My First Guitar

by Julia Crowe

  You would think my family would have reacted in some way toward my obsession with the guitar because my mother’s father was a musician, so she knew the pitfalls of the industry. He played saxophone with John Philip Sousa’s band then went on to form his own dance band. He was living very high during the Depression, but when the musicians’ union went on strike, right about the time cylinder records came out, the djs realized they did not have to hire live bands anymore. They could just spin the cylinders. In one fell swoop, all the bands were fired and my grandfather lost all of his work and was never able to recover from that. Pretty soon after cylinder records came 78 records. What I gleaned from this is, the music industry changes very quickly. I think both my parents knew that if their children have a passion for something, to encourage it.

  At first I didn’t know why I loved playing the guitar. It had something to do with just picking it up and saying, “Ahhh, this feels right!” I think a lot of it has to do with the vibrations of the instrument and why music has such a connection to the spirit. The cells of our body are vibrating, and they are responding to vibrations around us. So when we play music, we are not only listening with our ears but with every cell in our body. Even within the cells, every part of the way life is arranged reacts not only with vibration but, oftentimes, in harmonic sequence. The body has the same properties as music, and so even down to the elementary particles, it’s all vibration. So we are touching upon something very deep and essential to life in making music. We are using the same properties that god uses in creating life and matter.

  Just before I entered junior high school, I had a dream that I was carrying my guitar to school for some reason. As I walked, the guitar became heavier and heavier with each step until finally, I just set the guitar down, sat on top of it and rode it to school. It lifted a couple inches off the ground and took off. I was having so much fun that when the schoolbell rang, I didn’t get off. I just kept riding around on the playground with my guitar. So when I woke up from that dream, I realized the guitar was my vehicle.

  Muriel Anderson (on the right) giving her big sister Marguerite a guitar lesson on how to play the Rumba strum on “Sloop John B.” (Courtesy Muriel Anderson)

  I have been playing a Paul McGill guitar for quite some time and finally, Paul said, “You’ve been playing this old guitar for so long, it’s about time for you to get a new guitar because I am a much better builder than I was when you got that first one.” He showed me some beautiful wood for the back and sides and started working on it. After a while, I realized it really was not a good time for me to be buying a new guitar, that I should hold off and wait maybe a year or so. I told him this. He finished up the guitar to sell to a dealer in New York instead.

  Well, I happened to be in New York the day this guitar shipped in to sell. I stopped by my friend Nato Lima’s house and found Paul McGill and a friend of his, a prospective client, visiting there also with this guitar. I got the chance to play it and just fell in love with it. It was beautiful. I played it for a couple hours and then he left to bring the guitar to the dealer. His friend, Greg, decided to buy the guitar with the stipulation that I would play it in for a few years. Greg is now loaning it to me long-term. He told me to take it on tour and said, “It’s okay if it gets a few road bumps on it, that’s normal.” So I have been playing this guitar and enjoying it. It’s amazing, this is the wood I had seen that was meant to be my guitar, and here I am, playing it.

  Tommy Emmanuel

  Australian fingerstyle guitarist Tommy Emmanuel’s career has spanned five decades. He received his first Grammy nomination for his recording with Chet Atkins, The Day the Finger Pickers Took Over the World. Emmanuel is best known for his complex fingerpicking style, percussive effects on the guitar and his blazingly energetic performances.

  If you look at the photograph, you’ll see my first guitar was a full-sized, Australian-made Maton with 1950s writing on the headstock. My father bought it for me, and my mother put the guitar in my hands when I was five years old. She could play a bit so she really got me started to playing it, too. I remember being in kindergarten and as soon as I heard that bell ring, I remember jumping the fence and crossing the road to run home and pick up my guitar. I couldn’t wait to get home from school — our whole family was obsessed with the guitar.

