My First Guitar Read online

  MY FIRST GUITAR

  TALES OF TRUE LOVE

  AND LOST CHORDS

  JULIA CROWE

  FOREWORD BY

  ANDY SUMMERS

  Souvenir Press

  To Terrence & Taidgh

  with all my love.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Foreword by Andy Summers

  Prologue

  Traveling Seven Hours for a Cup of Coffee

  Les Paul

  Howard Hite on Elvis’ First Guitar

  Scotty Moore

  Aaron Shearer

  Dick Dale

  Albert Lee

  Jorge Morel

  George Benson

  Roger McGuinn

  Taj Mahal

  John Hammond

  Seymour Duncan

  A Guitar on the Make

  Eli Kassner

  Paco Peña

  Pat Martino

  Bob Margolin

  Richard Thompson

  Steve Howe

  Peter Frampton

  Frederic Hand

  Richard Bruné

  Carlos Barbosa-Lima

  Juan Martín

  Dennis Koster

  The Assad Brothers

  Wings on My Fingers

  Carlos Santana

  Jimmie Vaughan

  Pat Metheny

  Christian Frederick Martin IV

  Ralph Towner

  Sonny Landreth

  Lurrie Bell

  Rory Block

  David Tronzo

  Thirty Minutes Inside a Guitar Shop

  Melissa Etheridge

  Muriel Anderson

  Tommy Emmanuel

  Martin Taylor

  Dave Alvin

  Bob Taylor

  Graham Parker

  Wolf Marshall

  Daniel Lanois

  Sharon Isbin

  The Music Conservatory of Life

  David Russell

  Roland Dyens

  Los Angeles Guitar Quartet

  Alex Lifeson

  Steve Lukather

  Joe Satriani

  Steve Vai

  Gary Lucas

  Michael McKean

  Christopher Guest

  A Sheepdog Raised by Ducks

  Kerry Keane

  Lee Ranaldo

  Paul Reed Smith

  Vernon Reid

  Marty Friedman

  Joey Santiago

  Benjamin Verdery

  David Leisner

  Tom Morello

  Daron Malakian

  Tracii Guns

  Joscho Stephan

  Johnny Hiland

  Andy McKee

  Fabio Zanon

  Jonny Lang

  Frank Vignola

  A Cup of Coffee with Jimmy Page

  Jimmy Page

  Glossary

  Guitar Makes/Models Mentioned in This Book

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Foreword

  In the pages of this book you will read the stories of many guitarists who have reached the world with their guitars — those who have affected us, changed us and stirred our emotions with their passion for this most wonderful of instruments.

  The character of the guitar is such that it tends to bring about a relationship that is obsessive, engaging, unrelenting in its pull back toward that magic matrix of frets and strings. Probably, for most of the players in this book, this is a fact of life. The first guitar is then, by definition, the beginning of a musical life. It is the primary instrument that ignites the germinal instinct to make music, to pluck a string. And after all the other guitars that are sought, collected, lusted after, specially built, exchanged, bought back and cried over, it is the first guitar that has a special place, no matter how cheap, battered or unplayable it might have been. This first guitar is the herald, the awakener of the impulse to play and the impulse that will become a life-long rapport.

  Just after my thirteenth birthday I was handed a battered old Spanish guitar by an uncle who had no use for it anymore. When he placed it in my hands I suppose I received the call, because it felt as if my heart had stopped beating, as if I had pulled Excalibur from the stone. I could not play a note but it didn’t matter because I was so thrilled to have this object in my life. Aged and beaten as it was, I absolutely loved it, like a child with a tattered rag doll that is preferred to all the shiny new toys. With this first guitar my life changed as if, in an instant, an alchemy had taken place. I transformed from a typical rowdy English schoolboy who couldn’t be bothered with homework, who was late for school, who made trouble with a pack of other boys, who sneaked into the pictures without paying — into a hardcore guitar aficionado.

