My First Guitar

by Julia Crowe

  Peter Frampton’s first electric guitar, a Hofner Club 60, bought in or around 1960. Peter would have been ten years old. (Courtesy Peter Frampton)

  It was during these lessons with Miss Graham — god, I still remember her name — in Bromley, South London, where I grew up, that I met another one of her students, Terry Nicholson, who would become the bass player for our band, The True Beats. We hit it off right away, sharing the same taste in music. He introduced me to Roy Orbison’s music and more. We also played some songs by The Shadows, like “Apache.”

  I met all these other people of like mind, a bunch of other musos — it was great to see how many other people were into music and we formed our first band, the True Beats, within a couple of weeks. We played a combination of surf music, like The Ventures and The Shadows, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly theme and everything Elvis. Then The Beatles hit and changed everything — they just ruined it for us, because now we had to sing! The True Beats did well enough to capture the attention of a few London agents who were interested in taking the band pro. My dad, a schoolteacher, didn’t see eye to eye with the other parents of the bandmates, who basically saw the opportunity as a leap to stardom. He said to me that I had to finish school. I was only twelve years old. (The rest of the band had been between the ages of fourteen and sixteen and they were nearly done with school.) I was not going to argue with my dad, so I dropped out of playing to finish school instead.

  There was a television program at the time called Ready Steady Go!, which had a Star Search–type format called Ready Steady Win!. The True Beats made it onto that program and won. I think they might have had an album, too. But they never broke out beyond that. (Did my dad have the right idea taking me out of the band, you ask? Come to think of it, if I’d stayed, they most likely would have had a hit!)

  What I love about the guitar — where to start? It’s an extension of my hands. Ever since my formative years through adolescence, I’ve seen the guitar as an escape. It kept me occupied. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I played guitar instead of dating, let’s say. I was uncomfortable around other people and, really, the guitar is what I knew best, so I was not going to let go of that. I enjoy playing and cannot imagine not playing. In fact, I play more now than I did at other times because I realize this enjoyment I get from playing. It’s a gut feeling, a pleasant twinge that comes from just picking up the guitar.

  Of course, when I was ten years old, I was obsessed with getting an electric guitar. I would do nothing but doodle pictures of them on my books during class. I was eating, sleeping and breathing the guitar. I have small hands, so I prefer a thinner guitar neck. I do not have the left hand stretch as easily as people with longer fingers do, so I’ve had to work on that. I’ve had to make changes and modifications. Django Reinhardt played with a supreme handicap — he had two usable fingers and his thumb. Apparently there’d been a fire in his caravan and he raced in to rescue his wife and child. His leg was burned the worst and his left hand was withered, with his little finger and ring finger paralyzed. What he did was shift and at least press down with these fingers. I listen to Reinhardt’s music every day. I’ll be taking my daughter to school and running around doing errands with Django Reinhardt playing on my iPod.

  My first show, as I recall, was when I was eight years old. It was at the end of the school year and I was a Cub Scout. I had already won my badge from passing the musical proficiency test by playing my guitar, and I was asked to be an accompanist at the local Ed Sullivan–type variety show that was mainly put on for our parents. I said yes and cut a deal with them to give me my own spot to play a couple numbers at the end of the first half of the program. I played my two numbers and they went very well, to say the least. So I stepped forward into the mic and said, “Seeing as you like me so much, I will play you another — one that I wrote myself.”

  Now, I cannot tell you the title of what I played, just that I wrote it and my mother helped me with the lyrics, which had something to do with falling water or a waterfall. The audience loved it — here was this precocious eight year old — meanwhile they were giving me the hook from the wings, jerking their thumbs and whispering sharply that I had to get me off. But it was a resounding success.

  My guitar story is sweet and sour. When I played with Humble Pie in ’69 in San Francisco, supporting The Grateful Dead, I was playing a Les Paul Gibson SG, a solid-body guitar. I had recently swapped it for a semi-hollow body Gibson but found out the hard way that semi-acoustics played at a high level give a lot of feedback, especially when turned up for a solo. Nothing came out of my guitar but a waaaaaah-waaaaaaah sound. Needless to say, it was very frustrating.