  This Maton had a little amp that came with it and my mother would join me, playing a Hawaiian steel guitar. She helped teach me chords and tap out the time with my foot. My older brother, Phil, had the same guitar. Except mine had a sunburst on it and his was a blond maple top. We formed a little band and he played lead while I played rhythm. Accompaniment is in my blood. I used this guitar professionally throughout the ’60s until I got a steel solid-body guitar later on in ’68. But this is the guitar I used for our family band, called the Emmanuel Quartet, consisting of my brothers Chris and Phil on guitar, my sister on the Hawaiian lap steel and myself on drums. We changed our name in 1963 because everyone thought that with “quartet” in our name, we were classical.

  Tommy Emmanuel, age five. (Courtesy Tommy Emmanuel)

  Because I loved to play “Wipe Out” by The Surfaris, we called ourselves The Midget Safaries before deciding on The Trailblazers. I had that bass part covered. Our first gig was a local TV program where we each got paid a bag of chips and a Coke for playing “Apache.” My father passed away in 1966, and I started teaching guitar at age twelve to help the family make ends meet. Winning a TV show talent contest gave us our first chance to produce an EP. I was a teenager when I left home and moved to Sydney to pursue a professional career as a guitarist, and I played clubs all over the city, which lead to my becoming a session player for Stevie Wonder and playing with John Denver, Ziggy Marley and Tina Turner.

  When it comes to musical influences, my earliest memory is of hearing Marty Robbins singing “El Paso” and the guitar sounding so beautiful. Grady Martin was another hero. I’d wear the grooves out of my records from playing them over and over, trying to learn from them. To this day, I don’t read notes. I am ear trained and I learned out of sheer determination. I didn’t hear of Chet Atkins until I was seven and his music made such an impact on me. I’d listen closely, trying to figure out that scratch he had, but I think I figured it out by the way I set up the pickups.

  As far as challenges go, I get challenged all the time to improve. I remember being sixteen and so hungry for knowledge. I listened to George Benson and Chet Atkins and wanted to break through the barrier to know what they knew. I wanted it so badly that I could barely sleep. All I did was listen and play. Then I had a breakthrough. Things I never thought I could do, I was doing. A light had come on. What I realized is, if I really tried hard and galvanized myself out of sheer determination and digging for that sound, I could reach it.

  My love for the guitar is about making music first. It requires a lot of work but because of the time I am willing to put into it, it seems like it comes easy and the real joy is with sharing music. Think of how good it feels to make someone else feel great and to see them get lost in the music, too. We’d have no enemy in the world if we were all musicians. I have the greatest job and I think the guitar is a very expressive instrument. It speaks from the soul. When I’m teaching, I tell people, you cannot separate your soul’s personality from the kind of music you play or listen to — it’s all intertwined. You listen to B.B. King, Eric Clapton or George Benson and you’ll hear they’ve all got their own voice. And I can say I’ve got my place here, too.

  Ever hear that phrase, “This is Frank Sinatra’s world and you’re just living in it”? With music, I’ve got my place, so when I sit down to play, I like to pull my audience in close and say I’m not going to let you go till I’m finished with you. You’re going to come take a trip with me. The best is getting a new audience that doesn’t know what to expect and then finding that my playing disarms and releases them.

  My guitar story: last year I was playing in the Netherlands — in Amsterdam — to a huge crowd. And at th
e end of the night, my favorite small guitar, again, a Maton, was stolen. What got me is how upset other people became over this news, weeping. They’d become attached to that guitar, too. Just as one realizes a shattered glass can’t be glued back together, I had to accept the guitar was gone. I had to move on. I filed a report at the police station and they told me I had a snowball’s chance in hell of getting it back because Amsterdam is the kind of town a lot of people pass through. The next day I tried combing through the city to look for pawnshops but I discovered that pawnshops are not really a part of their culture. I was completely lost.

