N A L
first association was the Guild of American Luthiers,
before ASIA [the Association of Stringed Instrument
Artisans] kind of split off from that, so we’d all go to
the conventions to meet these other wild-eyed cra-
zies, who all had the same interests. [And because]
you never know where you’re going to get a good
idea from, you wouldn’t ever want to miss someone
else’s presentation: It was that kind of thing.
“Everyone was influencing each other, and it got
to be very collaborative, in lots of different ways. And
we were at a stage where some people were estab-
lished—but everyone was still learning.”
Dana Bourgeois actually began learning on his
own, in 1975, when he set about building a guitar in
his dorm room at Bowdoin College in Brunswick,
Maine. Bourgeois was raised around tools—his
father was an amateur woodworker, and his maternal
grandfather was a machinist—so he was conditioned
to think that making things was an appropriate
thing to do. “ Yeah, I thought: I could do this! And
then I ran into Irving Sloane’s book, Classic Guitar
Construction. There was no Internet back then. There
were no guitar schools. There was just this one
how-to book. And it was not a very good book, as a
method of teaching. But the photography was really
good, and inspiring.”
A few years later, during a time when he was run-
ning the local folk-music club in Brunswick, Dana
took an unknowing step closer to becoming a profes-
sional luthier: “I hired Eric Schoenberg to perform.
And he showed up with two drop-dead, pre-war
Martin OMs. And one of them needed a little bit of
set-up work—so I did the work, so he could play the
guitar that night.
“Eric was part-owner of the Music Emporium—
they were in Cambridge at the time, fairly close to
Harvard Square—and that was, to me, my ideal of a
music store, with all their mahogany woodwork,
mahogany cabinets, vintage guitars galore, a Mecca
of records...and people coming in all the time.
“And there were biweekly concerts in Sanders
Theater at Harvard, with people like Doc Watson and
Odetta. And people like Norman Blake and Tony Rice
would come in and play, or to do a master class at
the Music Emporium. That was my world; that was
my exposure. Russ Barenberg was living in Boston,
Tony Rice was working out of Boston, Rounder
Records was right around the corner. So it was like
Bourgeois’ Soloist model is the luthier’s updated take on the
OM-style guitar. This guitar features a cutaway, German spruce
top and pyramid-style bridge.
One of Bourgeois’ latest innovations is his Aged Tone process. This
unique curing process aims to make a more responsive, vintage sound-
ing instrument by “cooking off” some of the resins, sugars and water
found in a top wood. As you can see, it also darkens the wood quite
a bit. Photo: Art Dudley
the center of the universe for acoustic roots music,
really—even better than Nashville. And I was right
there! So I ended up doing restoration work on all of
these incredible guitars at the Music Emporium—
and building guitars on the side. And my exposure to
vintage guitars was really influencing my building.
“Eric Schoenberg had talked about how, as a solo
fingerstyle guitarist, his favorite guitar was the OM:
For his style of playing, it was like the steel-string
equivalent of a classical guitar, it just had such
incredible balance. But Eric wanted some modern
features on his guitars, and Martin wasn’t yet making
custom shop stuff—like a cutaway, for example. So I
designed the first cutaway on an OM, and built it for
Eric, and I started making them and selling them
through the Music Emporium, under the Bourgeois
name.
“And then Chris Martin came down to do a clinic
at Music Emporium when I was there. Martin had
just started the Custom Shop, and Eric asked him,
‘ Would you be interested in making these?’
“Chris said, ‘ Well, we wouldn’t make them with
our name,’ and Eric said, ‘How about with my
name?’ Chris said, ‘ Well, we’ll think about it.’
“So Eric and I formed Schoenberg Guitars. I did
the wood selection and the voicing, and Martin did
the manufacturing. I went down to Martin when the
top was glued to the rim, the braces were still rough,
and the back was fit, and I’d go down and shape the
bracing, then glue up the back. I was sourcing the
wood—we were supplying the wood. They were
building in batches of 20, which is what Martin has
always done.
“And then we marketed them, in the national
market. I remember going to a dinner for Frets
advertisers. There were only, like, nine guitarmakers
there! This was in the mid-’80s, which was a tough
time for lutherie, at least at the corporate level. And
Chris Martin said, ‘Hey, the only reason we accepted
this offer is because, you know, we just needed the
business. Twenty more guitars means I don’t have to
lay a couple of people off.’”
The business relationship between Bourgeois,
Schoenberg and Martin lasted for nearly four years:
enough time to make and sell nearly 300 Schoenberg
guitars. The fledgling company and their well-
TH E FR ET B OA R D J O U R NA L
regarded OMs then attracted the interest of yet
another modern guitar brand: Paul Reed Smith.
But Eric Schoenberg wasn’t interested in selling his
share of the company—and, at the same time, con-
sumer interest in Martin’s own guitars was once
again on the rise.
“If Eric and I had done that in the ’90s, just think
where Schoenberg Guitars could be now. But Mar-
tin’s business was picking up, and we were a little bit
of a pain in the butt sometimes, just to build small
amounts of these different things. I could see the
handwriting on the wall, and I said, ‘ Well, okay, I
think we need to get set up and do it ourselves. We
have the market. We have the demand, and that’s the
hard thing to get!’ But Eric didn’t want to take that
leap—with some justification.” In 1990, Eric Schoen-
berg stayed with the limited-production business
model, while Dana courted interest from PRS.
“Paul said, ‘Look, we can build a guitar factory in
Maine, make PRS guitars and you can run it.’ So I
went with PRS for a couple of years. They were so
successful; they were rolling in money at the time.
But then they had a series of new products: they had
a bass that flopped, they had a Strat-type guitar that
flopped and they had an amplifier that flopped.
Acoustic guitars were next, and they had just no
money by this time.”
In 1995, after his time with PRS and a brief stint
working as a consultant for Gibson, Dana set about
doing what he was ultimately meant to be doing:
hand building guitars whose headstocks bear the
name Bourgeois (a logo that came about, simply
enough, when Dana asked a friend “with really good
penmanship” to write out his last name).
The combined effects of very fast growth and
other complications led, in 2000, to a course correc-
tion: “I essentially wound that down and took on
some new partners, and it became Pantheon Guitars.
The whole idea was that we were going to build a
stable of brands, and distribute, and maybe license,
some designs. We talked with James Olson, and he
was interested for a while. Imagine if you could buy
a $5,000 Olson in a music store, without having to
get on a three- or four-year waiting list and pay
$20,000! A good idea, but it never really worked out.
And then 9/11 came along, and dealers just stopped
buying everything. And we barely survived that, just
by making Bourgeois guitars. And then, after that,
after we kind of grew back out of that, we just
weren’t interested in partnering with anyone—until
Baden came along. Rather than us licensing Baden,
they were going to pay us for tooling, and then buy
guitars that they would distribute on their own.
85
Employee Elizabeth Teret installs the kerfing on a guitar’s rim.
Unlike many guitars with bolt-on necks, which only have bolts
in the heel, Bourgeois guitars feature a unique system that also
includes bolts under the tongue of the fretboard. This allows
the entire neck assembly to be easily removed or adjusted.
The Lewiston, Maine, building that houses Bourgeois Guitars. Each
Bourgeois guitar is built over a two-month period. Index cards trace
each instrument’s place in the production line, from initial wood
selection all the way through final set-up.
“And that worked—we built maybe 20 guitars, all
very high-end—until the great recession came along
and wiped them out.” Again, Dana and his crew sur-
vived, and ultimately thrived, by doing what they do
best: making Bourgeois guitars.
“ We’re watching an uptick in the market right
now. We’re not going to double our sales overnight