  After a show, a guy named Mark Mariana came up to me and said, “I love your playing, and I couldn’t help notice your little problem.”

  “Yes, thank you very much,” I said, muttering, “my little problem, indeed.”

  He told me, “I’ve got a Les Paul that I’ve been doing some work on. I’ve sent it back to Gibson and had a three-pickup custom put on there.” It was gorgeous, like something out of Smokey Robinson & the Miracles. He let me play it for a show, and it was like this guitar had been made for me. I met him for breakfast at a coffee shop the next morning. “I don’t want to seem crass after all the work you’ve put into this guitar,” I told him, “but would you be willing to sell it?”

  He looked me in the eye and said no. “I’m not selling the guitar, sorry. I am going to give it to you.”

  This is the guitar I used on Frampton Comes Alive! and on all my solo albums from ’69 through ’80. This guitar fit me like a glove — not O.J.’s glove! My only other guitar was a ’55 red Fender that I used on “Show Me the Way.”

  During the ’80s we did a tour of South America through Argentina and Brazil. In Caracas, Venezuela, we had a mini-riot during our visit, which was unpleasant. But then we had a day off before going to Panama. Because we had this day off, our instruments were placed on a cargo plane and the band flew separately. Prior to this, we had been traveling with everything together on one plane.

  The plane carrying my guitars and the entire stage crashed upon take-off, killing the pilot, the co-pilot and the loading guy. Needless to say, given the loss of these men’s lives, the loss of the guitars cannot be compared.

  I tried playing other Les Pauls, but they were not the same. It was not until I moved to Nashville during the ’90s that I started hanging out at Gibson and they asked if I would like to have a custom guitar built in my name. I thought they were kidding me! Mike McGuire over there is my hero because he helped build exactly the same guitar like the one I’d had. We worked together on this for a year. It’s not a cheap guitar because it comes from their custom division. Basically, I can fly to Paris or London, walk into a shop, pick up this guitar and it is the exact same guitar. We are currently working on a second, more affordable Peter Frampton model guitar, which is like a Les Paul Junior with different pickups from my original model.

  Frederic Hand

  Classical guitarist and composer Frederic Hand has performed the guitar music in the Academy Award–winning film Kramer vs. Kramer with Meryl Streep and Dustin Hoffman as well as the film This Boy’s Life, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro.

  When I was six years old, my mother took me to see Andrés Segovia perform at Town Hall in New York City. I was totally captivated by the experience, enough to announce immediately after the concert that when I grew up, I wanted to become a classical guitarist. I asked for a guitar for my birthday. Though my mother was pleased with my enthusiastic response, my request for a guitar was not taken seriously. My seventh birthday came and went … with no guitar.

  I asked again a year later and this time, I was offered a ukulele. My parents, being frugal, reasoned that a ukulele was less of an investment for an eight year old. I refused the ukulele and kept my sights on obtaining a guitar. Finally, as I approached my ninth birthday, three years after initially hearing Segovia, my parents gave in. My mother had
been singing in an amateur chorus whose conductor was studying classical guitar. He recommended a three-quarter-size guitar made by Tatay.

  Frederic Hand, age ten, sitting on a park bench in New York City. Says Hand, “Everyone who sees this photo thinks the man is my dad but he had just been some stranger sitting there, listening to me play.” (Courtesy Frederic Hand)

  On a bright September day in 1956, my mother and I took the subway from Brooklyn to the Spanish Music Center in Manhattan. The proprietor, a man named Gabriel Oler, picked out a guitar for me with a price tag of $90. I don’t know what $90 in 1956 would be worth today, but for my family, this was an expensive purchase for a nine-year-old. It was impressed upon me this was a real musical instrument, not a toy. As we were leaving the store, Mr. Oler looked me in the eye and said something extremely odd. Not knowing at all of my interest in baseball, he said, “Now don’t put a baseball bat through that guitar.” My mother and I laughed and headed back to Brooklyn.

