My First Guitar

by Julia Crowe

  I’ve been playing professionally now for over forty years, and I’ve played with most of my heroes. My biggest hero was Jimmy Bryant. He was a country swing player during the ’50s, and I met up with him during the ’70s in Los Angeles. His was just a name that I’d heard off a record and to see him in the flesh was memorable — I actually played with him a couple times at the Palomino Club in Los Angeles. That was really a special moment for me.

  Here’s a story for you, I was playing with The Crickets. Rick Grech, who plays bass with The Crickets, was from Blind Faith. We did a tour together and he’s a really nice guy. One day, he said, “I’ve got a guitar that I’m going to give you. You’re really going to love this guitar. Jimi Hendrix gave me this guitar.” It was a black Les Paul Custom, with two pickups. Not a reissue but one from the ’60s. Hendrix had given it to him. My ex-wife needed money and sold it while I was away on tour. So that was the end of that marriage. The guy who’d bought the guitar promised me that if he sold it, I could have it back. He called me one day and I went to have a look at it. Apparently, he didn’t like the way it was playing so he had the fingerboard taken off and instead of having a camber on it, it was flat, like a classical guitar. I looked at it and thought, “Oh, this is not the same guitar that Hendrix had,” so I passed on it.

  We all have guitars and regret selling them. Of course, in the early days, it’s hard to justify having more than one or two guitars. You just had your axe and that was it. But nowadays, people have got lots of guitars. I’ve got about thirty or forty — though haven’t counted them lately. Not all of them are collectible, but people give you guitars and you feel like you can’t give it away and sell it, so it just ends up in the closet. I had a guitar that used to belong to Tony Sheridan, who was the guy The Beatles used to back in Hamburg, Germany. Probably The Beatles have played on this guitar. It was a Martin D-28E with DeArmond pickups. They’re quite rare. I had this guitar and thought, “This isn’t working, I need to get something else.” So I sold that and regretted it. But I do have another one of Tony Sheridan’s guitars.

  My first decent guitar was a Les Paul custom that I owned in 1961. I reluctantly sold it to a friend of mine, only because I’d wanted to buy a Gibson Super 400. I thought this was going to be the guitar, for being a top-of-the-line jazz guitar. It was a great guitar, of course, but it was not right for me, given the style I was playing and developing at the time. I always regretted giving up that first Les Paul.

  In ’79, I’d started playing with Eric Clapton and we were at one of our first rehearsals when he saw a picture of me playing my Les Paul Custom. He said, “I’ve got one of those at home.” The next day, he brought in this ’58 Les Paul Custom and he gave it to me. I still have that guitar, so I don’t feel so bad about losing my old one because I have Eric’s one now. It’s pretty much the same guitar, except he had it refretted with heavier frets, which makes it more playable because the original guitars had very thin frets and were a little hard to get along with. It’s a great guitar.

  The funny part is I did find my first Les Paul Custom again, the one that I sold. It had been sold to Eric Stuart of 10CC. I was in the BBC Studios when I saw this black Gibson case on the floor, quite rare in England because there were not many Les Pauls around. So I opened it up and saw my guitar with a ding on it and I thought, “Ah, there’s my Les Paul!” I lifted it up — they’re very heavy, Les Pauls — and I discovered he’d cut a big chunk out of it to make it lighter. I thought, “Oh god, why on earth would he do that?” I was just devastated.

  I have another guitar that Don Edward gave to me as well, another 1958 Gibson, one of his J-200s with the big black pick guards on it. That’s a really famous rock ’n’ roll guitar. I’m not home very often to play them, unfortunately, but they’re classic guitars that I’d hate to part with.

  Jorge Morel

  In the ’60s, Argentinean classical guitarist and composer Jorge Morel performed nightly at The Village Vanguard, where he shared billing with jazz legends Stan Kenton and Herbie Mann. He is known for his brilliant arrangements of popular songs and jazz standards and had been lifelong friends with Chet Atkins, who had arranged for him to record with RCA Victor, following Morel’s work for Decca Records.