or anything; we’re going to increase by maybe 10
percent over last year. But if we increased by a
hundred percent, there’s no way I could double the
workforce, because it takes so long to learn this stuff.
You wouldn’t want to have 10 new people in the shop
at any one time, because you couldn’t keep track of
it all.”
We spoke while touring the shop, occasionally
raising our voices to be heard over the sounds of
compressors and sanders and shapers, Dana
explaining the work in which his co-workers were
engaged on that busy Friday morning: “Mike John-
ston has been here 10 years—he’s the guy doing the
fretting over there—and he also does our repair
work, finish stuff and set-ups. A lot of stuff, all really
well, and really efficiently. And even to train one guy
to do one of those jobs, to be reasonably efficient,
it’s going to take a while.” I wondered: Are all of his
employees responsible for so many different tasks?
“ Yes, they have to be. If you look at it number-wise,
you can say there are a thousand operations in
building a guitar, if you kind of slice and dice it.
Well, we’ve got 10 people, so everyone has to learn a
hundred operations. You can’t make a guitar without
every one of those!”
Moments later, the same Mike Johnston suggests
that the Brazilian dreadnought on his bench ought
to have its frets dressed, pretty much now, in prepa-
ration for final inspection and shipping. The boss
volunteers, and I follow as Dana brings the dread to
a workstation dedicated to that purpose. Here, an
open guitar case is fixed to a bench, with a small
scissors jack—topped with a wooden neck rest—set
inside, near to the headstock area. The neck portion
of the lid is missing, along with a V-shaped chunk of
the body area. (With a guitar inside and the lid fas-
tened shut, the result is strangely reminiscent of a
’60s-era Rickenbacker electric.) The idea is that,
with the jack pushing the neck in a forward-bow
direction and the now-heavily-padded lid holding
TH E FR ET B OA R D J O U R NA L
the body in place, the jig simulates string tension
on the neck, allowing the frets to be dressed under
playing conditions. (Dana Bourgeois is quick to
credit Dan Erlewine, whose own neck-jig design was
the inspiration.)
At another station I spot a braced top, ready for
tuning—an area of expertise for which Bourgeois is
especially well known—and I ask Dana, is the overall
shaping and thicknessing of the top considered part
of the voicing process?
“That’s kind of like the last stage of voicing: You
thickness the top, according to stiffness across the
grain and along the grain; you actually pay more
attention to the along-the-grain [thickness],
because those side braces can really make a huge
adjustment. You can either beef them up and make it
stiff if it isn’t stiff, or you can make them really small,
if it’s too stiff. But there are no braces really going
along the grain.
“So we want it to end up at a certain place, and
we voice the bracing to get as many distinct tap-
tones as possible. And then, when the body goes
together, we flex the top and tap it, and if it doesn’t
quite seem lively enough, we still have the opportu-
nity to thin the top before the binding goes on—
that’s a hand operation.
“That happens on Mondays. The binding guys will
level the overhang and do the basic sanding, and
then come in and basically flex the top and see if it’s
the right stiffness or within the right zone. They’ll
tap it to see if it bounces: If it’s lively enough, you
can tap on at the bridge, and you can feel it kind of
pushing back at you. If it isn’t doing that, then we’ll
talk about it, flex it, and decide if something else
needs to be done to it.
“I work in collaboration with all of these guys.
And in reality I don’t actually change much [in the
other luthiers’ tuning work]. I mean, I’ll probably go
through those nine tops and backs at the end of the
day or tomorrow, and I bet I won’t change much, if
anything—just because, you know, we work together
so closely; they kind of know over time. And it’s only
the senior guys who get to do that stuff, anyhow.
You don’t put a new guy on voicing! You have the
new guys make the braces, and if something’s
wrong—well, you throw it away before it gets used.”
From there we visit the station where technician
Steve Sossel is bending sides, using a spray bottle,
a pair of microprocessor-controlled heat blankets,
and an adjustable bending jig that has obviously
seen a lot of use. After Steve brings to Dana’s atten-
tion an especially pretty pair of Brazilian sides, I ask
if the sanding thickness of the sides is critical in any
91
 “ You don’t put a new guy on voicing!
You have the new guys make the braces,
and if something’s wrong—well, you
throw it away before it gets used.”
way other than structural. “ Well,” Dana replies, “I
went to all-wood braces, and I went to spruce wood
braces. I think that there are some acoustically
viable little ‘tweeter’ areas on the sides that are
going on, and you don’t want to deaden those. But
almost everything we do is at the service of getting
a viable side.”
Then we backtrack to the sealed-off room used for
wood storage, where Dana explains the technology
behind a recent Bourgeois innovation: his series of
Aged Tone guitars with Adirondack spruce tops that
have been cured using a special torrefaction kiln
developed in Finland. The relatively low-temperature
variation of this process prescribed by Bourgeois has
the effect of “cooking off ” the waters, sugars and
resins in the wood, much as those substances are
evacuated over time—many decades of time—from
the tonewoods of the best-sounding and most highly
prized vintage guitars. The remaining structure,
reduced to essentials of cellulose and lignum, exhib-
its less self-damping and a higher stiffness-to-
weight ratio, all in the interest of a more timbrally
complex and responsive instrument. The cured tops
of the AT guitars even have the look and the smell
of older tops.
For the AT series, Dana Bourgeois has also intro-
duced a new type of finish. Long an enthusiastic
user of catalyzed polymers—which he says are
closer, in hardness, to a very old and properly cured
layer of nitrocellulose lacquer—Bourgeois has
selected a finish that’s related to cyanocrylate adhe-
sives, and which exhibits even less of a damping
effect on the spruce.
The combination is remarkable. At the end of my
Dana still sprays the sunburst on each Bourgeois himself. The results,
as you can see in this guitar eventually headed to dealer Redwood
Acoustics, are some of the best in the business.
TH E FR ET B OA R D J O U R NA L
first full day in Lewiston, Dana let me borrow, for the
evening, an AT-series dreadnought with a Madagas-
car rosewood body, which proved to be a delightfully
responsive instrument. While no one—least of all
Dana—would suggest that the AT guitars are the
equivalent of their vintage counterparts, the dread I
borrowed was more timbrally rich than I would ever
expect from a guitar that had been made just weeks
ago. The same was even more true of an Aged Tone
mahogany OM guitar that I played the next morning,
which combined that same unexpected richness with
a really startling sense of projection. I have vowed,
after seeing the word used too many times on too
many inane chat sites, never to use the word cannon
in public. But that was what crossed my mind.
I asked Dana: Once those resins are evacuated
from a piece of Adirondack spruce, is there a differ-
ence in the weight of the wood? “ Yes, the wood
shrinks a little bit, so you have to start with over-
sized stock. People have said, ‘Hey, can you tell me
who does the processing? I want to send a couple of
tops.’ Well, first of all, it’s a large process: You have
to process a lot of tops at once. Second, they’ve
got to be oversized, because there’s the shrinkage
factor.” For those reasons and more, Bourgeois
hopes to eventually bring the process in-house.
“ We have this done by a company in Canada.
The kilns are big: major, tractor-trailer-container
size. We heard that there’s a research kiln, made
by the company in Finland that makes the kilns: a
small kiln that has been passed from company to
company. We’re going to go up and take a look at it;
I think it’s not available to acquire, but we’d like to
build our own. That way we can use our own mate-
rial and have more control over the process.” Dana
adds that he has also experimented with using Aged
Tone wood for braces, although it’s too early to
introduce that to the market.
93

