My First Guitar

by Julia Crowe

  Teenaged Andrew York. (Courtesy Andrew York)

  We had a piano in the house. My mom sings and my dad was always listening to classical music and playing folk music, so the guitar was just there. It is a great instrument because it is self-sufficient. I did start playing trombone early in fifth grade and actually majored in flute in college but the guitar was always present and available within the house, and I’ve resonated with it as both a harmony and solo instrument. Being such a lover of music, I found it to be such a gas to learn and have a musical idea and then be able to realize it or else learn a picking pattern for a new folk song. It was a deep thrill to begin to play and I started writing music right away. I think I knew at a young age that I was going to be a musician my whole life. It was clear and nothing else struck me as quite so interesting.

  I was very young when I played my first professional gig, probably eight or nine years old. One of my sisters, who is ten years older than me, had me join her to play in a big auditorium that could have been an old folks’ retirement home. She sang a song called “The Green Leaves of Summer,” and I accompanied her as she sang. I also played a Sor piece with a bit of tremolo that came out of one of Aaron Shearer’s books. It was Giuliani or Sor.

  I really loved pop music — The Beatles and anything that came out on the radio, I’d follow. Some of it liked, some of it did not but I was aware of what was happening. And I loved classical music. I used to listen to Leonard Bernstein conducting Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. I listened to that over and over until I wore out the LP, and then my sister bought me another and I bought Beethoven’s Seventh as well. I was really into Beethoven. My uncle had a record of Sousa marches that astounded me. So I was really open, in terms of what I listened to and when I found something I liked, I became obsessed with it. I would listen to music over and over and listen deeply, hearing harmonies though I did not know what to call anything. Now that I’ve studied music, I can hear a song and know the chords and know what to call them. My dad found a really great teacher for me in Richmond, Virginia, named Greta Dollitz, who had been a student of Aaron Shearer. She is still teaching and has one of the longest running classical guitar radio shows in the country.

  What I like about the guitar is that it is a self-sufficient instrument. You can play it by yourself and have harmony and melody and everything there. You can also play with others, and it is a portable instrument. The trombone is not like that — it’s made to be played with an orchestra or jazz band. I like the guitar because it is complete. Music is a life journey, and if you are in it seriously, your life issues will begin to emerge with the music and you will begin to question everything. If you approach music as a life and art, then you are forced to confront yourself in various stages along the way.

  William Kanengiser

  I was eight years old when I started playing my first guitar, which had actually been my brother’s guitar that he got by collecting S&H Green Stamps in the ’60s. These stamps were collected at the grocery store checkout counter, they would give you sheets and sheets of these incredibly sticky stamps. It took about twenty of these books, just thousands of these ridiculous stamps. We turned them in for a guitar, which today, would be described more as a GSO or Guitar-Shaped Object because it was not a high-end instrument.

  It was my brother’s guitar because he is the one who had wanted the guitar. He is three years older than me and he was working with a book to learn how to play. At first he would not let me try to play his guitar. He had it for about three months and worked his way through a few pages of the book. Then he relented and let me try it. I went through the first five pages of the book in a week and this left him pretty much demoralized, to the point where he said, “You know what? Why don’t you keep the guitar?” I’ve never played another instrument outside of the college requirement of piano, which I just stunk horribly at. I have no keyboard skills whatsoever. I did always want to be a drummer but the guitar is my instrument.

  William Kanengiser, age fifteen, at music summer camp. “I was going for the Jimi Hendrix look!” he says. (Courtesy William Kanengiser)

  I have a very clear recollection of sitting with my guitar, though I did not know any notes yet, performing what I called an “open string concert.” I was just playing patterns on open strings, fingerstyle. I was already thinking of myself, at the age of eight, as playing for an audience and, possibly, in a way, this carried me through. My feeling about playing is that it is not complete until you ultimately give it to the audience.

  The artists who interested me included James Taylor — I remember being ecstatic when I figured out on my own the little lick to the beginning of his song, “Fire and Rain.” It was a eureka moment and my brother was going to kill me because I played just that opening little slide of a G chord to an A chord so many times. The Beatles’ “Blackbird” was the first complicated song I learned, one that traveled up and down the neck. Someone wrote it out for me in a sort of rudimentary tablature and I figured it out. I heard a little bit of Segovia back then and tried to emulate it, not knowing what I was doing. When I was in high school, I was really into the group Yes — Steve Howe was my idol. I figured out his “Mood for a Day” off the album Fragile in a day. I also played it in my junior high talent show. For the LAGQ Guitar Heroes album, I had to include this piece so it was fun for me to revisit it.