  From here on I became a loner. Just me and the guitar, unless I was sitting and swapping chords with another aspiring guitarist. And it was on this first guitar, after I had finally got a sixth string for it, that I learned the rudimentary chords, ran my fingers up to the twelfth fret, twanged the low E string and finally learned how to tune it to the piano. This was the adventure, this was the thrill and the knowledge that had to be constantly sought after no matter how hard the battle. Later I moved to other guitars that were sleeker, faster, smoother in their response. But my first guitar, with its already lived life of a thousand songs, changes of strings and strummed chords, will always remain in my memory as the signifier, the flame that began the rest of my life.

  — Andy Summers,

  solo artist and guitarist for The Police,

  author of One Train Later

  Prologue

  My idea for writing this book came about in late autumn 2003, when the classical guitar duo Michael Newman and Laura Oltman had invited me to attend a house concert CD release party for a save-music-in-schools compilation of guitarists. The party was hosted in a Central Park West apartment with sky-high panoramic views overlooking the park. The place conveyed the fabulous kind of ease and generous space that one only sees in movies or else real estate ads printed in the back of the New York Times magazine.

  The head of Tower Records’ classical music department muttered that the bathroom alone was bigger than his entire apartment. I darted between white-jacketed waiters bearing silver platters of hors d’oeuvres to search for Michael and Laura, and burst into a little girl’s frilly fantasy of a bedroom. There sat Gary Lucas of Captain Beefheart — and songwriting collaborator of Jeff Buckley — perched on the edge of a floral-patterned bed, dressed head-to-toe in badass black as he tuned his 1930s vintage nickel steel Dobro.

  He peered at me from beneath the brim of his hat and grimaced. Then he decided to get up off this bed, with its heap of ruffle-edged pillows, and extended his hand for a proper introduction. I noticed that he left behind a staggering menagerie of mashed and flattened soft animals. A small pink giraffe teetered and tumbled over the edge of the bed and bounced against the floor.

  This is the image that conceived this book. I knew that, in a few years, the toys would more than likely lose favor to newer infatuations, stuffed animals exchanged for musical heroes peering down from an array of posters taped up on the walls. Odds were, in a few years, a guitar would sit tucked in the corner.

  Just how does anyone become so passionate about the guitar that they cannot imagine a life without it? Where does it all begin? I wanted to know how guitarists came into owning their first guitar and what made them realize they had found their life’s work.

  I started aggressively pursuing whatever interviews I could with anyone who was willing. I chased down the not willing. I used my best facsimile of charm and wit. I stuck my foot into countless doors. I attended guitar festivals and, if no one assisted, I found my way throug
h backstage labyrinths to corner rock legends, backing them up against the wall and cajoling them into telling me their stories. Sometimes, the story was tough to tell — I could personally identify with the emotional catch in Joey Santiago’s voice when he recalled what his father did to his guitar out of misguided parental concern. There had been entirely unexpected connections between some of the guitarists, such as Daron Malakian’s account of purchasing a guitar from his idol Tracii Guns when he was 17, long before Malakian became a rock star himself. Collecting these tales has been admittedly addictive because each story is as unique, compelling and illuminating as the performer.

  The tales that emerged surprised even those in the guitarists’ inner circles, who had never heard some of these details before. Artists, especially rock stars, tend to be an over-interviewed lot. In fact, a few of my guitar-obsessed friends doubted some of my unearthed details simply because they had not read them before elsewhere.

  My intent was simple — to ask the artists to speak for themselves. There is beauty and music in one’s own way of telling a story that is just as distinctive and unique as the tonal quality and instantly recognizable sound these artists are renowned for coaxing from the guitar.

  It has been a privilege, a joy and an unforgettable experience for me to participate in such personal conversations with music legends. It is my hope that readers can see themselves within these stories and come to discover, or even rediscover, their own love for the guitar. And it is also my fervent hope that the passion in these fascinating stories encourages readers to expand their musical interests to genres that they might have not yet explored or considered.

