by Julia Crowe
When I was real little kid growing up in Downey, California, surf music was real popular, and I remember waking up on Saturday mornings to the sounds of different wannabe surf bands practicing in their parents garages’. It was great!
There was a surf record label/recording studio in town called, appropriately, Downey Records, and they released the original version of “Pipeline” by The Chantays as well as my favorite surf instrumental, “Boss” by The Rumblers. I guess that stuff was my first guitar influence. Off the top of my head, I’d say my biggest influences, though, were blues and early rock and roll guys like Johnny “Guitar” Watson, Big Bill Broonzy, Magic Sam, Chuck Berry, Carl Perkins, Lonnie Johnson — I could go on with a million names, most of whom you’ve never heard of. When I was older, around twelve or thirteen, my brother and I would go to blues bars like The Ash Grove and see Albert and Freddie King and Lightnin’ Hopkins. Just a few notes from those guys hit me on such a deep emotional level. They still do.
Despite my blues and R&B background, the main reason I’m a professional guitarist today is the influence of punk rock. You see whenever you pick up a guitar, you’re going up against everyone that ever played the instrument — Django, T-Bone Walker, Michael Bloomfield, Richard Thompson, Segovia, the guys in your neighborhood, whomever.
It can be quite scary. There are always going to be guys who are better than you. In my case, it’s a very long line of guys. But when I started hearing the early Ramones, Clash and Sex Pistols records around 1976, I realized that on a certain level, technique didn’t matter. Just plug in, turn up and beat the hell out of the guitar. It didn’t matter whether you were playing a $10,000 ’58 Les Paul or a $75 Mustang. Knowing this gave me the courage to get onstage and make a damn racket.
In the early days of The Blasters, I took some lumps from guys who’d say, “That guy sucks! If only they had a better guitarist.” I can’t say stuff like that didn’t hurt, but all in all I didn’t care. Punk rock changed the rules for a while and guys like me who were working as fry cooks could become rock and rollers. Over the years I’ve practiced hard to be a better guitarist, whether acoustic or electric, but part of me will always be a loud punk rock basher.
What I love about the guitar is its dexterity. Guitars can make and imitate any kind of sound or texture. For example, Adrian Belew can make a guitar sound like a herd of elephants. Blind Willie Johnson can make the guitar sound like a mournful choir. Jimi Hendrix can make the guitar sound like an erupting volcano or a flock of beautiful birds. I think that’s the reason the guitar became, and has stayed, the number one instrument in pop and rock ’n’ roll. Another reason is that no two great guitar players sound alike. Pat Martino plays differently than Ralph Towner who plays differently than Bob Margolin who plays differently than Johnny Ramone and yet, to me, all approaches are valid. The guitar is a good democratic, egalitarian instrument.
My Mustang still has glass imbedded in it from flying beer bottles that were hurled at us in the early days of The Blasters. There’s a dent and a slice down the upper cutaway horn from a particularly strong beer bottle thrower. Some of the audiences we played for in those days had very direct ways of letting you know if they liked you or not, and sometimes the Mustang was my only defense.
More recently I ran over my gig bag, with both my beloved ’64 Stratocaster and my ’61 reissue Strat inside it, with my van. I was leaving a sound check at the Beachland Ballroom in Cleveland, my mind on a million other things (motel rooms, ticket sales, salaries to pay, where to eat, interviews, etc.), when I leaned the double guitar gig bag against the side of van, got on the cell phone about something, jumped into the van, threw it into reverse and ran over the guitars. When I felt the bump beneath the tires, I stopped the van and had a minor nervous breakdown. The ’61 reissue is a nice guitar, but the ’64 Strat is irreplaceable. I ran into the club like a lunatic, shaking, sweating and cussing, and got Chris Miller, who plays guitar in my band, to come out, open the bag and inspect the damage. I sat down on a curb about thirty feet away, lit a cigarette and prayed to whatever deity looks out for dumbbell guitar players. I asked Chris to tell me what the damage was then I said, “No, don’t tell me. No, tell me. No, don’t tell me. No, tell me.” He opened the bag and, unbelievably, there was no major damage to the ’61 and absolutely no damage to the ’64 Strat. Whoever is the god of guitar players was looking favorably on me that day.
I retired my Mustang from touring when I bought the ’64 Strat in 1982. Just this year I retired the ’64 from touring also. It’s just become too difficult to travel anywhere these days with vintage guitars, and I don’t just mean the threat of someone stealing the guitars or me running them over. Last year I was flying home from Europe and I had a document from the Musicians Union that says the airlines, by law, have to permit me to bring a guitar in a gig bag onboard a plane, but all it takes is one power-drunk flight attendant to tell you no. Then they’ll just throw the guitar on top of the checked baggage while you can only hope for the best. I travel now with my ’61 reissue that I hot-rodded to approximate my ’64. If something happens to it, at least I can get another. My dear old Mustang and my beloved old Strat, I’m glad to say, get to stay safely at home and swap old barroom gig stories with each other.
Bob Taylor
Bob Taylor is the cofounder and president of the California-based Taylor Guitar company.
