by Julia Crowe
I like to smell a guitar before I play it — I got this from my dad. I look at them, smell them and once you get past the factory, there is something really beautiful about equating this to when my dad bought shoes. He always smelled them first before he put them on. So it is a habit for me that I got from him, to connect with the guitar with all my all my senses, from sight to smell. I won’t lick it, or anything like that, but this sensory exploration is important because humans are connected to their senses. Intrinsically, it is important to really connect with the guitar. For example, like a spoon gives you honey but a spoon cannot taste the honey. I do not want to be a spoon. I want to taste the honey before you do. I think if you approach music from that perception, then it is five things: genuine, honest, sincere, real and true. And then people will claim you around the world as part of the family.
My treasured guitar right now is a new guitar made by Paul Reed Smith as a gift from my wife. The guitar is creamy-looking but sustains like a Stradivarius forever. The wood feels like it is made out of granite, although it is African wood, very dense and thick. The tone is different and the approach is different. My wife and I were just married December 19, 2010, and on the back of the guitar, it is engraved, “The first time ever, everything.” My wife is an incredible drummer in her own right, probably among the top three in the world. She’s a serious Bruce Lee type of drummer. She keeps time but not like a time-keeper. She’s like a hummingbird so I am very grateful that I married someone who, like Bruce Lee, is deeply invested in higher standards of excellence.
Jimmie Vaughan
Jimmie Vaughan, the older brother of the late Stevie Ray Vaughan, is a Grammy-winning blues guitarist and singer from Dallas. Vaughan is the founder of The Fabulous Thunderbirds.
When I was twelve years old, friends of my mom and dad had a son who was a musician, and he happened to be away on the buddy plan in the Navy. His parents and mine would get together on the weekends at their house to play dominoes, and I’d go into their son’s room and play with his drums and a guitar. That was the first time I picked up a guitar.
About a year later, I was playing football at school and broke my collarbone. I was a terrible athlete and didn’t understand sports. They told me I would be laid up at home for a month and I had a rolled up tube of a cloth bandage around my arm that was meant to hold my collarbone in place. One of the guys gave my dad a guitar to help me pass the time, saying, “Here’s something that won’t tackle him.” It was an Old Kraftsman flat top guitar with four strings on it — the E and the B strings were broken.
The first thing I learned to play on it was Bill Doggett’s “Honky Tonk,” and basically it hasn’t changed any because I’m still playing the same music. My brother Stevie was eight years old at the time, and he had a little guitar with cowboys on it and plastic strings. The Kraftsman flat top was one sold from the Spiegel’s catalog. I played it every single day and I am fifty-four years old now. Thanks to football, I found my career.
Jimmie Vaughan (left), age fourteen, in a band called the Swinging Pendulums, 1965. (Courtesy Jimmie Vaughan)
At one point I had tried to play drums and could play simple beats, but six months into getting that first guitar, my dad bought me a three-quarter-size Gibson with one pickup and no cutaways. It was like a 335 in thickness and had binding on the sides. He’d picked it up at a pawnshop for fifty bucks and we got an amp from a friend.
I started out playing a lot of Jimmy Reed and Bill Doggett’s “Honky Tonk,” hits from the ’50s and a lot of blues. I learned to play from what I heard off the radio in Dallas, and we had one black music station there as well. My uncle Joe also taught me some country-style playing. It was an exciting time to play because the English guys were also trying to play the blues.
My dad liked to play dominoes with some of his fellow workers and a couple of these guys also happened to be musicians. One of them had a Telecaster and another guy had a custom-made guitar that looked like one of the big, thick, jazz Gibson guitars with his name, Leonard, inlaid on the neck in ivory. Stevie and I used to watch these guys play in our living room for hours, and they taught us to play Chuck Berry, John Lee Hooker, Jimmy Reed and some country tunes.