Legal Brazilian rosewood is getting increasingly harder to obtain for
many manufacturers and luthiers. Luckily, Bourgeois has a pretty good
stash and is able to create gorgeous guitars such as this Soloist.
Our conversation paused a number of times so
Dana could see to the tasks that wanted seeing to: a
few phone calls and requests to sign this or that, but
mostly frets that needed dressing, tops that needed
examining, and a body in the process of being fin-
ished that needed its masking removed and its bind-
ing cleaned up. Dana still does all the sunburst
finishes himself, too. He also assigned a couple of
repair jobs to other luthiers in the shop, having
taken on the last big job himself—for flatpicker and
Bourgeois endorser Courtney Hartmann of the band
Della Mae. “She had seven parallel cracks on the
side [of her dreadnought]. She hit just on the flat of
the side—fortunately. So she calls me up: ‘Gee, I’m
here in Maine, and I’ve got this problem. I know
you’re on vacation, but...’” And Dana, who had
been vacationing on his boat, trails off with a good-
natured laugh.
“I had been planning on coming ashore that day
anyhow, so I came and I glued all seven; they were
all, like, misaligned, so I put one of those scissors
jacks in and I opened up the top and back and
aligned everything, and I glued ’em all, all at once,
with hide glue—just smeared it on—and then I glued
’em up with spool clamps. And then there were three
side braces that were a little loose, so I took them
all out, and I literally glued them back in with my
fingers, just holding them, for five minutes, till they
set. That’s really the only way to put ’em back in. I
just glopped the glue in there and said, ‘Don’t look
inside! Here’s your guitar! As you’re leaving for
Colorado the next day! On a tour!’” More laughs.
The subject of young pickers such as Ms. Hart-
mann soon turns to the subject of young luthiers:
“It’s an interesting scene,” he says. “I was asked to
be a speaker at the ASIA convention this spring; I
was to speak one night, Chris Martin the other night.
And I thought, Wow, I can’t turn this down! But there
were a lot of gray hairs in the audience. I expected
to see, like, a new generation of wild-eyed hippies—
and they’re not there!
“There’s a lot of people going to the schools,
I guess. And these guitar schools do a great job! I
mean, people come out of guitar schools with more
skill than I had in 10 years—more technical skill.
They don’t have experience, but they have the tech-
nical skill.
“ Who knows? It’s been an interesting time. It’s
been a great time, with so much happening. I feel
I’m just really lucky, career-wise.” fj
95
 TH Some things are universal. I’ve never seen a hum-
E mingbird that didn’t inspire everyone in the vicinity
T to forget about the rest of the world a while and
pause, knowing nothing else for a few moments. A
E
XA
song, held in able hands or throats, can do the same.
For me, the litmus test of listening with eyes closed,
S