  I had a luncheon that I couldn’t get out of, so I went to the restaurant, which was a beautiful place. The waiter came over and said to me, “Mr. Emmanuel? You have a phone call.” It was my friend Dim, telling me they’d found my guitar. I was given an address to an Irish pub and the name of a woman, Linda. I couldn’t believe it. I had tears in my eyes and we just bolted into town. This place was in the Red Light District and my heart was beating hard when we stepped into that pub. Linda was this Irish lady and she handed me my guitar in its zip bag. The guitar hadn’t even been touched.

  What had happened was Linda had gone to my concert the night before and then had a party at her apartment where a lot of people showed up, played and then promptly fell asleep on her floor. She was on her way into work when she spotted the guitar standing upright in a corner, and she thought it looked a little too nice to belong to anyone there. So she opened one of the pockets and found my name on the business card along with my U.K. agent. She was in shock. Someone must have picked up the guitar from backstage. My U.K. agent called my manager, Gina, who was on her way to Sydney, and all these calls finally bounced their way to me at that restaurant.

  That guitar is now in lockup in Germany. I’ve named it “The Mouse that Roars,” because it’s a little guitar, a BG808 Maton, and I’ve played it for audiences of over 100,000. The Maton Company has since built me a replica. Wherever I go, I keep a few guitars. I have some stashed in England and Melbourne. I have favorites stored in different places as backup and for recording.

  Martin Taylor

  British jazz guitarist and composer Martin Taylor is a self-taught musician who has won numerous awards for his contributions to jazz music. He has collaborated with Stéphane Grappelli, Jeff Beck, Chet Atkins, Bill Wyman, George Harrison, Dionne Warwick and Jamie Cullum, and his solo album Artistry was produced by Steve Howe. He received an honorary doctorate in music from the Royal Scottish Academy of Music & Drama and was appointed Member of the British Empire “For Services to Jazz Music” in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List in 2002.

  I received my first guitar when I was five years old — I’d been given a red little ukulele first with a palm tree painted on it, when I was four years old. The three-quarter-size guitar my dad bought for me had originally been made in Russia. He bought it from a market in the east end of London, and it was like a classical guitar but it had steel-strings and the action had been very high. I couldn’t stop playing it — I was obsessed by it to the point where it made my fingers bleed. It was bad to have this bad guitar but, the fact that it did not put me off meant that I was dedicated to it. If I’d had a good guitar, who knows? I think I still would have become a guitar player.

  My dad did not start playing music until he was thirty years old, and he had sent away for a catalog guitar, a Höfner President. I can remember it arriving. As soon as I saw it inside its open case, I thought it was the most magical thing I’d ever seen. The case had a red velvet lining and the guitar, for being new, was fragrant. I used to play it when my dad was at work. My mum let me play it, though I never told him this. Then finally, my mum asked my dad if he would get me a guitar, and that was really the start of it.

  I did not really have any great ambitions with playing the guitar. I played it for fun, as a hobby. My dad had a band, and the guitar player did not show up one day. I think I was about eleven years old at the time. My dad came back from the gig and told me to put on a jacket and bowtie and accompany him. I had played one gig before this, my first real gig, when I was about eight years old. It had been inside a music store shop window, playing jazz. I basically replaced the guitar player in my dad’s band that day and was in the band officially from that point forward for a couple of years. When I was fourteen, I realized playing is what I wanted to do professionally, so I left school at age fifteen. I’ve been on the road ever since.

  My dad knew this is what I wanted to do for a living, so he was very supportive. I don’t think my mother was as enthusiastic, particularly because I left home when I was sixteen and was touring all over England and playing on cruise ships. I think she thought I was a bit young to be doing this, especially in the bad company of musicians who drank and smoked cigarettes. The musicians I worked with were encouraging because they were all in their thirties and forties and older but they could see there was something in what I was doing, and they liked my playing. I was very lucky to have their encouragement.

  I find that the guitar allows me to express myself. I can express myself far better through music than through words, as most musicians probably do — it is one aspect of music that attracts us. I also love to perform for people. I’ve never been great about sitting in a room, just practicing. I like to get out and play, and I love to play in bands.