  My first guitar: my father gave it to me when I was twelve. I had a little Christmas gift of a guitar before this one when I was six years old. It had wooden pegs like a cavaquinho. I didn’t play much, just learned a few chords. When I went to school to learn, I took this guitar with me. My teacher pointed out it was a toy and not a guitar, so my father bought me a bigger guitar.

  One time, in the bedroom that I shared with my brother, I was playing my new guitar while he was talking, but I was not listening. He started screaming at me so I’d said, “Shut up!” He took off his shoe and threw it and I reacted by holding up guitar in defense, but the impact of his shoe cracked the guitar. My brother was crying after that. I was twelve years old and he had been ten.

  My brother and I started to learn the guitar together but, six months later, he stopped. “Look, I don’t have the talent,” he said. “I like it but I can hardly hold the guitar. I could never do that.” I suggested that he try. “Why should I struggle so much?” he asked. He was an intelligent man and, listening to me, he said, “You make it sound easy.” He quit the guitar. My father didn’t push. He said, “One guitarist in the family is enough.” My brother became an engineer — a great architect, designing the heating systems.

  So my first real guitar was one made in Buenos Aires by Antigua Casa Nuñez. In those days, during the 1940s, they made guitars in the shop rather than by factory. My father was an actor and had a lot of friends in entertainment. He also played the guitar. One day I came home from school and my father said to me, “Go to your bedroom, I think you’ll find something there that you like.”

  I saw the closed case and inside was this gorgeous instrument. Oh, my god. I couldn’t get my hands off it the whole day. It was an Antigua Casa Nuñez Diego Gracia, made in 1928. He had bought it from a friend who played the guitar. This friend was about to pawn the guitar but instead, my father offered him $250 — a lot of money back then. I played this guitar for so long. When you are very young, you don’t know how to take care of an instrument. We knew nothing of the Dampit for maintaining the humidity of the wood.

  I came to New York with this same guitar in 1961 from Puerto Rico to play at Carnegie Hall with the Kingston Trio. We were both on the same bill and had two concerts in one evening. I went to the hotel, the Edison on 47th Street. I was very excited. I placed the guitar on top of a table. It was December or November, very cold outside. I went downstairs, had lunch, took a walk and came back to the hotel. When I opened up the case and touched my guitar, I was surprised that it felt hot. And when I picked it up … crack! Crack! Crack! What I had thought had been a table had turned out to be the radiator. The guitar had sat directly on the heater for two hours and cracked in twenty places.

  Somebody gave me a Velasquez guitar. I tried to have the top of the Antigua Casa Nuñez replaced in Cuba but it was not the same guitar afterward, so I sold it to one of my students. Of course, I wish I still had it because it was my first guitar. Many guitarists do not still have their first guitars. I revisited the store where that first guitar had been made, and I bought another one but it, also, was not the same. I brought it back to America with me and eventually got rid of that one, too.

  I have not played any other instrument but the guitar, though I do have a piano for composition. I just bang on the piano — I don’t play it. I think my favorite instruments are the strings. I liked American music and orchestras. I liked traditional guitar music, of course, like Carcassi, Giuliani, Bach and Sor. Bach I learned later when I was seventeen or eighteen years old. I wanted to play Bach’s music and nothing else for a while. I had no idea that I might have something inside me that would someday speak musically. When I was maybe fifteen or sixteen years old, I wrote a piece that I liked but wanted to make sure it wa
s mine, that I didn’t inadvertently steal from some place. I started to write more and my friends liked it. Then my father said, “Who wrote that? I like it. You wrote that? Are you SURE? Well, I like it. You sure you didn’t take it from somewhere?”

  Even before I came to America, I liked jazz, the tango, American folklore, Argentinian and South American music from every country. But I also liked Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw and their orchestras playing violins, romantic stuff. I thought that the guitar would probably be the wrong instrument because I couldn’t play this music on it. But I fell in love with the guitar anyway and realized that I could possibly make some arrangements of this music for the guitar. Not all of it but some of it.

