My First Guitar
Page 6
I love the way the guitar looks, feels, smells and sounds. I love everything about guitars. It’s a sweet-sounding instrument and, once you get over having calluses on your left hand, it’s pretty easy to play. I never really understood the piano, which feels like playing a typewriter. I know how to figure out the notes on it but I never really liked the sound of a traditional grand piano — I love the sound of a guitar. I played a nylon-string guitar when I worked with The Chad Mitchell Trio for a couple years. I had a nice little Martin 00-21 that I bought in Chicago, and I had offered to play that behind them, but they said no, saying they felt the Martin was a little thin sounding. They’d wanted the fuller sound of a classical guitar.
I still find the first position F Major chord challenging to play because it is so close to the nut. So I cheat on that chord by using my thumb like a lot of rock guys do. I don’t like the F Major chord. If I had my way, there wouldn’t be any F Major chord. When I got into playing the 12-string guitar, the B strings were always difficult because they might be in tune if you are tuned to E and you play an E chord, but when you play a D chord, it would be a bit sharp. It’s tricky. A lot of the early 12-string guitars did not compensate at the bridge, so the B strings would not be in tune up the neck. Marty Stuart, the country guy, once said, “When you get to heaven, there will be no B strings!”
My first real performance was at my high school, the Latin High School of Chicago. I did not get paid for it, though. My first paid gig was when I played at a coffeehouse in Chicago called Café Roué on Rush Street at Oak Street. By that time, I had been excited by folk music when I was attending the Latin School because our teacher had invited Bob Gibson over to play a set for us. He had played really cool music for us on the five-string banjo, and he’d been excited by Pete Seeger. Gibson was like a younger version of Pete Seeger, doing more souped-up folk music than Pete — not quite as traditional — and I had liked that a lot. So I got into folk music and played a lot of Pete Seeger and Bob Gibson songs on the five-string banjo. By that time, I had acquired a five-string long-necked Vega banjo like Music Man and I also had this little Martin 00-21 guitar that my teacher Frank Hamilton at the Old Town School of Folk Music played. I saw that Josh White played a five-string banjo, too, so I’d thought it was a good instrument to have.
I followed Bob Gibson’s career since he played at my high school and I went to see one of his shows at the Gate of Horn, a really great folk and jazz club in Chicago. This club had been active from about ’56 to ’63 and all the folk singers like Judy Collins and Bob Dylan played there, as well as Peter Yarrow, before he was in Peter, Paul & Mary. It was owned at the time by Albert Grossman, who later managed Peter, Paul & Mary and later, Dylan.
I was at this club when Bob Gibson was playing. I was walked into his dressing room and saw that he had a Vega 12-string guitar, which had been an unusual instrument because nobody was making commercial 12-strings at that time, in the late ’50s. You could find some old Stella 12-strings, like the kind Lead Belly played, and some others by other low-end manufacturers like Harmony — but Bob had this great Vega 12-string. I couldn’t resist the temptation to pick it up. I took the capo off this guitar, tuned it and played a little bit. Then I put the capo back on just as I had found it. What I did not realize is that this completely knocks the guitar out of tune. Bob walked into the dressing room, grabbed this guitar, went onstage and proceeded to play. And the guitar’s tone was really sour. He walked right by me, roaring, “WHO was playing my guitar?!” It was me but I did not confess to it. Now that he has passed away, I can tell that story.
Once, back in the day, I took a flight from Paris to New York on the Concorde. The flight personnel claimed they would treat my guitar with kid gloves, saying they would wrap it carefully in plastic with assurances it would travel perfectly fine. When we arrived in New York, I found that my guitar had not been wrapped in plastic. I didn’t open the case until we arrived at the hotel. My wife took one look at the back of it and gasped because it was all crushed in. If they had put kid gloves on anything, I’d say they’d probably put kid gloves on the forklift before they drove it straight through my guitar.