  I have to say my family was great about my interest in the guitar. There are no musicians in my immediate family. I had two cousins who were professional pianists — one was classical and the other was a Broadway showtunes kind of guy. No one else in my family had musical talent but they loved music, especially jazz. My dad was a huge jazz aficionado. My parents encouraged me — they were never pushy and they were not stage parents. Basically, I practiced because I wanted to.

  I remember there was one seminal moment when I was maybe a junior in high school. I was starting to get pretty good on the guitar and I was also a good student. I think my parents thought, hey, compared to the less desirable things most teenagers could be doing with their free time, demonstrating an interest in music was not so bad. I wondered if I should go into medicine and get a real job. I had a discussion with my parents. They asked, “Are you really serious about music as what it is you want to study, as opposed to it being a hobby?” Ultimately, they did not put up any roadblocks. They said, “Bill’s going to give this a chance and see how he does with it.” And it worked out pretty well. I’m just as surprised as anybody!

  Like many kids at that age, when I started playing, I thought, “If I can learn to play the guitar, then I’ll be really cool. Girls will find me interesting.” Of course, what happened was I became so focused on practicing that I sort of just locked myself inside my room for a couple years — so much for the social aspect. A friend of mine went to a high school reunion and found out there were a bunch of girls who had thought I was kind of cute, but I’d been oblivious because all I was doing at the time was practicing my guitar.

  I was entranced by the instrument and found that it felt like a natural extension of myself. It did not feel easy, but natural, and I could not imagine doing anything else. I had a few crucial moments of questioning what I was doing playing. I was on my way to becoming a professional guitarist when I heard David Russell perform for the first time, and I remember calling up my mom and saying, “I just saw this guy play and I’m never going to play like that. I can’t do that.” I had this crisis because he had rocked my world so much. And I love David. My mom was cool about it, saying, “Well, just do your best.” I thought that I would give it a try for a couple more years and if it did not work out, I would learn something about computers. As it turned out, David Russell was a huge inspiration and model and forced me to reevaluate my playing. I practiced my ass off.

  Believe it or not, one of my first professional gigs as a student in Los Angeles was also the moment when I met my wife. I was a student at USC at the time, and a friend of mine who is a jazz player received a call that a cigar store
was having a party and they wanted a classical guitarist to play. He passed along the gig to me. I did not have a car. In Los Angeles, it’s kind of hard to get around without a car. I said, “Look, I’ll take the bus there, but someone has got to give me a ride home.” So I went to this party and played my guitar. And there was this girl there. She was a friend of the owner’s sister and had been enlisted to make sure that no one stole any of the high-end pipes in the shop. The shop owner was supposed to give me the ride home, but he had won the pipe-smoking contest and became sick as a result. She wound up giving me a ride home and we went out for Chinese food. The embarrassing part was when the bill came. I realized that I had a check inside my wallet for playing the gig but not enough cash to pay for dinner. So we went Dutch on our first date. And the very next day was Valentine’s Day, in 1979. We just celebrated our twenty-ninth wedding anniversary. I’d have to say that was a pretty good gig.

  One memorable guitar I owned was really gorgeous instrument that I’d bought from Pepe Romero’s brother, Celin, when I first started to study with the Romeros. It was a Miguel Rodriguez church door spruce top, very unusual. And it had a pedigree because Celin had played it on their recording of the Concierto Andaluz. I played this guitar for ten years in several competitions and, toward the end of those ten years, I’d found that this guitar was becoming very temperamental and did not like traveling. I bought another instrument that I’d fallen in love with and did not touch the Rodriguez for two years. When I did, I just felt that this instrument no longer did anything for me. This was about the time my daughter was about to be born and we were kind of low on money, so I sold it. I sold the Rodriguez to a guy who was a real Romero devotee and collector, but I sold it for a song, bottom of the market.

  Twelve years later, I received tax advice from my accountant, who said, “You know, Bill, you haven’t bought a guitar in five years and you need to buy a guitar as a tax write-off.” I called a friend who happens to be a guitar trader in town and told him that I needed to buy a guitar. He said to me, “I cannot believe you are calling me right now because two days ago your old Rodriguez arrived in my shop.”

  I hadn’t played this guitar in twelve years. It turned out that the guy I had sold it to later traded it for Julian Bream’s lute, and then somebody else sold it to somebody else and so on until it ended up in Los Angeles. I drove over to the shop, played about three notes on this guitar and I couldn’t believe that I’d ever sold it. I fell madly in love with it and I remembered every single nook and cranny of this guitar.