  When the sounds of Gershwin came into my life — that was it. I first heard his music while watching a movie about Gershwin’s life starring Robert Alda, called Rhapsody in Blue. I knew the name of Gershwin, but when I heard his music in this film, it mesmerized me. In those days, the movies used to be replayed from the start. You paid one admission and then if you wanted to see it again, you simply stayed. Well, I stayed for three showings of this film. My father was worried because I’d left at two p.m. and I didn’t come home until the evening. Not long ago, they showed this movie on an old movie channel on TV. Gershwin was born in Brooklyn. “Where’s Brooklyn?” I wondered. I had absorbed every detail of this movie.

  My father was an actor, a very good one, and he took the guitar everywhere because it was his life. He loved the classical guitar and it’s why I am playing the guitar. It’s important for me to say if there is one person I need to acknowledge, it is my first teacher, Amparo Alvarisa. She taught at the school where my father took me across the street from our house. It was a class of twelve students and some dropped out. I was there with two or three students and, with the class being so small, the school did not think it worth keeping. So she came to my house to teach privately after that. My dad did whatever he could to pay this lady. I had two lessons weekly for two years, then once a week the third year. By the fourth year, we went to Pablo Escobar because he had been her teacher. She said she could not teach me anything further so I took lessons from him.

  George Benson

  The winner of multiple Grammy Awards over the course of his forty-year career, jazz guitarist George Benson is also known for using a distinctive Manouche rest-stroke picking technique, similar to that of gypsy jazz players, where one string is plucked downwards and the pick ends its run on the next string.

  I was nine years old when I received my first guitar. I had already been playing the ukulele for two years at that point because my hands were too small yet to play the guitar. I could not wait for my hands to grow large enough to play! So when my hands grew just large enough, my parents bought me a $15 guitar, something along the lines of a Stella. It was a functional acoustic guitar, nothing electric — it had a round sound hole and, boy, I thought it was the greatest thing that could ever happen. I’d learned a few chords and things and immediately went out into the streets and started making money with it.

  I did try to play violin at one point, which had been before the ukulele, and I’d tried to play the piano, too, but again, my hands were too small to be able to play the piano, too. My first electric guitar, my stepfather made for me. We couldn’t afford a new electric guitar because they were expensive. I kept crying about this instrument that I saw in a pawnshop and finally, my stepfather said, “Let’s go take a look at it.” We did not go inside the store but we looked at it from the front wraparound window. He said, “You know what? I could make that.” So we went home and started cutting up wood around the house and, a few days later, I had my first electric guitar for less than half what they had been asking for at the store! My stepfather was a jack-of-all-trades who knew how to do electricity, carpentry, plumbing, everything.

  When my mother met my stepfather, I was only seven years old, and he brought an electric guitar to the house with an amplifier. He also had a record player. Those were the first electric items in our house because we had just moved from a house that had no electricity to a house that did. He went to the pawnshop and retrieved his guitar, amplifier and record player, and he played Charlie Christian records for me with The Benny Goodman Sextet and George Shearing records — those were my first experience with listening to records and it set a high standard from the very beginning.

  My family was glad to see that I was happy playing the guitar, but they did not think anything special would come of it until I started making money with it. Then they said, “Oh! Ooooh! Wow!” They did not know how much money I was making but it was three times the amount of money my mother was making every day in the hospital, making pennies. I was making two weeks’ worth of her salary within a single day of playing out on the street corner before she found I was making that kind of money. I started making records when I was ten years old, only one year after I started playing the guitar.

