My First Guitar

by Julia Crowe

  I was studying their character. I was studying the person and seeing how they survived and how they made a living doing this. I was envious, as a child, of the adult. The last teacher I had studied with, as a teenager, was Dennis Sandole, and my observation of him had been even more intense because I was interested in why he had a Van Gogh on the wall. I was interested in why there was a piano in the studio and why the guitar was there up against the wall in a corner, covered with dust. I was interested in why he always wore a black suit and a black tie with a white shirt. I was interested in why he always wanted his payment to be placed in a glass on top of the piano and why he never wanted to touch it. I was interested in things like that. As far as what he’d instructed me, I couldn’t read it, primarily because his handwriting was similar to a doctor’s.

  The initial joys I felt about playing my guitar as a child is something every child feels. It is the reason children feel happy: it’s playfulness. I had always been interrupted by one adult or another saying, “Stop playing and do your homework.” This happens for every child as preparation and training for the system that is in play within our culture. The enjoyment came from the same reason I was happy playing — that I was interrupted. Once I went to New York at the age of fifteen, I came back to playing as I had been as a child — with no interruptions. That’s why I left school.

  Every time you play, there is always a problem. Even today we had a problem. There is always a problem with sound checks. It is something that is separate from the ecstasy of collective rapport. In fact, there is an elusive expectation, and every time, expectation will lead to disappointment. So that is a challenge in itself. It is an ongoing challenge that never ends. It reveals the polarity of reality itself — to prepare for something that is not, in total, communication as it would be, prior to itself taking place. As you saw for yourself today, we just completed the sound check one more time. It’s done every time. So you get a general idea of what you would like it to be, with the hope that when all of the people come to hear you play, then that will get close to what you’d really love it to be. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. But I think it is due to expectation. I think all challenges and all of the impacts of everything that takes place, takes place similarly to that. Even when I had my operation — there were many things that took place. It is very difficult to pinpoint any one of them, especially now because that was the past and I really don’t think too much about the past. The only thing I really find interesting is the present. Now. The moment.

  Bob Margolin

  “Steady Rollin’” Bob Margolin served as a backing musician for Muddy Waters from 1973 to 1980. He has also performed with Pinetop Perkins and is a columnist for Blues Revue magazine.

  My younger sister started taking guitar lessons and my folks bought a $30 Stella guitar from her teacher in 1964. I picked it up and said, “I can play this,” and I started taking lessons too. Not for long, though — they weren’t teaching what I wanted to play. I was fifteen years old at the time.

  From 1957 on, I listened to the radio and the wide variety of pop songs of it offered. It was Chuck Berry’s guitar playing that really made me want to pick up the guitar. I also appreciated The Beatles and then the guitar heroes — first Mike Bloomfield, then Eric Clapton and then Jimi Hendrix. A few years later, I started listening to the blues intensely.

  Muddy and Jimmy Rogers were my main inspirations but I’ve also been strongly influenced by Robert Lockwood Jr., Hubert Sumlin, Magic Sam and Luther Tucker. For slide guitar — Tampa Red, Robert Nighthawk and Earl Hooker. Past Chicago Blues players: T-Bone, B.B., Freddie and Albert King, Albert Collins. Among modern guitarists, who inspire me, I would have to name Jimmie Vaughan, Ronnie Earl, John Mooney, Derek Trucks and Junior Watson. For acoustic guitar: Robert Johnson and Lonnie Johnson. For rock: I still love Chuck Berry and Scotty Moore and Carl Perkins. As you can see, blues on a guitar is what moves me.

  My family was very supportive. I imagine some guitarists have families that discourage them, and that’s very sad but understandable, as it’s not a pursuit that brings in a lot of money, except to a few at the top.

  Bob Margolin, age sixteen. (Courtesy Bob Margolin)

  Guitar playing and the music itself are sensually exciting. Having a gig go well feels great. I’ve also found that having a tone on the guitar and/or amp that feels right inspires better playing. If I have any challenge with the guitar, it’s in making the best music I can. I have to play my best possible each time. When I was in Muddy’s band, there was a time near the beginning when he let me know with looks from the bandstand when my playing was not pleasing him. I tried to get him to show me what he wanted and one night after a performance, I followed him back into his room with my guitar and asked him to play it for me. He wouldn’t do it on the guitar, but he tried to describe it and sing it at me while I fumbled around on my guitar. In sympathy, he told me that trying to play it right would “hurt like being in love.” Most guitarists will understand that.

  I’ve played in bands since I was in high school. Toward the end of my college years, I was in a band that was starting to work often and I found that my gigs were conflicting with my school. The bass player in the band, who was a year older but a lot wiser, advised me that if there wasn’t time to do both well I should at least choose a deliberate priority. For me, that priority was music, and from that point on I judged every course of action by whether it would lead me to have a good time on the bandstand. This attitude didn’t come from a gig or a performance directly but from trying to understand myself. It was an easy choice because those gigs gave me so much pleasure that I knew I wanted to pursue playing more.