There is a happy ending to this story, though. Because it was a 12-string guitar, a signature model that Martin Guitars made about ten years ago, it inspired me to go back to Martin and request an entirely new signature model 7-string guitar, one that Martin Guitars continued to manufacture afterward. My reason for creating this new guitar is that I’d wanted a high G and a low G like a 12-string has, but the rest of the guitar would be a 6-string so it had the flexibility of a 6-string guitar with a distinctive bite on the G-string tear, which I use to play leads up and down from the 0 to the 12th fret. The sound of a 12-string, when I played lead breaks on it, like the break in the songs “My Dear” and “Turn, Turn, Turn,” is all done on the G string, but with this seven-string guitar, you can bend it, play bluegrass runs on the bottom, and it has more flexibility, like having a Swiss Army knife on the guitar. So that incident from Air France ultimately prompted me to do something good.
Taj Mahal
Henry Saint Clair Fredericks, a.k.a. Taj Majal, is a blues guitarist whose career has spanned nearly fifty years. He uses a flat pick to play blues leads, and when fingerpicking, he leads with his thumb and middle finger rather than using his index finger. I interviewed Taj Mahal in his dressing room backstage at the first Wall-to-Wall Guitar Festival at the Krannert Center in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois.
My stepfather came after my dad died during the early 1950s, when I was about eleven years old. About three years later, when I was fourteen, I discovered this guitar sitting inside a closet and learned that it belonged to my stepfather. That was the beginning and the end. I was already guitar crazy. I was music crazy. From every direction, I’d wanted to hear music. I also became acutely aware of when they were trying to fake the public out with some version that did not feel like real music. This was back in the ’40s. I used to ask myself, “Why does that feel so, hmmm? I cannot put my finger on it.” And then the other stuff I loved had been wild music captured live by tape and that was exciting. Then it was like, “Well, the notes are there, but I’m not getting it.” I couldn’t figure it out, but then later came to realize this was the sound of people who had figured out patterns, which they were trying to market.
I had my stepfather’s guitar and, as luck would have it, some new neighbors moved in next door with two brothers in the family. One of the brothers was about six months older than me, nearly fifteen at the time, and he was playing. See, I never had to go through that whole Robert Johnson thing in order to find the door that mattered. By the time I got to Robert Johnson, that was the weirdest sounding, most far-off thing to my ear because I’m talking about having a live guy who is the same age sitting in front of you playing, and processing Blind Lemon Jefferson, Muddy Waters, Blind Boy Fuller, Lightnin’ Hopkins and Johnny Lee Hooker. Those guys are huge musicians. These boys down the street said Muddy and all those musicians came from Clarksdale, Mississippi, but they really came from Stovall, Mississippi. These boys came from deep in the Delta.
The young girls who came recently from the South liked this music, but the ones who had been up North longer started having a taste for more sophisticated music and shut the door on it altogether. It was a great thing for a couple of young, crazy boys to have grownups come up and say, “We’ll give y’all a coupla dollars if you come on up here. Now y’all can’t drink but you can play that music.” And we’d make all this money, drinking our sodas and just whangin’. These brothers were so exciting. And of course, it was all because of that Silvertone archtop guitar I’d found inside the closet. It had flaming maple grain with a sunburst and f-holes — a huge find for a closet.
When I asked where to get strings, I was told by the older brother who lived next door, “Go to the drugstore.” The drugstore?! Not the music shop? I went to the drugstore to get these Black Diamond strings. He showed me how to unwind the third string, be
cause the third string is always wound, and we’d take a pair of pliers and pull that wrapper off — that’s how you get a bendy, winding string. And then we’d never tune the guitar up because we wanted to build our hands up. That would hurt your hands for a while and then he’d say, “Tune it up some more.” We were probably at E-flat or D when playing in the 8th position, except when we played with Ernest and them, because Ernest played harmonica as well as they played guitar. The police used to come and tell us to turn that stuff down. They were outta sight, that clan. They played “Boogie Chillen’,” which was a huge song.