  Two weeks later, I was playing one of my favorite games alone in my room. I lived and died by the exploits of the Brooklyn Dodgers and would create imaginary games between them and their hated rivals, the New York Yankees. There I was, as Mantle, stepping up to the plate with my baseball bat and a rolled-up sock for a baseball. Mickey was batting from the left side that day. I threw the rolled-up sock into the air and, lacking the control needed to be a real switch hitter, I swung and missed the sock completely. Instead, the bat swung straight through the side of the guitar, which was lying out on my bed, shattering the wood into dozens of little pieces.

  It’s forty-seven years later and I remember that moment vividly. For a few seconds, I was stunned silent. I couldn’t believe or accept what had just happened. I wanted to shout “do over” like my friends and I did when we played together. The truth was I was struck numb and didn’t know what to do. I screamed — I had just put a baseball bat through my guitar.

  My mom and I went back to the Spanish Music Center and then on to numerous shops along West 48th Street. No one could help us. They all said that my guitar, which had a gaping hole in its side, could not be fixed. I was completely despondent. After we exhausted every repair possibility, I showed the guitar to my fifteen-year-old cousin, Stevie Robin.

  Woodworking was to Stevie what music would eventually become to me. He was undaunted by the fact that every guitar repairman in New York had said the instrument was unfixable. He steamed and bent a piece of plywood to the missing piece on the side of the guitar. Then he glued dozens of little fragments of shattered wood back onto the plywood. This created an almost patchwork effect. The repair was completely successful and the guitar sounded as good as new, maybe better. And, I had the most unique-looking instrument, a curiosity to everyone who would encounter it.

  This guitar served me well for the next four years until I outgrew it. I still have it. Though I’ve owned many guitars since, this one remains the most special, mainly because of how my cousin Stevie had saved it … and me.

  Richard Bruné

  Guitar builder Richard Bruné is renowned for his guitar craftsmanship and restoration work on many valuable, historical instruments, including Marie Antoinette’s guitar, Agustín Barrios’ 1927 Simplicio guitar, Julian Bream’s lute (originally crafted by the late David Rubio) and Charlie Byrd’s guitar. One of Bruné’s Baroque guitars has been displayed at the Smithsonian Institute and he has also drafted the technical details of Andrés Segovia’s 1937 Hermann Hauser guitar, currently on display at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

  I was about thirteen or fourteen years old and I was playing the violin at the time I became interested in the guitar. I started playing violin in fourth grade but I grew up listening to flamenco because my dad had many recordings. I’d loved the sound of it. Other music I grew up listening to was various primas, or gypsy violin soloists, and Sándor Lakatos. Dayton, Ohio, was very heavy with Hungarian immigrants, and on Sundays, there was a Hungarian radio hour that was actually done by Sándor Lakatos, rebroadcast from Hungary. My dad did not go to church but he tuned in to this radio station and played these records, and that is why I had wanted to play this music more than anything, and this is why I first took up with the violin. For someone of that age, trying to master this kind of music, I’d realized, man, I was kind of out of my league here. The violin teachers in Dayton were into the Sevcik Violin Studies, and I thought it was going to be a very long time before I would be able to play any of that.

  My mom took me to a music store in Dayton, and the only thing they had that I could afford was a nylon-string Brazilian Giannini that was practically all plywood. It was very much a Spanish-style instrument and I was already starting to play flamenco. My influences were Sabicas, Niño Ricardo, Carlos Montoya, but particularly Sabicas was my influence for flamenco guitar.