  The guitar is a personal instrument because you can take it with you and you can play it from different points of view. You can make up your own ideas. It’s not like a piano, either; on a guitar you can play the same a on various strings and frets, whereas on a piano each A on the keyboard is a different pitch. Also, with the guitar, you’re able to add a couple different kinds of trills, vibrato and tune it down. The biggest challenge I’ve ever faced with the guitar was with the quality of the instrument because I’d always had cheap guitars in the beginning and they used to literally fall apart in my hands. The strings had edges on them that used to cut my fingertips. This did set my mentality about the guitar neck early on and created the very reason that I play the way I do now — with a very light touch — because I was afraid I was going to run into one of those barbed strings.

  That one moment that said I could be playing the guitar professionally for the rest of my life has never come to me. The guitar is merely something that I do. I have found that everything I have done, I have done well. A lot of my friends thought I would wind up becoming a doctor. I used to conceive of things and ideas and then actually make them. I used to be an artist who had studied commercial art in school and also I studied electric power. I was always a B or B+ student in everything I studied. Music is the one area that allowed me to make a living. It was something I did with relative ease, so it began to take over and the money started going to the moon when I left Pittsburgh, my hometown. It wasn’t for pennies anymore but serious dollars. When we had a hit record, boy, everything changed, and we found that we could almost buy anything we wanted, so I passed that good success on to my children and my wife.

  I went into a store one time in New York on Music Row on 48th Street. If you said to anybody you were heading to 48th Street, they knew you were going to be looking at some musical instruments. I was walking by a brand new store when some fellow saw me walking by and said, “George, come here! I’ve got something you’ve gotta see!” He pulled out this fabulous guitar and I knew right away it was very expensive, just an incredible guitar. He’d said, “It’s only a thousand dollars.” I said, “A THOUSAND DOLLARS? Get out of here! I ain’t got no thousand dollars.” He said, “Why don’t you just charge it to your record company?” And jokingly, I’d said, “Yeah! Do that! We’ll charge it to the record company!” So he packed it up, put it inside a case and let me walk out with it after saying, “Just sign right here.”

  I just walked out the store with it. And sure enough, the record company paid for it. This guitar is made by one of the most famous luthiers in the jazz guitar world — his name was D’Angelico. I still have this guitar and every time I pull it out, I make a hit record with it. I pulled it out eighteen years ago and then it was in my closet for fifteen years after that, and I pulled it out two or three years ago and every record I have used this guitar on has become a #1 hit for smooth jazz. Now it is worth about $150,000. I’d had three or four other D’Angelico guitars later that I have auctioned and wish that I hadn’t done that now, but I’ve always kept this one because it was special. />
  Roger McGuinn

  Chicago-born guitarist McGuinn is famous for his jangly electric guitar playing in songs like “Mr. Tambourine Man” and “Eight Miles High” by The Byrds. He creates that signature sound using a technique based on banjo fingerpicking he learned at the Old Town School of Folk Music.

  I was fourteen years old when I received my first guitar for my birthday because I had been turned on by Elvis Presley’s “Heartbreak Hotel” the year before. This guitar was a Harmony brand and, though I do not remember the model number, it was one of those f-hole guitars with action that was about an inch high. I always say that guitar was better for slicing hard-boiled eggs than playing music. I did not realize that the action should have been lowered. Instead, I did the best I could with it. I couldn’t really play any chords because the strings were too difficult to press down so I’d figured out some single string music and copied the lead break from a song called “Woman Love,” on the flip side of Gene Vincent’s “Be-Bop-A-Lula.” Some years later, when I’d met George Harrison and compared notes, it turned out that he and I had learned to play the same lead breaks of that song around the same time. That was the first song we both learned to play on our guitars.

  My little brother had a toy accordion that I would mess around with, but that was really it in terms of my playing any other musical instrument. My brother and I both took guitar lessons at the Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago, but he did not wind up pursuing music. Rockabilly is what fascinated me — Elvis Presley, Gene Vincent, The Everly Brothers and Johnny Cash. My family was fine with my playing the guitar, but they did not like Elvis Presley at all. They didn’t trust him. I guess he just scared them for being too wild. So I used to have to secretly listen to rock ’n’ roll on my transistor radio with an earphone. They were fine with the idea of me playing music, though.