I was ten years old when I received my first guitar, and it had no brand name that I recall. No artists had inspired me to play — it really had been the kids who lived on my street who had persuaded me to get a guitar because they all played one, too. I did not play any other instrument back then, though I can play a banjo and a ukulele now. My family saw my guitar playing as a kid’s hobby. It wasn’t regarded any differently from a kid who would like to play piano, like my sister did, or someone who would like to play football. They never saw me as being obsessed with it, not at that age! When I started building guitars they started taking notice that I was intimately obsessed with it.
I wanted to buy a guitar in high school that I could not afford, so I just made one, and this seemed like a normal approach for me. I was in auto shop and told my teacher that I wanted to get into wood shop class so I could build a guitar. He let me transfer classes in tenth grade, and I used the wood shop to build my guitars. I had already been building stuff in industrial arts class from seventh grade onward and had won state fairs in metalwork, so I knew I was good at making things.
I found a little book on how to make classical guitars, and though I did not make a classical guitar, I used some of these construction methods. I also looked at other guitars, dissected them in my mind and simply went at it and created a 12-string guitar. It had the body of a Yamaha guitar (traced from a friend’s Yamaha) and the peghead of a Japanese guitar that was actually a copy of a Gibson, though I had never seen a Gibson at that time to know this. I had never seen any good guitars at that time like a Martin, Gibson or Fender.
During my junior and senior years in high school I ended up making three acoustic guitars and a banjo. I spent a lot of time in wood shop, and had a teacher who left me on my own to do my thing. He did not know how to make a guitar, but he gave me the room to experiment and work on these projects. As a result, I started to learn how to do some inlay work. This was in the days when you could go snorkeling off the coast of San Diego and catch abalone for your dinner, so I would catch abalone and grind the shells down to do inlay work. The guitars I made were crude by today’s standards, but I still have one of them today.
I like guitar music and I’m not a great guitar player. When I graduated from high school in ’73, you were either listening to Cream or Iron Butterfly or Jefferson Airplane or Grateful Dead — or else you were listening to Peter, Paul & Mary; John Denver; Gordon Lightfoot and the more folky musicians. Then bands like The Eagles came along and created folk rock. The first time I heard The Eagles play, I was a junior in high school. I heard their song “Take It Easy” on the radio and t
hought, “Oooh, I’m home now!” Up to that point, I’d tended to listen to John Denver and Gordon Lightfoot and The Kingston Trio. Sparked by the film Deliverance, there was also a bunch of bluegrass music that you could listen to that had been and, as a result, the banjo received a huge shot in the arm in terms of resurgence in popularity.
If you gave me the choice of playing music or giving me the tools to build things, I would choose tools and building things. If I had to give up one, I would give up the music. In reality, building guitars is the perfect pursuit for me because it combines two of my favorite things in life. I could live without playing the guitar, but I would not have a very satisfying life if I was not making something all the time.
I’m a better player than most people, but once you leave the “most people” circle, then anyone accomplished on the guitar is a better player than I am. I can pick out things by ear and play along with people — it’s not hard and I enjoy doing that sort of thing for my own entertainment, but I’m not a performer and do not want to be a performer. The challenge with guitar playing for me is to become a better player, as I do not have the natural gift for it. If I work at it, I do become pretty good but then, by the next week, I’ll have forgotten it all. However, when I work at building something, I never forget anything. I just get better and better and better at it. I have not forgotten one thing about building something, but I’ve forgotten everything about playing the guitar.
Bob Taylor as a teenager. (Courtesy Bob Taylor)
You can spend twenty years figuring out how to build a guitar that is easy to play. Taylor is a major guitar supplier to the music industry — we’ve been the number one seller in the U.S. for acoustic guitars for a couple of years now. However, if you randomly selected 100 guitar players, placed them in a room and asked them to raise their hand if they felt Taylor Guitars makes the greatest sounding guitar there is — I would say maybe thirty to forty percent of them would agree. Preference in sound is a very subjective choice. That’s like putting everybody in a room and saying, “Raise your hand if you think Breyer’s vanilla ice cream is the best vanilla ice cream you’ve ever tasted.” For some people it is and to others, it’s not. That’s the way it is.
However, if I asked, “Raise your hand if you think Taylor makes guitars that are the easiest to play,” all those hands would fly up in a heartbeat. Learning how to build a guitar that is easy to play? I have a Ph.D. in that! I’ve spent my lifetime learning how to do that, and I’ve figured it out better than anybody else, really. Other things you cannot win so easily but this, well, it took me about twenty-five years to learn how to do it. Taylor guitars allow players to push the strings down easily on the fretboard and not have to struggle so much to make it easy to play — it’s like a car that is easy to drive.
We started getting good at this early on, but it has been continuously perfected. Over time, this process became streamlined because we’ve refined our factory methods to produce a great-playing guitar, each and every time. We almost cannot make a bad one for how well developed our design and manufacturing process is. Along the way, other makers started looking at our guitars and because of our efforts, many guitars became easier to play. Other makers do not do it quite as well as we do but, boy, they sure make their guitars better than they did thirty years ago.