I had another friend named Garland Edwards, and he played more R&B and funky blues. All of us agreed on Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley. I loved Johnny “Guitar” Watson and Albert Collins and Noble “Thin Man” Watts, Billy Butler, Nicky Baker, Banjo Ike, Freddie Greene, Nat King Cole, Oscar Moore. Oh god, I loved those guys. And later, I liked Wes Montgomery. I stretched out because my father was a bebop composer with West Indian roots, and a lot of people at that time contributed their rhythmic patterns. But yeah, the sound of the guitar just killed me, coming from any direction. I still love it a lot. It’s just this instrument. Sometimes I could not play three notes of what this guy was playing, but I could go there and listen to what he was playing all night long.
My mom did not like my obsession with the guitar. She and my friend Garland’s mother called the guitar “a starvation box.” “You still up there playing that starvation box?” It did warn both of us. Garland went to Canada and I kind of drifted on. My purpose for playing music was not so much to be popular, as much as it was something I needed to do for myself.
It would not have mattered whatever kind of job I had, as I was really interested in agriculture. I spent about ten years working on two different farms when I was working my way through school. I worked at one farm, a dairy farm, briefly and the other for a longer period of time. And I still check in on the dairy farm to this day. Working there is how I got my money to go to school. It gave me a chance to think about what it was I wanted to do with my life. I’ve never been afraid of work. I worked my way up to foreman at this place. I learned that while city music sounded good, it had nothing to do with lifting them bales and cleaning that barn. So the kind of music that I knew I wanted to play was music that accompanied this situation.
As I got older, after a couple of years spent picking tobacco, I went back home to my old neighborhood and found my friend Lyndon Perry, and I’d sit down with him or the Nichols, who lived up the street — Junior, Alex, Mary. They were all just into playing. It had nothing to do with anything. These are people who played music from the heart because they loved it and wanted to pass it on to another generation. I didn’t know how lucky I was because these were just people I knew in the neighborhood. Years later, all those guys had bands but this is where they started.
I still have that Silvertone. It’s missing one of the tuning pegs but I can get a new set. Back then, nobody knew you could do that. We’d use a pair of pliers to tune the guitar. The hard thing for me about the guitar had been singing and playing at the same time. I just worked at it. The guys who always killed me were the bass players who were in the pocket with the drummer and singing. Larry Graham from Graham Central Station and from Sly and the Family Stone is an amazing player. He’s in the pocket, kicking the pocket while he’s singing the melody over the top. This is the way people played. If you had to do it, you did it. I was determined. Pretty soon, you just let go and there it is.
I played a National guitar on The Natch’l Blues that came to me from a guy who had freaked out on acid during the ’60s. He was kind of a weird guy who had this beautiful guitar but he could not play it. While he was tripping on acid, he’d had a vision that he needed to give this guitar to me. I was wary, but it was a really good guitar. The sound of that National on that record! The guys who had founded the original company, the Dopyera Brothers from Chicago — I’d met all of them plus their sister and nephew. They used to fix my guitars and this one guitar had the biggest sound you could possibly imagine. It was an early ’30s guitar. That album was recorded in ’67 or ’68. In 1971, this guy came back around because he knew what that guitar was worth. And you know what? I just gave it to him. He was freaking out, and when I say freaking out, he knew that I was bigger than he was because after giving a guitar to somebody, I would never ask for it back. Some people live in a paradigm. Whenever it’s like that and it’s crazy, my thought is to just let it go. More times than not, if I let it go, it comes back around. I’m not hassled and brooding over it. I tell myself, “Hey, how much time did I have with that instrument!” as opposed to thinking how bad I feel because it is gone. It’s a hard one to work out but you’d better work it out, because it will take years off your life and turn you into some sad, self-pitying thing. My brother freaked out because he couldn’t believe I did that. He wanted me to put pressure on that guy, but I said, “I don’t know, man. Right now that guy’s got pressure on him.” I’d tried to find a comparable instrument and have to say that I have not found it.