  Traveling Seven Hours for a Cup of Coffee

  Many years ago, during a hiatus from college, I arrived at London’s Heathrow Airport wearing my sincerity and best dress with the misguided notion that I would be taken seriously for at least not looking like a grungy backpacker. I approached the stone-faced customs officer to explain the reason for my visit: I was a writer working on my first book. I planned to visit London for three days and spend the rest of my time hanging out with sheep in Ireland. The officer scrutinized the glaringly empty contents of my brand new passport, as blank as my unwritten book. She then sized up my youth and asked the fatal question: “What’s the book about?” Jet lag is its own truth serum. I told her I had no idea because I had only started writing it. Anything could happen, just like life itself. How can you accurately plot what may happen before you arrive?

  I was having a brand new panic attack now, reliving this episode now that I was going to be traveling again to London. Jimmy Page had invited me to meet him for coffee. This time, I told the customs officer that I was on holiday. It wasn’t a complete lie. According to my friends, I was on holiday from all common sense to be traveling eight-plus hours from New York via Charlotte, North Carolina, to London to meet a rock star with a lurid reputation, who may or may not show, all for a dubious cup of coffee.

  Two months earlier, I’d received an email from a lady, stating that Mr. Page would like to meet me over said cup of coffee to discuss a new book I was writing. He was keenly interested in being part of it. I had assumed this was a prank because a few friends knew I was compiling interviews with famous guitarists for a book proposal. I refused to bite. I mean, what self-respecting Englishman drinks coffee? Weeks later, a second email arrived from the same address. It was not a joke.

  When the postal clerk at Church Street Station asked my reason for a passport renewal, I hesitated then told her the truth, thinking this might possibly seem a little more real if I confessed it to a complete stranger. I was excited but uncertain about what I was getting into with all this.

  “No shit! Jimmy Page” was the clerk’s response. “My brother made me listen to all those Led Zeppelin albums when they first came out. Drove me crazy, always saying, ‘You’ve got to hear this.’” She waved my passport form up into the air, turned her head and bellowed to the rest of her coworkers, “Yo! We gotta process this on the double because this lady here is gonna be meeting Mistah Jimmy Page in London, ENGLAND!” I slinked away, aware of heads straining curiously from postal booths. I could hear some joker from the back singing the guitar lick from “Kashmir” so loudly it echoed off the stately marble walls: “DUN-na-nunt. NUNNA-nunt. DUH-na-nunt Nunnanunt. NUNNA-nunt!”

  Next, I visited the local bookstore to buy Led Zeppelin CDs. Sure I’d heard their music before but, as a classical musician, I knew it best in an indirect sense. For example, I knew that Matt Haimovitz plays his own cool rendition of “Kashmir” on cello. I wanted to absorb the original albums in their proper sequential order. I listened to them on a portable CD player stuffed into my coat pocket because I could not afford an iPod. In fact, I did not even know how I was going to pay for this trip.

  Besides writing for peanuts for guitar magazines, I teach guitar and spend my days criss-crossing Manhattan on foot like a doctor making musical house calls to guitar students, realigning their hand positions upon the fretboard and curing phobias about playing barre chords. I was loping up to Union Square to one of these lessons when I realized just how good a guitarist Page truly is. Most guitar magazines will insist that I spell out the exact diatonic scale, mode and key signature in both notation and tab with a comprehensive sidebar on gear, but let’s just set all the piranha-jock posturing on the anatomical and technical details of the music aside for a moment and say my realization had been simply like that scene from the film Easter Parade, when Fred Astaire suggests to Judy Garland that she walk ahead of him and prove she has the magical ability to turn men’s heads. Garland pulls this off by making a cross-eyed, blowfish face. I swung along at a good clip, thoroughly spaced out in my own mental zone, until it dawned on me that strangers were rubbernecking at me on the sidewalk. I had not been making any face but I was plugged into the 12-bar blues song “Rock ’n’ Roll,” from Led Zeppelin IV. Let’s just say that listening to classical guitar by headphones rarely alters one’s gait. Nor does it cause strangers’ heads to turn when one is walking innocently down the street. After this musical epiphany, I knew I had to go to London.