  My family took my interest in music in stride. My dad died when I was fifteen so he was not around, but my mom was still trying to eke out a living, and I think she saw my interest in the phonograph and my father’s records as a way of keeping me out of trouble. When I looked around for a new guitar that was better than the Giannini that we’d paid $75 for, I realized we could not afford the kind of guitar I wanted. And this is what prompted the decision to try to make my own guitar. I was convinced that the knowledge I had of what a good guitar would be meant that I could create a better guitar than the one I had. A few friends owned Spanish-made instruments that were of course beyond my means but they’d let me study these guitars, and that is how I got started.

  I’d made my first guitar out of a dining room table that dated from the ’30s, when my parents had gotten married — and this dining room set had been retired to the basement long ago. My dad, before he died, had taken on the project of renovating our basement into what they called, back then, a “recreation room.” That’s what people did back in the ’50s. They turned their basements into recreation rooms where they’d have highball drinks with their neighbors. So the dining room table did not have a function within the context of the basement except keeping stuff off the floor whenever it flooded down there.

  When I mentioned to my mom that I wanted to make a guitar, she suggested that I use this dining room table because we knew it was aged wood. Back in those days, cheap furniture had been made out of real wood versus cheap furniture these days, which is made from wood byproducts. The table was made of American poplar, which is a rather bland, soft wood. Actually, it’s not too bad. It’s sort of like cypress in color and texture but if you hold up poplar sides and backs and give it the traditional tap test that luthiers like to do in order to test the tone of a wood, cypress has a nice tone, whereas poplar is flat without much of a tap tone. That wood from the dining room table was cheap and available and was therefore perfect for a seventeen-year-old kid who did not have much money or even tools. I finished making that guitar in the summer of ’66. It was better than my Giannini but still, it was not what I envisioned until I made my second guitar with better tools and materials.

  Made from his parents’ dining room table, the first guitar ever made by Richard Bruné. (Courtesy Richard Bruné)

  I love the guitar because it speaks to me and I can express my emotions with it and that, in a nutshell, is what it’s about. It was unusual for me to have this interest in flamenco early on, especially for not being someone born into that culture — but it was the style of music I started playing rather than rock. I faced challenges in terms of absorbing the fundamentals of this art form for this reason — the techniques of flamenco, which incorporate classical guitar on top of techniques like the rasgueados, thumbwork and tapping that are indigenous to playing flamenco. All of this I had to figure out on my own without having a live person in front of me whom I could learn from. I was self-taught, by ear, from listening to vinyl LP records.

  We did not have a TV in our room — we had a Magnavox record player. On one side, it was a monster cabinet with a turntable and the speakers were underneath and on the other side, you stacked yo
ur records. Whenever I had some money, I’d go to the record store and search for flamenco records that I did not own, and then I would visit the library in search of more. I lobbied to get a reel-to-reel tape recorder that allowed me to copy these borrowed records from the library. That had been a real revelation because I could then play these recordings back at nearly half their original speed.

  My first paid performance had been at a coffeehouse called The Lemon Tree in Dayton, Ohio, right next door to the arts theater and movie house, which showed what we called “art films” for the eighteen-and-older crowd. Some films had the pretension of being European art films and others were just flat-out jiggle films but, at any rate, the coffeehouse was located right next door and served as the hangout for the local intelligentsia, which was comprised of what was left over from the beatnik crowd with the burgeoning hippie crowd intermixed. Being underage, I went in there and performed solo and, much to my amazement, actually made money from doing this. Later I was asked to appear on a local TV show called Rising Generation, and, immediately afterward, I was hired to play on an advertisement and do a voiceover in Spanish for Vic Cassano’s, which was a big chain in Dayton. I wondered why she wanted me to speak in Spanish for an Italian pizzeria, but I thought, “Hey, it’s paying.” I think the lady who had hired me felt that Spanish and Italian were the same. That was the era we grew up in. I did this whole spiel of playing the guitar and then saying, “El pizzeria de Cassano es el mejor in el mundo!” in my seventeen-year-old voice, of course. Somewhere out there in the world there is a tape of that floating around, and thank god it has not shown up on YouTube!