  My guitar story is about a lost love: the first really bluesy guitar I had was a ’50s Les Paul Special that I bought used in 1968. A friend refinished it beautifully. I loved the sound of that guitar, even though it was so heavy that in ’71, when I was playing six sets a night in bars, it was making my left shoulder lower than my right. One night, someone broke into my apartment and stole it. I still dream about that guitar.

  Richard Thompson

  Born in Notting Hill, London, Richard Thompson is a well-known British songwriter, highly regarded for his acoustic and electric guitar-playing techniques. He was named for his service to music on Queen Elizabeth’s 2011 New Year Honours List as an Officer of the Order of the British Empire.

  My father was a policeman in the Metropolitan Police Force in London. He worked in the West End where all the music shops are located, along Charing Cross Road and Denmark Road. For the last fifty years this area has been full of music shops. One of my dad’s old army buddies was the manager of a shop called Lew Davies, and he gave my father a nylon-string Spanish guitar to bring home since it had been part of inventory broken in transit to the shop. It was a pretty basic, nasty cheap model. My father was a fairly good carpenter so he repaired it with the idea that he was going to play it. Yet he did not really get around to playing it. My older sister was going to play it but she did not really get around to it, either.

  The guitar was just sitting there so I had a go because I really liked guitars and I loved the idea of rock ’n’ roll. The guitar for me was a seductive thing, so I started to play it. I then started to play together with my friend, and together we had formed a little band of two guitars, bass and drums when I was twelve years old. I’d been asking for a guitar since I was about five years old but instead, I’d received all sorts of toy versions, like really bad plastic ukuleles. My parents did not believe I was serious about the guitar.

  Richard Thompson (right), with his bandmate Malcolm Fuller and Richard’s sister Perri playing his second guitar. (Courtesy Richard Thompson)

  Even though my father was a bad amateur guitar player, he’d been playing dance music and jazz since the 1930s and he had great records, including recordings of Les Paul and Django Reinhardt. So on the one hand, I grew up listening to his music and on the other, the stuff that grabbed me was my sister’s records. She was bu
ying rock ’n’ roll records. I’d thought that was the coolest stuff, to hear Scotty Moore playing on Elvis Presley records, Buddy Holly, Duane Eddy, Cliff Gallup playing with Gene Vincent and Hank Marvin and the Shadows. Hank got such a great sound out of a Fender.

  This is the stuff we wanted to play as kids — this was my dream at age twelve. My parents had liked it at first that I played the guitar, and I did have classical guitar lessons for a year. These lessons were great because they shoved me up a lot of new avenues and gave me a lot of possibilities. When I was playing guitar a bit more loudly at sixteen, my parents were not so keen on that. I think this was really frustrating for my father, who loved music and loved the guitar — but he did not like The Who. I think it took my parents a while to resign themselves to the fact that I was a musician.

  I think any instrument is a voice, not unrelated to the human voice. You try to find a tone and a sound that expresses the voice you want. It becomes a joyous process to be able to make these sounds and play these notes and summon up these emotions, seemingly out of the ether. Music is such a strange, elusive thing. It’s not like architecture. You can easily see the steps that go into building a skyscraper, such as starting with pouring a cement foundation — but, with music, the construction process is a bit slipperier and trickier.

  For me the more challenging aspects of playing were with the acoustic guitar as opposed to the electric. I had not played onstage solo when I started playing at folk clubs in the early ’70s. I had to find a way of being more orchestral on the acoustic guitar, and this is where my classical training became very useful. I used alternate tunings to make the guitar sound bigger. I obtained a new classical guitar of a German make with a mahogany top after that first guitar, as my parents took pity on me for struggling with that first Spanish guitar. I had this German guitar until I was eighteen years old, when I obtained a proper acoustic steel-string, made by the English maker John Bailey, who was well known in the mid-1960s. He had made guitars for The Incredible String Band and Jimmy Page.

  I was thirteen years old when I had my first performance and we were opening for another band at St. Aloysius High school, a Catholic high school in London. We were really bad — the audience threw things at us. In fact, it had been so traumatic that I’ve blocked out what it was we had played past “Twist and Shout.”

  I was walking along Charing Cross Road past a music shop when I was nineteen years old. I saw a Gibson 120T in the window, a thin hollow-body guitar with f-holes and a big plastic scratch plate. I’d thought this would be fantastic to have, as I was into playing slide guitar. I paid about £75 for it, which was a small fortune at the time. I took it home with me and started using it to play gigs.

  When we were driving home from a gig one evening, the back doors of the van opened unexpectedly. And of all the instruments to fall out, my guitar went out the back. The driver immediately realized something had happened so he stopped the van and hopped out to retrieve it. But it was already gone. Another car had come down the road and someone had grabbed the instrument before they took off. This guitar was insured so I bought another Gibson 120T from the same shop and paid another £75 for it. Almost immediately, this guitar was stolen from my dressing room. I realized I was cursed and doomed. I was not going to bother to get another guitar of that same make ever again. Had I gone through this three times in a row, I might have had to go into therapy.

  Steve Howe

  British guitarist Steve Howe is known for his guitar playing with English progressive rock group Yes. Gibson guitars produced a Steve Howe Signature ES-175 guitar in his honor in 2002.