As an artist-type kid, it was beautiful for me to look at. I loved drawing pictures and the guitar looked like a rocket ship or a ray gun with knobs on it. It came as such a wonderful surprise when I found out I could play it. The guitar is all I thought about. I also knew it was my ticket because if I got good enough at it, I could be a big guy and have a car, too. By the time I heard B.B. King and Eric Clapton, I knew that was it.
When I was fourteen, I had my first gig during the summer playing in a band six nights a week at The Hobnob Lounge from eight p.m. to midnight and eight p.m. to one a.m. on Saturdays. We had no PA system and had to sing through a mic plugged into the jukebox. The place was a real dive with a go-go dancer and, being in Texas before they had mixed drinks, it was a BYOB kind of place. The dads of our band members had to alternate taking us to the gig, and of course they protested, insisting they hated it — all the while the three dads would be gathered there at the same time to listen to us play songs from the Rolling Stones, The Kinks, “Boney Maroney” by Ritchie Valens and “Wine, Wine, Wine” by The Nightcaps, a band big in Texas at the time. We played mostly bluesy songs.
At one point, my dad said to me, “Son, you need to learn your majors and minors, so I’m thinking you should go to guitar school.” I was hesitant because I already felt like I knew how to play, but I agreed to take the bus into town in Oak Cliff to Boyd’s Guitar School, along a road lined with pawnshops that had guitars for sale.
My guitar teacher insisted I was going to have to learn to read notes. I would go home and play a few notes, but after those few, I could immediately tell what the melody was, like “Mary Had a Little Lamb” and I could easily sound out the rest from there. So I didn’t really bother with reading. I didn’t want to read because that was like studying and to me the guitar is about playing. By the third lesson, my teacher basically fired me. He said, “You’re far gone.” I thought he was complimenting me, that he’d meant something like, “You’re way out there and advanced beyond the pack.” I was happy to quit.
I used to stare in the windows of shops nearby and admire the guitars inside these beautiful wooden display cases with velvet holders sitting behind the clean glass. The cases looked like a gun rack but for guitars. I used to practically drool over the Stratocaster and Les Paul SGS with the double cutaways.
I left home at fifteen to be in a band and left a Telecaster behind for Stevie. I had a hard time forgiving him for cutting it up and putting pickups on it, but that’s what people did at the time. It was after I’d left that he became serious about the guitar and, in a couple of years, he started to play around Dallas.
What I love about the guitar is that it’s straight from the heart. I never dreamed I’d grow up to be in the Fender catalog or meet Les Paul. The guitar has been amazing. Without it, I’d probably still be in Oak Cliff.
Pat Metheny
Pat Metheny is known for reinventing the sound of jazz guitar, expanding its palette of sound with alternate tunings on a 12-string guitar and playing with digital signal processing and guitar synthesizers. He also plays an unforgettable 42-string Pikasso guitar made by Canadian luthier Linda Manzer.
My first serious guitar was an electric Gibson ES-140, which was an odd, weird guitar. I was about twelve and a half years old when I got it. Before that, I had a cheap little toy guitar that I don’t really count. I grew interested in playing the guitar as it became a cultural icon of the youth movement, starting with rock ’n’ roll and The Beatles. I was about ten years old at the time, had little knowledge and a transistor radio. That’s how I became interested.
The last thing my parents wanted me to do was become interested in the guitar. We were a trumpet-centric family. My dad played trumpet; my mom’s dad played trumpet professionally; and my brother, Mike, who is five years
older, was a trumpet prodigy. I started playing trumpet myself at age eight. To my parents, the guitar represented everything they thought shouldn’t be allowed into the home. This was like throwing gasoline on the fire — it made me want a guitar all that much more.