perhaps in a tenebrous light, is where I can know

RO

a song most intimately. The good stuff will no doubt

put the hairs of the nape of your neck on end, and
OT

stop the seemingly impenetrable maelstrom of life

and tedium. Jolie Holland will do that to you.
S OF SIN

There’s something timeless about her work. And,

of course, there’s that voice. It is equal parts a train
come off the rails, fragility, courage, intent and trem-
ble—flat-out, all-encompassing—as it shimmers
GE

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N L L
GW O
RIT E H
ER JOL I

highwaY
By Nathaniel Riverhorse Nakadate
Photography by Laurel Nakadate

kinD
TH E FR ET B OA R D J O U R NA L 97
Jolie Holland’s ‘50s Guild X-50 is one of the
singer-songwriters’ favorite guitars.
 and floats through the room during a show. Doubt-
less her path has not been an easy one, but so it goes
with most of life, for without the inherent trials and
travails, none of us would understand the sweet,
heady, righteous and beautiful moments. Music,
when gotten right, can frame them all.
NATHANIEL RIVERHORSE NAKADATE: You’re from Texas;
what are you doing in New York City?
JOLIE HOLLAND: Man, Texas and New York need each
other, and they deserve each other. Their ego prob-
lems kind of harmonize. Both states are pretty
famous for being full of themselves. There are so
many great New York musicians who are from Texas;
Ornette Coleman comes to mind. I feel like an immi-
grant here, but everyone else is an immigrant, too.
NRN: How did you find your path to music?
I’m always fascinated with the catalyst—if it
was a relative who left you a guitar, or even on
your own.
JH: When I was a kid, my legal guardians didn’t
support me very much in playing music, but they
didn’t actively discourage me. My step-grandfather
gave me a toy piano when I was 5, and I was privately
writing music on it within a few months. I had the
loan of my stepfather’s guitar as a young teenager. A
girl I met in school—Tess Wiley, who went on to have
a career in music—taught me how to play the guitar.
She was great, a 16-year-old teaching a 13-year-old.
We met in junior high orchestra class, where I was
first viola, and she was first violin.
My great uncles played with Bob Wills and Willie
Nelson. They were on the Louisiana Hayride before
Willie was, but their careers were more regional
than his. They never had hits. They ran a music
venue in Houston in the ’50s, and their band was
known as Bud and Bud, the Hooper Twins. They
were playing up into their 80s, and we just lost one
of them in the past year.
NRN: I’m guessing you have quite a few early
gutbucket blues influences, and can even
recall a line you sing in “Alley Flowers” about
Willie McTell.
JH: I quote McTell a lot—he has been a guiding
light for me from the first moment I heard him.
I adore the unself-conscious beauty and artistry
in so much of the early blues. Of course, there’s a lot
of blues that doesn’t move me at all. Blind Willie
McTell’s work has such a cohesion, such a magical
sense of flow. He plays the guitar like a motherfucker,
like it was a goddamned piano. He plays right
through the guitar to the heart of the matter. And
honestly, he’s so sexy. His voice is like Prince, all clear
100 T H E F R E T B OA R D J O U R N A L
and brittle and fine. The way he talks about love...
NRN: What was your childhood like? I heard
you were homeless for a while?
JH: My mother had a hard time with me. She
kicked me out of the house a couple times when I
was a teenager. I lived with friends until I graduated
from high school, and then I was on the road a lot for
many years. I was blessed to meet some incredible
young people in Austin who introduced me to the
lifestyle. I slept in squats. I hitchhiked, and lived in
the backs of vehicles, behind wilderness boundaries,
and slept in city parks a couple times. But I always
had a traveling partner or two, and I was generally
safe during those years. I wasn’t a victim of circum-
stance. I played violin on the street in cities all over
North America, and picked up weird jobs wherever I
could find them. I washed dishes for a First Nations
artist who carved totem poles for his living. I cleaned
hotel rooms, and got waitressing gigs whenever I
settled down long enough to keep them. I remember
a four-and-a-half-year period in which I only lived
somewhere once for two months straight, and that
was the longest I’d stayed anywhere during that time.
NRN: Let’s talk about the writing process.
JH: Some stuff I write, and some stuff I write down,
if you know what I mean? I do my best to write
almost entirely from imagination, without an instru-
ment. Substance is the horse and technique is the
cart. If a song does something technically interest-
ing, like it has an unlikely key change, or some idio-
syncratic sense of time, I want that oddity to be dyed
in the wool, inherent to the body of the song, not just
some cute tag-on that might interest a couple nerds.
Sometimes I get really fascinated with theory when
I’m writing, but I try to keep that impulse subservi-
ent to the song.
I just finished a song that came to me when I was
purely unsuspecting—I think I was making a pot of
coffee. The phrase came as melody and lyrics, and
the sentiment was very embarrassing—it’s the kind
of thing people are usually too self-conscious to say.
Nevertheless, it’s the kind of thing that needs to be