I’m not a big saver of things. It gives me great pleasure to throw stuff out and, every once in a while, I’ll decide that I want to collect something like say, watches. I’ll have a bunch of watches, and then it will occur to me that I cannot handle having all these watches, so I’ll decide to get rid of some. I built those three guitars in high school, and when I reached the point where I started having a little career going, I began looking at these three guitars like they were the enemy. “What if somebody sees them,” I asked myself. “I’m out there trying to tell people I’m a good guitar maker and the last thing I need is for those beginner guitars to be floating out there.” You know how it is whenever a famous actor simply hates it when an old video or film audition happens to turn up on YouTube from the days when they happened to be a total dork. I felt the same way toward these guitars. One of the guitars was in my brother-in-law’s possession (I actually still have that one, thank god), but the other two guitars I managed to get a hold of. I blew one of them up with a cherry bomb — it blew up spectacularly. I bought one of those firecrackers from Tijuana, lit that thing and it went ka-boom. The other I ran over with a motorcycle. I got rid of the evidence, but now I sort of regret it. Sixteen years later I asked myself, “Why did I do that?” I didn’t know there was going to be a museum.
Graham Parker
British rock singer and songwriter Graham Parker released several critically acclaimed albums in the ’70s as Graham Parker & the Rumour. He has continued his career with various collaborations that produced hit albums like The Mona Lisa’s Sister, Struck by Lightning and Acid Bubblegum.
I guess I was twelve or thirteen when I got my first guitar. It would have been in 1963, when The Beatles emerged. They made music accessible to my age group.
My cousin, who was a couple of years older, gave me an acoustic guitar, which may or may not have had a brand name. All I remember about it is the frayed, thick, colored cord that served as a strap. When I saw either Brian Jones or Mick Jagger playing the harmonica on tv, I immediately took that up and found that stringing together a few blues riffs was a lot easier than playing the guitar.
After The Beatles and the Rolling Stones, all the beat groups started appearing as if by magic. This was followed by soul, ska, blues: the stuff that influenced the beat groups in the first place. But I’d say that both Otis Redding and Levi Stubbs were the greatest influences on my singing.
I was actually never that obsessed with the guitar, and I still had many other interests. I was a poor learner and never really got any good until a couple of years ago! But my parents were always supportive of whatever I did, apart from hanging around cafés smoking cigarettes and playing pinball.
Graham Parker (far left), age twelve, in the Black Rockers. (Courtesy Graham Parker)
I love playing lead guitar, which I do now on my records. However, I’m an awfully clunky guitarist, and it’s only in recent years that I figured out how you do it. I discovered by accident that if you turn the amp up really loud, you can’t go wrong! Really, you can just flail around and good stuff will come out. I guess the challenge is finding an amp that goes up to eleven and not being afraid to use it. Going “rocka rocka rocka rocka” on a Fender Telecaster is as close to sex as you can get with your trousers on. My career didn’t start until I was twenty-five, so I went from being totally unknown and unschooled to leading a crack band in front of hip London audiences. It wasn’t playing live that made me think I could make a career out of it, it was writing the songs that became my first album, in the two years before those first performances. I was convinced that I was writing the best songs that could possibly be written by anybody, at least at that period of time, when quite frankly, the competition wasn’t up to much.
Wolf Marshall
Acclaimed guitarist and educator Wolf Marshall is known for his transcription books and for serving as editor-in-chief of GuitarOne magazine. He has been on faculty of the UCLA Jazz Department since 2007.
I was fourteen years old and I wanted a guitar because I was really into the guitar-driven music of the day, like British Invasion, early surf music. In Southern California, surf music was a big deal. I had already taken music lessons on the violin, piano and cello, and finally after three instruments where my mom, who was a classical pianist, had been pushing me into classical music — it didn’t take —I asked her for an electric guitar and she rented one for a month. It was a stupid little guitar called a Kay — solid-body with one pickup and it was just a piece of junk. I didn’t even rent an amp with it — that’s how bad it was. I could play it but I just did not enjoy it. You have to find an instrument that you love and stick with it all your life. When I had to return this guitar
at the end of the month, my mom took me to a store and got me my first real guitar, a Les Paul Junior. I had that guitar for a year and a half. I do not have it any longer and have been through so many guitars, but I look back on all of them fondly.
Wolf Marshall at age fourteen in Los Angeles, California, with his first guitar, a 1950s Gibson Les Paul Junior. (Courtesy Wolf Marshall)
The first real guitar that I played with professionally was a Fender Telecaster. What I love about the guitar is that it was part of the scene and part of one’s peer group. The cello was not for me — the business of sitting down — but I did love the strings. There’s something about a kid being taught by a parent, it’s too loose and lacks the formality and structure compared to taking lessons with someone who is not your parent. With the piano, cello and violin, I found myself saying, “Mom, I’ve got homework — I cannot practice”; “Mom, I’m going out to see a movie with my friends” — and that’s not going to work in terms of learning. With the guitar, I was self-motivated and wanted to learn stuff by The Beatles and Rolling Stones. Those bands and surf music were the first to make an impression on my mind in the mid-’60s, along with early rock ’n’ roll coming out of England.