  At Christmas 1959, I was given my first guitar. My pestering of my parents had started two years earlier, and finally they gave in as they began to believe that I really was going to take it seriously. A week before Christmas my Dad had taken me to King’s Cross, an area of North London that was fifteen minutes from our home in Holloway. “Freemans” was the name of the shop, I recall. There were many different styles of guitars on display. A Spanish guitar did not fit the bill, nor did a flat top folk guitar. An electric guitar was unthinkable, mostly due to the anticipated amplifier and the noise levels. I chose an archtop acoustic guitar, which seemed to catch my eye. It was from Germany but not made by Framus. I do not remember a maker’s name, only that it was brown with plain cream plastic tuners and it had f-holes.

  Although rock ’n’ roll was certainly one reason I desired a guitar, I had imagined that one of the steps I would need to take was to become a dance band guitarist! I had spotted these “slaves to the rhythm” and enjoyed the syncopated strumming they had to maintain along with the occasional guitar breaks they were given. I liked the concept in these bands where there was only one guitar, one bass, a drummer and then the rest of the musicians. The real action seemed to come from this tight unit called the rhythm section. I’d been listening to rock guitar for two years before that, as well as musicians like Les Paul, brass bands and war music. But rock ’n’ roll seemed to reach out to me. I got more into The Shadows, particularly the instrumental aspect. I was learning from listening to Hank Marvin and Duane Eddy. I was entirely eartrained, never forced to take a lesson but thought I’d like a lesson if I could.

  The only book that helped me learn about music was the Eric Kershaw dance band chord book. I studied it long and hard, but I never could get along with method tutor books. Method books always said, “You are now ready for the next page,” but I wasn’t! At the time, no teachers seemed to be around so I drew what I could from the players around in Holloway, yet the mystery of the fingerboard layout and the potential of what one might do with more knowledge, appeared to be beyond reach.

  So I set about learning as many of the chords as I could remember the names of like C Major 7 + 5, changing to F diminished flat 9. This was an education I welcomed, unlike school. There were usually three inversions for each chord as the shape got higher up the fingerboard. My first guitar sounded at home doing this sort of music study, and this method of study was to influence my style throughout my career.

  As far as my family goes, I suppose at first my playing was irritating or a strange misconception, as I would play along with records. My brother had played clarinet but gave it up, mainly because our family was living in a small flat in London and my brother and I shared the same bedroom. By the time I was nineteen, they got used to me being there and practicing “Tea for Two” until gradually, something started to gel.

  I remember getting a Chet Atkins record, sitting at home with the guys and remarking, “This can’t be one guitarist!” There was no overdubbing. We were in awe. Same with Scotty Moore, who played with Elvis Presley. I was sixteen years old when I first saw Albert Lee play. He used to play at the Ronnie Scott Jazz Club, and I’d seen Wes Montgomery playing there with a smile on his face. Later I met Chet Atkins, Segovia and Steve Morrison was friendly, too. All these people get around the guitar in different ways.

  I often refer to acoustic guitars as the starting point that I will return to, as I write, arrange, practice and prepare music on one still. I kept my first guitar until it got lost around 1968 after it had suffered the indignity of having pickups crudely screwed to it and being decorated with colorful images of “flower power” during 1967! It just disappeared as I began collecting other guitars. Now I use a Gibson L-4C as my archtop acoustic guitar.

  Like any “first” in your life, you never forget it. In my mind’s eye, I can still visualize that first guitar, even though it was quite inferior and unyielding. Perhaps the same term used for our first car, an NSU RO 80, might apply to that guitar — it was just a “Beautiful Lemon.”

  Peter Frampton

  From Beckenham, England, Peter Frampton was eighteen years old when he joined the band Humble Pie. His fifth solo album, 1976’s Frampton Comes Alive!, which features his famed talk box guitar effect, has turned platinum six times, making it one of the top-selling live records in history. His instrumental album Fingerprints won a 2006 Grammy Award fo
r Best Pop Instrumental Album.

  I was eight years old when I got my first guitar but, before that, I played my grandmother’s banjolele, which was a small, ukulele-sized version of the banjo with four strings on it. Christmas 1957 is when Santa brought me a guitar. It was a cheap 6-string, steel-stringed guitar that my father bought from a local music store. (Yes, I was onto Santa Claus by then.)

  The first people who inspired me were ones I saw on TV, Americans like Buddy Holly and Eddie Cochran. I was into the guitarist/singers and not interested in the singers who just stood there at the mic. I liked lead guitarists, like Hank Marvin, who was the lead in The Shadows. They were The Beatles before The Beatles came along.

  I learned to play mostly by ear until I was about eleven or twelve years old. That’s about the time my family noticed I was becoming obsessed with the guitar and they figured, “You might as well do it right, then, with some lessons. I had classical guitar lessons for four years, which I did not like, if only because it took time away from my learning rock solos. At the time, classical guitar seemed a bit pedantic and uninteresting and I was not paying much attention, though I wish now that I had, because it did help me broaden my knowledge of the guitar — and I still use classical techniques today. The pieces I learned in classical guitar had Italian-named composers, which I forget, but I could still play them for you.