Recorded Books Inc. - Guitar: an American Life

GUITAR

An American Life

Tim Brookes

Copyright 2005 by Tim Brookes

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, or the facilitation thereof, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

Published simultaneously in Canada
Printed in the United States of America

FIRST GROVE PRESS PAPERBACK EDITION

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Brookes, Tim, 1953
Guitar : an American life / Tim Brookes.
p. cm.
eBook ISBN-13: 978-1-5558-4613-8
1. GuitarUnited StatesHistory. 2. GuitaristsUnited States. I. Title.
ML1015.G9B753 2005
787.870973dc22 2004060877

Grove Press
an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
841 Broadway
New York, NY 10003

Distributed by Publishers Group West

www.groveatlantic.com

To the unknown guitar maker, the unknown guitarist, and the unknown guitar.

GUITAR

On Sunday, August 18, I opened my guitar case, started to take out the guitar, and realized at once that something felt wrong. The strings were... floppy. Instead of that springy pressure against the palm of the hand, they were rattling and loose, splaying left and right across the fingerboard.

Thats weird, I thought. I dont think I slackened the strings.

The previous day my family and my guitar had flown back from a vacation in Colorado, and now that I thought about it, someone had once told me it was a good idea to slacken your strings before putting a guitar on a plane. But these strings seemed to have slackened themselves. How could they do that? Very strange.

So I took the guitar out to tune it back up and to my utter horror saw that the whole head was flopping, falling back to its customary position and, as the strings tightened, bouncing back up again, as if it were hinged at the back of the neck.

Still not understanding, I turned the guitar over and saw what the baggage handlers had done. Where the neck joined the back of the head, a jagged crack ran so far up through the wood that the only thing holding head and neck together was the thin layer of headstock veneer that formed the face of the guitar. The head was all but snapped off.

For a moment, I could hardly breathe. Normally, Im not that attached to my possessions. Things break. Things get lost. But this was my Fylde. This was my guitar.

I bought it in 1980, when I was an unfinished person, a collection of bits and pieces, surviving by my wits until a better idea occurred to me. I was still living in England, house-sitting for an Iranian woman who had come to England ostensibly to get an education but in reality to get away from her husband. She had asked me to look after her house and then, inexplicably, gone back to Iran. I was living on next to nothing, writing poetry and short stories, teaching English as a foreign language at a bogus institution that pretended to be an Oxford college, and playing guitar and singing at a couple of pubs and a wine bar.

Its astonishing to me now that, even though I could barely afford food, I sold my Guild dreadnought, a big, boomy guitar ideal for playing to noisy drunks, hitchhiked down to London, and bought the Fylde. Fylde is the brand name of a guitar maker named Roger Bucknall, who makes handcrafted guitars for people who want to play intricate, demanding fingerstyle workthat is, playing with the fingers of the right hand as if it were a classical guitar, rather than with a pickand the top names in English folk music own Fyldes. It cost me four hundred pounds, all the money I had, and I hitched back to Oxfordshire with it that afternoon to play my evening gig. Standing by the road with my left thumb out and my right hand on my guitar case as it stood by my hip, I barely trod the ground. I was traveling, as Eric Clapton sings in Crossroads, with my rider by my side.

Twenty-two years later, it was one of the few relics of my strange and erratic single life. It had moved to America with me and had continued in the background of my life, like an occasionally audible song from a distant room, through two failed marriages and one successful one, while I had shouldered a succession of jobs and started to raise two daughters. Now it lay across my lap, its neck broken.

Barbara, my wife, came in to see why I was making odd moaning and whimpering noises. Shes a musician herselfa real musician, a classical flute player; a dozen times a year we play flute-and-guitar duets, mostly at weddingsso she understood at once.

Look, she said. Your fiftieth birthdays coming up. Ill buy you a new guitar.

This was, we both knew, mostly a gesture of moral support: neither of us had any money. But it gave me something to do apart from mope, so I started looking at guitars.

Guitar shops had changed a lot in the quarter century or so since Id bought the Fylde. For a start, there were a lot more guitars on the walls, by a lot more makers: not only Martin, Gibson, Fender, Ovation, and Guild (plus a raft of classicals) but also Taylor, Takoma, Breedlove, Collings, Washburn, Montana, Santa Cruz, and a few more names at the cheap end. And much, much more variety: not only more variety in woods and colors but also in body shape and design, with the sound hole varying in shape, size, and position, the headstock flaring out into new configurations, and almost a quarter of the guitars in the showroom featuring various kinds of cutaway. Less obviously, perhaps a third also included built-in pickups for amplification, and even sliders for setting ones own EQ levels. The acoustic guitar, in short, had begun to merge with the electric.

I spent hours hanging out, fooling around with this guitar or that, and decided in passing that someone should write a sociology of the guitar store. Even when guitars were sold at more general music stores, or even at furniture stores or small-town general stores, the store offered more to the guitarist than just a new guitar. Guitar stores have functioned as message centers for local musicians, and as teaching studios. Field recordings often took place in music stores, and music store owners often acted as official or unofficial talent scouts for record companies. Many guitar makers learned their trade by doing repairs in a stores back room or basement, and the first consistent sets of electric guitar strings were put together and sold by a music store owner. Because guitar stores are often owned by guitarists, theyve also become places where their mates can come and hang out, thus serving as social centers and even old guitarists homes. Most interesting of all, a guitar store is the only place in the known universe where a guy will allow himself to shop like a woman, spending half an hour, an hour, two hours trying a dozen guitars with only the faintest possibility of actually buying something, playing a few licks, swapping a few lies, while in the background someone plays the opening bars of Stairway to Heaven.

Yet all this diligent and selfless research was surprisingly little fun, and this was the first clue to the extraordinarily intimate relationship between a guitarist and his or her guitar.