Another story I’d have is that I was playing in Arizona when a young guy came in with his dad. He said that he knew I played this kind of guitar and he had an instrument that he had tried to take a blazing torch to in order to cut out a space. This was a Dobro, an old fiddleback grasp with the round holes and square crosses. This was an old, old, old guitar, like 1921. He had tried to take out the faceplate to put a pickup inside. It looked like someone had taken a can opener to it for all the sharp edges where he did the cutting and he was upset that he did this. The kid said, “I will trade you for any other guitar.” We went back to the West coast, where I had a Martin 00-18 that I could never get the sound I wanted from it. We decided that he would put this Dobro inside a guitar case and send it up to me and I would swap it out with the Martin and send it back to him. I took this Dobro guitar down to the Dopyera Brothers and they were horrified to see what had been done to it. They cut that piece out, put a brass piece in and buffed it. They cleaned up that instrument so good that, when I walked into the shop, I walked right past my own guitar. Never in my life have I walked passed my own instrument. It had old patina to it, from when brass gets dull. There’s a picture of me with it on the Fuh Ya’ Musica album where I’m sitting there in a white suit, barefoot with this guitar.
John Hammond
Blues guitarist and songwriter John Hammond, the son of record producer John H. Hammond, has recorded with Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Dr. John and Duane Allman. He is a recognized blues scholar who hosted a 1991 U.K. television documentary The Search for Robert Johnson, the legendary Delta bluesman.
I met John and his wife, Marla, backstage at the First World Guitar Congress, where we did this interview. A year later, we caught up in New York City so I could write a cover story on John for Acoustic Guitar magazine. I had the chance to play the Stubbs guitar that he mentions here. John would play a riff, hand the guitar over and ask that I play it back exactly to prove that I got it. I realized he had two advantages — forty years of playing and larger hands.
I got my first guitar at Antioch College in 1960 from a girl named Carlotta Jones. I bought it from her for $10 — a Gibson J-100. I think they called it “The Sailor’s Model,” from the 1930s or ’40s. It was an old guitar, black with white trim. It had a hole punched into the top to serve as a sound port, but this did not seem to alter the sound all that much. I thought it was a beautiful guitar. It had this great fingerboard, and this was the first guitar I learned to play, when I was seventeen. I was nineteen when I started playing professionally.
John Hammond, age seventeen. (Courtesy John Hammond)
I’d have to say I was attracted to the guitar because it was for sale. I could afford it and it was right there. My roommate had a Martin 12-string guitar that was like a work of art. I was so reluctant to play his guitar that I bought the Gibson. I was basically an art student at the time and not particularly happy about being in school. Everybody seeme
d to have an acoustic guitar that they played at parties. I used to say to myself, “I could do that.” I guess I took it a step further.
I don’t think my family realized at first how serious I was. My mother was more supportive than my dad, but when my dad saw that I was actually making a living at playing, he eventually came around. My first musical inspiration has always been the music of Robert Johnson. I love blues in general and country blues became a passion for me in 1957, when I picked up an album called The Country Blues, a compilation of ’30s masters like Leroy Carr, Scrapper Blackwell, Blind Boy Fuller, Blind Lemon Jefferson. And then Robert Johnson had one song on the album that galvanized me — it’s not like I wasn’t inspired by others but he was my main inspiration. The song was “Preaching Blues.” Other artists who inspired me are Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker and Little Walter Jacobs. They were truly motivating figures in my imagination.
I do not have my first guitar anymore. I went through about four other guitars before I got a 1947 Gibson country western model in 1967, once owned by Josh Graves of Flatt & Scruggs. And I played it for eighteen years until it became a little fragile.
What I love about a guitar is hard to explain in words. It’s just something that has to chime inside of me. The two guitars I travel with today are a Stubbs acoustic guitar that was made in England and a 1935 National Duolian. The Stubbs guitar was made in 1992 by Vinnie Smith from Kendal, England. It has koa wood back and sides with an ebony fingerboard and a cedar top. It has a beautiful balance with a deep bass and a very strong high end. The hardest thing for me about the guitar is that I’ve been robbed twice on the road of all my instruments. It’s why I’ve had so many guitars over the years, I think.