When I was about twelve, I made a deal with my parents that their Christmas gift to me would be their permission to buy a guitar, if I could work and earn enough money for the guitar. This was about August, so it gave me plenty of time to work like crazy and save up. I helped my mother with a garage sale and earned a percentage from that. A week before Christmas, I had $80 saved up. This was in 1967. My dad and I pored over the want ads in the Kansas City Star and found an ad for a $100 Gibson guitar, so we drove the twelve miles in from Lee’s Summit over to Raytown. I can remember this so vividly, like it happened just yesterday. The man who was selling this three-quarter-sized Gibson hollow-bodied ES-140 also had a solid-body Gibson Les Paul that would be worth a lot of money these days, but he wanted $150 for that one, which was out of our price range. But anyway, I was more interested in the hollow-bodied one. That was the guitar for me, that three-quarter-sized Gibson. My dad, being a car salesman, talked the guy down to a price of $80.
Now, there’s an asterisk to this story: six months later, I checked the guitar on a flight to Manitowoc, Wisconsin, to go visit my grandparents. The guitar was smashed. It was incredibly traumatic. Ozark Airlines reimbursed me — this is back when airlines still did that — and my dad and I checked the want ads again in the Kansas City Star. This time, I picked a full-sized Gibson ES-175 that I’ve played ever since. This has been my main guitar for over thirty-five years.
Lee’s Summit, where I grew up, was a basic Midwestern farm town in those days, although it has grown quite a bit since. There were really no guitar teachers, which was an advantage in the sense that I had to teach myself how to play by learning to listen. Since I had already rebelled against my family’s musical taste, I decided to push it one step further and rebel against my friends by becoming the world’s youngest and biggest jazz snob. I had nothing in common with the greasers and the jocks and the 4-H Club kids who lived in my town. Jazz was and is the ultimate rebellion because it requires that you draw from every source and really look inside. I was lucky to find that out at a young age.
At fourteen years old, I’d become good enough to start working with a few of the best players in Kansas City. I learned from them and from the experience of playing in real-life situations. The music I was listening to was Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins. I was listening to mainstream jazz music every waking minute of the day. Because of my trumpet background, with the guitar I felt like I could breathe instead of pick, in terms of phrasing. Music was the zone for me. I always loved musicians and wanted to know what they were doing and how it was done. It was incredibly exciting playing in actual gigs, and it’s where I learned the most about playing.
As far as jazz goes, the guitar is a bit problematic. There are two issues — one is with the dynamic range and the other is the actual nature of what the guitar is and isn’t. It’s a difficult nut to crack when it comes to being a fluent, expressive jazz tool. Yet the guitar offers an amazing versatility and variety of texture — from nylon-string players to the guy from some heavy metal band with his eighteen Marshall amps. Everyone will call both musicians “guitarists,” though their sound is completely different. The range of expression and what you can do with it is what makes the guitar always new and exciting.
About eight or nine years ago, I retired my Gibson ES-175, which I played nonstop from the time I got it in 1968 without ever having any work done on it. It was becoming too rickety to take out on the road, so I use it at home for practicing and playing or sometimes for recording. What I take out on the road now is a signature Ibanez Pat Metheny guitar, which is a model loosely based on my Gibson 175. A team of Japanese specialists had taken my Gibson for one afternoon with the idea of creating this new guitar, and the idea sounded good to me because I did not want to take the Gibson touring any longer. I’m not a materialistic person but I am emotionally attached to that one guitar.
Christian Frederick Martin IV
Christian Frederick Martin IV is the great-great-great grandson of luthier Christian Frederick Martin Sr., a German cabinetmaker who became the apprentice of guitar maker Johann Georg Stauffer of Vienna, Austria. Martin Sr. had immigrated to New York City in 1833 after a bitter legal dispute in which the Violin Makers Guild attempted to limit competition by seeking an injunction prohibiting cabinetmakers from making musical instruments. Martin Sr. opened a retail music store on 196 Hudson Street in Manhattan (now the entrance to the Holland Tunnel) before moving to Nazareth, Pennsylvania. There he established C.F. Martin & Company, where his great-great-great grandson serves as current CEO.
My parents were divorced so I grew up with my mother in New Jersey, away from the family business. I asked my father and grandfather for a guitar for Christmas when I was about eleven or twelve years old, and I received a nylon-string 5-18, which is a little Martin guitar, a model that goes back to the 1800s. What was great about this one is that it had a plate on the back of the headstock that read, “To Chris, from Dad and Poppy.” Poppy was my grandfather. I wanted a guitar because I had gone to summer camp and heard the counselor playing chords and singing songs, and I thought, “I could do that.”