said in a song, or privately to someone you’re very
close to. The melody was really pretty. I made a little
recording of the line and then forgot all about it.
A couple weeks later, I came upon the recording
again, and realized that a certain harmony worked
well with it, so I endeavored to make a setting for my
embarrassing little chorus. I picked up a guitar in a
weird tuning and fooled with it for several hours,
came up with verses and other parts. Only after I was
done did I notice its frame from a theoretical per-
spective: It never goes to the five. It’s mostly C and
Thanks to a low price (under $20 throughout the 1960s), retailers were
able to sell thousands of Silvertone flattops such as this one. Holland
picked this one up at a Bay Area garage sale and has since put it to good
use. She used this guitar throughout her 2012 Tiny Desk Concert on
National Public Radio.
F6, with one A minor for one bar. In other words, it’s
a real weirdo, but I never paid any attention to that
till I was done.
Thematically, it’s a realization of a plan I’ve had
for about a year to write a really naive love song, as
opposed to a come-on song (not that I think I’ve
ever written a come-on song). In other words, “Oh
Donna” and not “ You Give Me Fever.” It’s my tribute
to Buddy Holly, to the old uncomplicated love songs.
There are very few love songs from a woman’s per-
spective that do such a thing. I wanted it to be like
“I Wanna Go Steady (When You’re Ready)”— putting
it out there in a totally honest, but still naturally shy
way. The song is called “On and On” and it’ll be on
the next record.
If I come up with a structural or thematic idea, I
consider it as a birdhouse. You can just throw some-
thing together and stick it in the yard. You can spend
as much time as you want making it ornate. But you
never know if a bird is even going to settle in and
raise a family. I have a bunch of these empty struc-
tures at any given time, but more often than not,
when the song comes through, it generates its own
structure, unsuited to any plan I had arranged.
NRN: Which song or two of yours feels like
everything you hoped for out of it, one you per-
sonally know you got right?
JH: The stuff that blows in from the ether pretty
much always feels perfect in its own way—the stuff
I have to get the hammer and nails out for, that can
be less satisfying.
I’m proud of “Palmyra”—it has an internal struc-
ture that’s very stable and crystalline. At the end of
the first B part, it says “cold hard world” and then in
the second half, the first time that B part comes
around again, in the same spot, there’s “old ninth
ward,” talking about my friends’ neighborhood that
got hit during Hurricane Katrina. There are other
aligned internal structures to that song that I didn’t
notice till I was done with it, as well as some inside
jokes, a reference to a Daniel Johnston song, also a
reference to McTell. If it makes my friends laugh,
swoon or get weepy, I feel like I’ve done my job.
NRN: Your album Pint of Blood has such a live
feel to it, and I think even Marc Ribot played
with you on a cut, which makes sense.
TH E FR ET B OA R D J O U R NA L
JH: Marc was the only one who didn’t play live
with us! Most of it was cut live, even the vocals. We
did drums, two guitars and vocals live on most of the
tracks, and then Shahzad Ismaily overdubbed his
bass parts.
NRN: I saw a live cover performance of “Rex’s
Blues” you gave in London that is stunning.
Care to comment on Townes Van Zandt’s
wordsmithing?
JH: Thank you. I appreciate how Townes talked
about songs overtaking you, as though the writer
were not the author. He was very humble and nutty
about making that point repeatedly. I think I know
what he meant. His work has such a fine sense of
gravity, but he’d set a silly song next to a heavy song.
His stuff worked like romantic poetry. He really lit
a fire.
NRN: Tell us about your various instruments
and guitars.
JH: I have a Guild from the early ’50s with a soap-
bar P90 pickup, sounds like little baby Jesus. And
this acoustic Regal from the same period with a
weird round bottom and a cutaway. I wrote a bunch
of the new material on this cheap Silvertone I got at
a garage sale in San Francisco a long time ago—it
must be from the ’50s too. I have a cheap Goldtop
Les Paul copy called a Jay Turser, but I took the writ-
ing off the top. It’s slightly hollow, and it’s fun to play
around the house, plugged in or not. That guitar has
never let me down.
I keep heavy flatwounds on most of my guitars—
[musician] Ryan Sawyer pointed out that was a Texas
thing. He said a lot of the western swing players do
that. I just gravitated to that sound so the higher
resonances would be quieter, and leave more room
for my voice.
NRN : And your Michael Hurley connection?
JH: Michael Hurley is a very dear friend. We’ve
toured together, and play together whenever we get
a chance. I send him new baby fledgling songs of
mine. He sends me demos of his brand new songs
sometimes. I sang on a few songs on his next record
that will be coming out on Mississippi Records soon.
And he wrote a song that he asked me to sing, that’ll
be the only cover on my next album. That song is
called “B Bottom Girl,” never before recorded. On
the demo, he’s singing it very high because he wrote
it for a woman’s voice. The lyrics are slightly embar-
rassing to sing, but I’m going to do it! fj
103
VALLeY
SuN
 SeRenADe
By Eli West