  Lisa Hoffman, the mother of my guitar student Alex, generously advanced me a couple months’ worth of lesson fees to cover my airfare to London. On her living room wall, Lisa has a gigantic autographed “Born to Run” poster alongside a framed, coffee table photograph of her younger self gleefully embracing The Boss himself.

  I informed my U.K. magazine publisher, Maurice Summerfield, that I was coming to London and asked if there might be any concert for me to review while I was there to help defray expenses. “Have you heard of the expression ‘Carrying coals to Newcastle’?” he asked me. “I have twenty editors in London, which is why you’re in New York. And Jimmy Page?” A hint of disdain inflected his voice. “Why not Brian May? Brian May performed for the Queen’s Fiftieth Jubilee, you know.”

  I discovered that when it comes to Jimmy Page everyone has an opinion. Or a request.

  “Didn’t Page chew the head off a bat?” someone asked. “Or was that Ozzie? He did something, though. Occult stuff. I think the whole band worshipped the Devil.”

  “I hear Page likes young girls. And he’s old now. Real old guy with real young girls. God, I wonder how old he has to be by now. I wish I was him.”

  “Shame on you. You call yourself a Chicagoan but then you go off to meet with the man who ripped off Willie Dixon! Shame!”

  “He’s the greatest. Can you have him autograph this CD for me?”

  “He’s overrated. Can you give him my CD?”

  I had all this swirling through my jet-lagged brain as I lay exhausted upon the tiny bed inside my Bayswater hotel room, with its seasick floor and a staff left over from lost episodes of Fawlty Towers. I forced myself to sit upright and dial Jimmy’s office. The lady who had emailed me, Sue Frankland-Haile, was very kind, asking me how I had fared on my trip.

  “I’m afraid I have some rather disappointing news,” she said.

 
; Something had come up in Mr. Page’s schedule and we could not be certain this meeting would happen after all. “Was it your main reason for coming out?” she asked. Lacking a swift response, I’d confessed that it was. She said she would check back with me later. I hung up and flopped over the concave mattress.

  I was alone in London far away from home, with possibly nothing to show for the effort. I decided to make the best of it by visiting every possible guitar shop in London, starting with Hank’s, where a line of guitars stood on floor stands like sentries guarding the tombs of more expensive guitars locked inside glass cases. I played Pujol’s “El Abejorro” for an appreciative sales clerk who wore his hair like Steve McQueen and kept his tinted aviator glasses on inside the darkened shop. The kid behind the counter at Macari’s had been a bit reluctant about showing me capos. A young schoolboy, still wearing his dark blue uniform jacket, played the beautiful acoustic instrumental intro to “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You” on a cedar-top classical guitar in the basement of Ivor Mairants. At the Spanish Guitar Centre on Cranbourn Street in Soho, the sales clerk, who assumed I did not know any better, commanded me to remove my coat so that the buttons would not scratch the back of the fine spruce concert guitar I had picked up. He then returned to impressing a real customer with his tale of a recent visit by Sting, who had dropped a small fortune on one of their guitars. Once the customer departed, he looked back toward me and said curiously, “We do not see many American girls here.”

  When I returned to my hotel room, I found the red message light blinking on the phone. It was Sue Frankland-Haile from Page’s office. I called back immediately. “Where have you been?” she asked. I told her that I had scoured every guitar shop I could find in Soho. She expressed shock that I had walked all the way from Bayswater to Soho but I assured her that perambulating halfway across town was a New York thing to do.

  “There is a chance we might be able to make this work,” she told me. “You must appear at this coffee shop. If Jimmy cannot make it, there will be a phone message waiting for you at the counter inside.” Then she added, “Now you happen to know what he looks like but he does not know at all what you look like. Please tell me something identifying about yourself so I can let him know.”