  There have been many times when I’ve wondered about playing. When I first started playing, I’d found myself in jobs that I did not enjoy doing. I always made a point of getting out of that because when I started playing the guitar, it was because I enjoyed it. I found myself in a few jobs where I was only doing it to pay the rent, and I thought this is not good — I’d be better off getting a job and then just playing for fun. People seem to enjoy my music and I enjoy playing it, so it seems to be my destiny, really. That’s what I have to do, so I make the point of enjoying myself.

  I started playing when I was so young that I can’t really remember learning to play it. Probably, playing the guitar is the only thing in my life that has actually come easily to me. I suppose I did work hard at learning to play the guitar, but it never felt like work.

  There was an Irish singer on TV in the ’60s called Val Doonican, and he was comparable to Perry Como or Bing Crosby. He had a real cozy kind of sound and used to sit in a rocking chair, wearing a sweater. His television show gave the impression of extending an invitation into his comfy house. Chet Atkins used to appear as a guest on his show and I appeared on there many years later. I used to look at this guitar on the cover of a Val Doonican album that my parents had bought for me, a beautiful Clifford Essex guitar, made in England. Because I had this terrible first guitar that made my fingers bleed, I used to ask my mum and dad, “Why can’t I have a guitar like that?” They said, “Well, we cannot afford a guitar like that.” I used to sit and stare at this album cover, just wishing I had a guitar like that. When Christmas arrived, and my mum said, “We’ve got a present for you,” I thought it would be this guitar. But she had knit me a sweater exactly like the one Val was wearing on the album cover. She thought the sweater was what I’d been staring at.

  I came to know Val many years later and, when I told him this story, he did not know whether to laugh or cry. A couple weeks later I was playing a concert and his daughter came backstage and told me, “My dad couldn’t come this evening because he’s got a cold, but he sent this in his place.” And she gave me the guitar that was on that album cover.

  Dave Alvin

  Grammy-winning guitarist and songwriter Dave Alvin is renowned for forming the ’80s American roots rock band The Blasters with his older brother Phil, and then joining Exene Cervenka of X as lead guitarist. I was supposed to phone Dave for an interview an hour after speaking to Dick Dale, but that interview had stretched unexpectedly into the three-hour mark. When I apologized for the delay, Dave assuaged my anxiety, telling me that, of all coincidences, he grew up hearing Dale’s surf guitar music outside his bedroom window and, later on in life, he
had the opportunity to meet Dale backstage at a gig. Dave noted, “He is a loquacious fellow.”

  My first guitar was a 1964 Fender Mustang. I was twenty-two when James Harman, the great blues harmonica player, bought it for me at a pawnshop in Santa Ana, California. He paid seventy-five bucks and I still owe him the money. My Mustang had a slightly longer neck than usual for a Mustang, and someone had taken out the Fender pickups and replaced them with Schecters. It was a bit of a mongrel guitar. There were always guitars lying around our family house: a cheap but loud 12-string, my brother Phil’s 1941 Epiphone and Gary Massey’s old Silvertone, but the Mustang was the first guitar that I could call my own.

  You see, I never thought I could be a guitar player because when I was a kid my neighborhood had a lot of great guitar players who should have gone on to fame and fortune but never did. Guys like Mike Roach, Tom deMott and Gary Massey. They were a few years older than me, and I was extremely intimidated by them and never thought I could be as good as them. I still don’t. Anyway, in order to get to hang out jam sessions, I figured I had to play something other than guitar, so I got pretty good on the flute and reasonably bad on the tenor sax but all the while I’d watch the guitarist’s fingers and then, when no one was around, I’d grab a guitar and try to play like them. My brother, Phil, taught himself to play in the fingerpicking styles of Blind Blake and Blind Boy, Fuller and I’d do the same routine with him: watch him play and then as soon as he’d leave the room, I’d grab the guitar and try to figure out what he’d been doing. It really wasn’t until years later when we started The Blasters, and I had my Mustang, that my brother and I even played guitar together, that’s how intimidated I was.