FLETCH ER B ROCK A ND LAW R ENCE SMA RT

ON MA KI NG MA NDOLI NS I N TH E SAWTOOTHS 105

I
daho’s remote Sawtooth Mountains
are home and horizon to not one but two respected
mandolin builders: Fletcher Brock and Lawrence
Smart. Their homes in the Wood River Valley sit
below the alpine town of Stanley, which holds
cold-temperature records for the continental United
States. I visited the valley last summer to tour their
shops and talk about their craft.
I knew both Fletch and Lawrence first by their
work, as I own and use their instruments on the road
as a musician. Their stories, however, revealed natu-
ral precedents to their remarkable craftsmanship;
personality and skill are clearly inseparable for the
two. As friends, competitors and collaborators, their
pursuits both parallel and diverge from one another.
Each is known for creating different sonic qualities
and for particular instruments.
Their instruments have done most of the talking
to date. In the hands of mandolin greats like Mike
Marshall, Chris Thile, John Reischman and Sarah
Jarosz, their mandolins, mandolas and octave
mandolins have kept phones ringing, making wait
lists that extend beyond months and years. This
honest, sound-of-ear marketing is best suited for
their soft-spoken skills. As Lawrence said during
our interview, “So here we are, quietly in Idaho.”
108 T H E F R E T B OA R D J O U R N A L
ELI WEST: How long have you each been in
the valley?
FLETCHER BROCK: I moved to Ketchum around ’79,
splitting time between here and Seattle.
LAWRENCE SMART: I was in McCall for 26 or 27 years,
until moving here three years ago.
EW: Fletcher, you had done some woodwork-
ing prior to lutherie?
FB: Different aspects of woodworking: houses,
furniture, boats and instruments.
EW: Lawrence, what were your inroads to
lutherie? Were you a cabinetmaker or some-
thing else?
LS: Being just a tinkerer, I did a lot of projects in
the basement that got me started with wood, almost
burning down my parents’ house. In college, I
became a carpenter to help pay the bills. It was then
that I built a clawhammer banjo and a dulcimer,
just for fun.
EW: For each of you, what prompted your
move to the Sawtooths?
FB: I met a man named Earl Engelmann on a winter
yacht delivery from Long Island to Saint Thomas.
After we jumped ship in Florida, he offered me a job
building a house in Ketchum. I bought a ’64 Nova for
$50, put in new lifters and drove across the country.
The house project lasted more than two years, which
established me as a woodworker in the valley.
LS: I had lived in west-central Idaho for many
years and traveled to the Stanley basin often to rec-
reate and also to play with the Stanley-based band
Headwaters. So, when my kids were leaving home for
college, I used the chance to move closer to this place.
EW: How has the geography of this place
informed your identity as an artist and a trades-
man, or maybe simply as a person?
FB: Major paradigm shift for me. I grew up in a
seafaring family on the Atlantic Ocean, so moving
to Idaho’s high desert has completely changed my
worldview. There is a western seat-of-the-pants
attitude, and the natural beauty is always an inspira-
tion. I was lucky to work with some extraordinary
people and contribute to some imaginative projects.
LS: Growing up in the West, a lot of my childhood
was spent in mountains or deserts. It naturally then
became one of my strongest passions, recharging my
soul so that I’m able to be better at the workbench.
I designed a headstock shape based on the profile
of a peak just outside of McCall [Idaho], so I guess
that’s probably a more direct interpretation.
A red spruce A-style mandolin on Lawrence Smart’s workbench.
Fletcher Brock clamps in the end blocks on an octave mandolin.
Lawrence Smart and one of his recently completed
F-5 Florentine mandolins.
EW: Particular to instruments, Fletcher, you’ve
been at it for 15 years?
FB: I’m approaching 20. I left Cape Cod in ’72 for
the very creative atmosphere of Providence, Rhode
Island, where the music scene centered around the
Rhode Island School of Design. Bill Crozier [mando-
lin player and RISD student] built a batch of mando-
lins for his industrial design class and encouraged
a bunch of us to do the same. I tagged along to the
RISD woodshop, pretending I was a student.
EW: Sneaky. Lawrence, what about you?
LS: I became aware that people actually made
musical instruments in high school. There was a
vintage instrument shop in Salt Lake, Utah, Inter-
mountain Guitar and Banjo. I used to go hang
around his shop, and ask questions until they
chased me out. I then started playing music with
112 T H E F R E T B OA R D J O U R N A L
guys going to the Violin Making School of America.
I would buy crappy instruments, fix them and turn
them over. Doing repair work got me started, taking
stuff apart and putting it back together. After teach-
ing high school special education for five years, I
took a year’s leave of absence and went to a guitar-
building workshop in Vermont under the direction
of George Morris, and never went back to teaching.
EW: Was there a definitive point or even
instrument that signified falling into your craft?
FB: Your ear changes over time. You start hearing
things differently. If there was a breakthrough
instrument, it didn’t hold that status for long. I
remember the progression and saying, “This is the
best one I’ve ever built.” Then a few instruments
later, “Oh, this is the best one I’ve ever built.” My
friend Amos Galpin has this expression, “imitating
art.” He uses it mostly in reference to recapturing a
particularly groovy run at some song, only to find
out that it could never be duplicated.
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Another Smart two-point mandolin in the works
I’ve been in that position building instruments.
I would try to copy a particularly good instrument I
had built, but they would always be different. Both
good, but different. No one seems to be able to
reproduce Strad violins consistently. I believe it’s
your hands that are learning, not the mind. There
are setbacks: I have a photo of a completely finished
F5 in which I buried a utility knife in the top—
because it didn’t sound too good.
LS: “I suck!”
FB: …I need to go back to roofing. I think that
I’ve had the most success with my octave mandolins.
Mandolins are hard to build, and harder to make
sound good.
EW: Lawrence, do you think mandolins are
hard to build?
LS: I think it’s all pretty challenging and interest-
114 T H E F R E T B OA R D J O U R N A L
ing. I hope I never feel like I’ve arrived. But to add
on to what Fletch said, our ears change over time.