My other grandfather was a doctor, and one of his patients was a guitar teacher named Mr. Conrad. Mr. Conrad taught out of his house in Lyndhurst, New Jersey, in a little studio in the basement. He did not know of my connection to Martin Guitars at the time. All I know is he opened up my guitar case, stared at the guitar, looked at me, stared at the guitar again and said, “That’s a Martin. I’ve never had a beginning student show up for their first lesson with a Martin guitar before. Your family must have a lot of faith in you.”
I said, “Oh no, my dad owns the company.” At that point, a little light must have gone off in Mr. Conrad’s head — he was going to turn me into the next Segovia. He pulled out a footstool, propped my left foot onto it, opened up Mel Bay study book number one and started me in on scales. Scales! He told me I was going to have to learn to read first.
I never connected with Mr. Conrad, sad to say. I wouldn’t practice all week until a half hour before my lesson, when I would then practice the scales. He was so polite and never said to me, “Look, this isn’t working out.” I was lazy and not inspired, though ultimately, I did learn to read and play scales very well. I went to summer camp and was unable to play the chords I had wanted to learn. When you’re sitting there at the campfire in the dark, you can kind of feel out chords, but you cannot really pull out a piece of sheet music and start playing.
My brother, Doug, on the other hand, borrowed a guitar of mine years later, holed himself up in his room for six months and came out having taught himself to play the guitar just by listening to the radio. Later on, I had a Martin electric guitar with a Fender amp and had learned to play some Beatles music very loudly. I can also bang away on the piano in what some might call strange, improvisational jazz.
I really got into making guitars by late in high school. Grandfather Martin influenced me with his dedication to both quality and commitment to his coworkers. He felt if he treated his craftsmen with a great deal of respect, they would be inspired to make the best guitar of its kind.
The first guitar I made was at summer camp. One of the things you could do at camp was woodworking. The counselor said to me, “Chris, I think you’ve moved beyond Popsicle sticks and are ready to further your art.” I’m not sure whether it was his idea or mine, but I decided to make a guitar. I called up my dad and said, “Send me a kit.”
He was baffled, telling me, “We don’t have kits.”
I said, “Well, just put some parts in a box and send them to me.” As luck would have it, the company was experimenting with a trapezoidal-shaped guitar so I received a box with a blueprint but no instructions. I was happy to have the part
s and said, “Let’s go!”
Christian Frederick Martin IV in his childhood with a Martin GT electric guitar. (Courtesy of C. Martin Archives)
What I learned much later was the sides are the first thing to be built on a guitar. Then the top and back are cut larger so you have some overhang to trim and fit. What I had done was cut the top and back first after some very careful measuring. And when I tried to fit the sides, it didn’t fit. I used lots of wood putty to fill in those gaps. In the end, I did win a prize because no one had ever attempted to make a guitar before. I still have this guitar and it doesn’t sound too bad. It has a mahogany body, and it’s a little hard to hold with its shape, as it tends to slide off the knee. There’s no upper or lower bout.
For Martin’s millionth guitar, we had Larry Robinson, an extraordinary inlay artist, help us develop a steel-string showpiece. We wanted to create a guitar that gave the feeling of Europe about two hundred years ago, and we wanted the guitar to tell a story based on European designs. Larry’s first blueprint came back with a crown on it and I said, “Wait a minute, our family is not descended from royalty.” We scrapped that idea. The inherent risk with this project was all the shipping back and forth. Larry would do some inlay, send it back to the plant and so on. With all this shipping, the millionth guitar was starting to live up to its name in cost. We had thought about pricing it at one million dollars, thinking it would be a neat idea to say Martin’s Millionth guitar goes for one million but I stopped to think about it — we’re not elitist. We just decided the best thing to say is this guitar is priceless. Which it is.