My understanding of an instrument’s role evolves
and changes, too. That influences what you describe
as “our individual sound.”
FB: While Lawrence and I definitely have our own
sounds, we’re basically working from the same set
of plans. We compare notes a lot, talk about gradua-
tions, bending, thicknesses, yet our instruments
sound pretty different.
EW: The challenge with characterizing an
instrument’s tone, despite any cheap metaphors,
is that it’s always subjective. With that, is it
dangerous to ask if you think of your instru-
ments as having a metaphoric sound?
FB: Yeah, too dangerous.
LS: I’ve tried to stretch for whatever I want to
make. Some people say I want an instrument that
sounds like Matt Flinner’s mandolin, or John Reis-
chman’s mandolin. Of course, “No, I can’t, but I can
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A Brock (top) and Smart mandolin share space on a work table. Smart
recounts a quote he heard from fellow builder Michael Heiden, “Making
an F-model mandolin separates the men from the boys.”
tweak some things to try to get it that way.” There
are a few ways you can quantify it a little bit more—
talking about things like sustain and harmonics,
overtone structure and attack.
EW: Despite a large influx of mandolin build-
ers, you have both established your own terri-
tory, which is…
FB: Lawrence has been at it for a bit longer than
me. We’ve both ridden through the ups and downs.
I remember when I started going to IBMA and I was
one of three mandolin builders hocking instru-
ments. Within three years, there were more like 20.
But I was part of that gold rush back then. Similar
to when all of us hippies flocked to carpentry.
In part, this was because mandolins were selling
for closer to what they were actually worth, in regard
to the amount of time that it takes to build one. We’re
116 T H E F R E T B OA R D J O U R N A L
established mostly through perseverance and the
fact that we’ve painted ourselves into this corner. For
the most part, I love going to work in the morning.
LS: Michael Heiden said one time to me, “Making
an F-model mandolin separates the men from the
boys.” Some of it is just due to our age. Fletcher and
I are in our 50s, and we were doing it back in our
30s. We were able to get a few years on us. I know a
few instrument makers who have been really suc-
cessful, while most professional luthiers probably
just get by. I’m grateful I don’t have a desire to make
the big bucks...
FB: It’s a lifestyle choice.
EW: That’s not too far from playing music.
There’s the story of the young businessman who
charters a fisherman and his boat while on
vacation. The fisherman asks, “What do you
want to do when you retire?” He replies, “Well,
I’d love to save enough to then be able to spend
every day fishing.” And the fisherman laughs.
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In addition to the
mandolins he’s known for,
Brock also builds larger
bodied instruments,
including octave mandolins
(Sarah Jarosz plays one),
dreadnought guitars,
archtops and citterns.
FB: The lifestyle opens a lot of doors. From all of
our experiences being musicians, you get opportuni-
ties and situations you wouldn’t normally come
across. Not so much as a luthier.
EW: Speaking of which, both of you have musi-
cal identities outside building. Most instrument
builders play a bit.
FB: And a lot of them don’t.
LS: It’s surprising, there are people who build
instruments but don’t play. Honestly, that’s true with
a lot of our clients, too. There are people that really
love beautiful things but are not musicians.
FB: As you noted, Eli, becoming a good musician
takes enormous dedication and sacrifice. Some
folks, while talented, are not drawn to the lifestyle.
They still love to play, and because they found
careers that provided solvency and stability, they
can buy a nice instrument.
LS: Living art, that’s our sort of background.
FB: Yeah, although I could probably use a little
more security.
LS: On top of that, musicians are often really inter-
esting people. The people we get to work with and
associate with are really great people.
EW: One of the challenges—which I learned
in having a career prior to music—is that the
product I sell as a musician is an experience.
118 T H E F R E T B OA R D J O U R N A L
I value the tangibility of your art—an actual
instrument.
FB: It’s really cool that having a handmade instru-
ment is now almost the norm, whereas back when
we started, you were doing big-time battle against
Gibson and Martin.
EW: Certain builders have tried to scale man-
ufacturing, domestically and abroad. From my
perspective, the premise of the craft is compro-
mised. Your thoughts?
FB: The definition of handmade has changed.
LS: The computer era has ushered in a whole
new...
FB: CNC machines. I don’t have one, but I use a
router and other power tools. Where is the line for
“handmade”? It gets gray...
LS: There’s been times when I’ve thought about
making more instruments and hiring somebody. Yet
when I really ask myself that question, the answer
has always been no. I’m a way better woodworker
than I would be a marketer or manager.
FB: Same here.
LS: There is that question: Is it handmade by one
person, or is it handmade by five people in a small
shop?
EW: And this is unique to the instrument
world, because your brand is inseparable from
your hands. Not true in a cabinet shop.
FB: Lawrence, can I work for you?
LS: Ha! However, some real collaboration would
be a good idea, to donate for raising some money.
FB: I wanted to do that with a whole bunch of dif-
ferent builders: Get Nugget to carve the top,
Gilchrist to carve the back, etc.
EW: What is the most outside-the-box instru-
ment each of you has made?
FB: A fan-fret 12-string two-point cittern that I
built for Dave Ogden.
LS: The 10-string fan-fret mandolin, based on
sketches of a mandolin and mandola pair that
Arthur Stern designed and drew.
EW: If I were a builder, it would be a challenge
to let go of an instrument after building it. Was
there a point where you stopped grieving that
kind of loss?
LS: It’s always been exciting to get it into a per-
son’s hands. The act of sending them off feels okay,
though not without stress.
FB: Sometimes I have ones I don’t want to let go. I
remember Steve Anderson saying, “ When they’re
done, they’re out of here. The sooner the better.”
EW: Are there aspects of each other’s practice
that you admire?
Photograph by Fletcher Brock
 LS: The way Fletcher conceives of jigs is really
pretty remarkable. I don’t know if you have any sort
of insight to add as to how I could absorb a little bit
of that.
FB: Oh, just come copy them. Take pictures and
make them. I’ve copied a bunch myself. My jigs have
lots of directions written on them, since I can’t
remember how they work. My mandolin bridge jigs
I’m quite fond of.
EW: What other builders have inspired you?
LS: The guy I noticed early on was John Montele-
one, from a design standpoint. He comes from that
flamboyant Italian tradition of D’Aquisto and
D’Angelico.
FB: Nugget and Gilchrist are deities in my mando-
lin world. I like D’Angelico, Strad and Guarneri. Fred
Carlson, Eugene Clark, John Slobod... Steve Ander-
sen has helped me a ton, as well as Michael Gurian.
[Ski guide] Bozo Cardozo has some pretty unique
ideas. Alexander Dumble is an inspiration. Most all
of our friends from the festivals. Can’t mention one
’cause you’d have to mention them all. Everyone has
great ideas.
LS: Of course, it’s hard to leave Steve Gilchrist out
of that because he’s been such a force.
FB: What about you, Eli, who are we forgetting?
EW: Every instrument made by the late John
Sullivan I’ve loved. Builders like Heiden, Duff,
John Ramsey...but without question, Gilchrist
and Nugget are the two modern pillars. Back to
geography, can you identify aspects about your
trade/art that would differ if you lived some-
where like, say, New York City?
FB: I lose track of the music and lutherie indus-
tries here in the valley, so I like to get out to festivals
and cities. Then I come home and process. I’ve had a
shop in Seattle where there is always a lot more
action. One day, the bass player from the Cirque du
Soleil house band dropped in and wanted me to put
frets in the fingerboard of his fiddle [gasp], which I
did. That might not happen here, but other opportu-
nities come along simply because it is a small town.
LS: Hard to guess, but it might have meant doing
more repair and seeing more instruments in gen-
eral. It’s always inspiring to go places where there
are more luthiers doing more different kinds of
work. It’s been great to go to Fletch’s shop and see
what he’s up to.
120 T H E F R E T B OA R D J O U R N A L
EW: This valley is known for its seasonal bina-
ries. Fletch, I’ve heard you talk of the bitter cold
winters. Does the subsequent lifestyle help or
hurt your pursuit of lutherie?
FB: When it’s cold, I spend more time in the shop
as there are fewer interruptions. I’ve lost my appe-
tite for outdoor activities when it is bitter cold out-
side, so my wife, Cally, and I are actually looking at
possibly relocating to the central coast of California.
Back to a maritime climate, on the coast, will be a
good thing.
LS: Specifically, humidity issues might be the only
real drawback. It is drier here than a lot of places,
and fortunately it’s much easier to add moisture to
the air than take it out. The bitter cold might delay
my work a little, mostly because the powder skiing is
likely to be good!
EW: Are there any final points that you guys
would want to include?
LS: I just want to have it on the record that Fletch-
er’s my hero, and his instruments usually really piss
me off.
FB: Insane, he’s my nemesis. Very close friend,
but nemesis. fj
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press run) is 20,984; actual number of single issue published nearing to filing date is 20,303. B. Paid
and/or requested circulation, 1. Total average number copies each issue during preceding 12 months
of mail subscriptions (paid and/or requested) is 5,745; actual number of single issue subscriptions
nearest to filing date is 5759. 3. Total average number copies each issue during preceding 12 months
of sales through dealers and carriers, street vendors and counter sales is 5,738; actual number copies
sold through dealers and carriers, street vendors and counter sales is 7,235. C. (Sum of B1, B2, B3,
B4) Average number copies of each issue during preceding 12 months of total paid and/or requested
circulation is 11,483; actual number copies of single issue published nearest filing to date is 12,994.
D-E. Average number copies each issue during preceding 12 months for free distribution by mail,
carrier or other means (samples, complimentary and other free copies) is 120; actual number copies
of single issue published nearest to filing date is 120. F. Total distribution of sum C and E for average
number copies each issue during preceding 12 months is 11,603; actual number copies of single issue
published nearest to filing date is 13,114. G. Average number copies each issue during preceding 12
months of copies not distributed for 1. Office use, leftover, unaccounted, spoiled after printing is
9,381; actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date is 7,189. H. Total (sum
15G and H should equal net press run shown in A) average number copies each issue during preceding
12 months is 20,984; actual number copies of single issue published nearest to filing date is 20,303.
I. Paid and/or Requested Circulation equals 98% of total actual copies (average during preceding 12
months) and 99% (single issue published nearest to filing date). I certify that the statements made
by me above are correct and complete. Jason Verlinde, Publisher.
rsmuthguitars.com
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 Tailpiece
“It’s nothing but a Harmony Sovereign from the
’30s. And a friend of mine out in Taos, New Mexico,
gave it to me. I was in Taos to visit him and it’s dry
out there. But when it came out here, it caved in
because of the moisture.
“I knocked into it and it fell on the floor, into that
tuning. I said ‘Hey, that’s kinda nice.’
“ Wim Wenders is frightened to death he’s not
going to get a score, he’s got two days.
“And, I said, ‘ Will you sit down? If you don’t like
what we’re going to do, then we’ll do something else.
But if you like it, then we can go ahead. But you’ve
got to sit down.’ He’s pacing up and down in the
booth, you know, like all in a lather. And then we did
128 T H E F R E T B OA R D J O U R N A L
the title cue, which we did with that [vacuum] hose
there...twirling this thing. And I had to figure out
how to do that, this simple trick of two microphones,
stereo, big M-50s, way up there. Twirling these
vacuum cleaner hoses to make like an E-flat. And
then I tuned all the instruments and their piano was
an electric Kawaii with strings.
“So I got in there, two strings per note instead of
three, and I tuned the whole thing to quarter tones.
It was in E-flat, all almost in unison. But because it’s
so loose, the strings are like bells, like chimes. Pretty
cool. And then we started.”
—Ry Cooder, describing recording the Paris, Texas
theme on this Harmony Sovereign.
Photograph by Reuben Cox