  There is a tradition with Rodriguez guitars that Pepe Romero started, where you give them a name and christen them. Pepe calls his guitar “La Wonderful.” I called mine “L’Enamorada,” and I had put this little piece of masking tape with that name on it inside next to the label. And my little piece of tape with that name was still there. And for the love of this guitar, I paid about five times more for it than what I had sold it for.

  John Dearman

  I saw The Beatles play on Ed Sullivan when I was seven years old, and after that, I started carrying on constantly to my parents about how I wanted to play drums. When my birthday came around I received my present with great anticipation. And it was not a drum set. I think my parents realized that would be a little painful for a few years. What they’d bought me instead was a baritone ukulele. I guess they had spoken to someone at a music store who told them, for a kid my age, this would be a good instrument. It’s tuned like a ukulele but it is bigger and you play it with felt pick. From there, I took a couple months’ worth of lessons — learning to read from a Mel Bay book and playing songs like “Aura Lea.”

  Then we moved to Orange County, California, from Minneapolis. My little stint with the ukulele bombed but this time around, I wanted a guitar. They got me a nylon-string called an Avila. It was unusual — the whole thing was painted chocolate brown, front and back. Again, they took me in for lessons and I had the greatest teacher. He showed me how to play “Secret Agent Man” and “Wipe Out.” I think he might have showed me a little malagueña. He was showing me stuff directly — there were no books. I just went nuts with that.

  I did not come from a musical family but my dad liked listening to jazz. He liked guitar, what a lot of people had at that time, like Charlie Byrd, Chet Atkins and Luiz Bonfá. I really remember the Bonfá album. My dad was a pharmacist, with no other particular interest in music. I was not particularly into music as a kid, either. It was just that the whole Beatles thing had gotten me excited. The ukulele lessons did not interest me to the extent that my teacher had when he showed me how to play the guitar licks. That’s what excited me again.

  There was a long period after this where I did not take lessons. My parents split up. When I was a teenager, I got back into playing again by just picking stuff up off records. I remember learning songs by The Doors and by Chet Atkins and all the fingerstyle guitarists. Above all, my earliest influence was Chet Atkins. When I went to live with my dad at thirteen, he took me in for lessons.

  He said, “You have that old guitar still. Why aren’t you playing it?” I said, “Well, you know, I’m not that interested.” “Let’s take some lessons” was his response. I agreed and took lessons for six months. They put me on the Mel Bay methods again. I could not get past page three because I found it to be the most boring stuff. Again I ignored the guitar until a year later when I started picking up stuff off records. Then I just went nuts all through high school. I spent all my time next to the record player, learning everything by Chet Atkins. I learned a lot of folk stuff, too. I was into Neil Young. I transcribed some Wes Montgomery albums, Segovia and Parkening records. Everything I learned was by ear. If you put a piece of sheet music in front of me, it would take me a year to read it. So I picked up a wide range of stuff, including classical.

  My dad was happy to see me playing the guitar, given whatever else I could have been doing in high school in the ’70s. I became known as the guitar guy at school. It was not until I was out of high school that I started to study classical guitar, because that is when I met the Romeros.

  At this point, I was a fairly accomplished fingerstyle player who knew a wide range of stuff. I had studied some Brazilian music, basic bossa nova. I knew a few classical pieces — and I was teaching at a music store. I met a guy there who was studying classical and he was very good. We became best friends and he said, “You should see my teacher, Celin Romero.” I had heard of the Romeros, that they were a famous guitar family, but I didn’t know much about them. So my friend took me over to Celin’s house in San Diego one day and we chatted a little bit, then my friend said, “Why don’t you play something for me?” Celin asked what I was going to play and I told him I knew this piece called “Yellowbird,” a Chet Atkins arrangement. He said, “Oh, Shet Atkeens! I love heeem — he’s a good friend of mine.” I might have also played a Bach piece and one of the Venezuelan waltzes that I’d taken off a record. He took me on for lessons. At that point I had a steel-string acoustic, a couple of electric guitars, a slide guitar, a banjo — but within a month I sold all of them to buy a Contreras guitar from the Romeros. After studying with the Romeros, I started to attend USC to study music.

  I find the guitar fascinating. It just becomes part of your identity in a way, even if it’s just playing for your friends. For me, it took over my whole life. The guitar is all I’ve ever wanted to do. I never questioned playing the guitar or whether or not it should be a career. I just followed the next step that was in front of me, and I’ve met with great fortune doing that because if I hadn’t met that guy who introduced me to Celin, I would probably still be sitting a that music store, teaching to this day and playing at restaurants. I had no intention to go to college or anything because I was going to be a musician.

  Learning by symbols never agreed with me. I learned full classical and fingerstyle pieces from a record in one long day, memorizing as I went. Recently, I thought that perhaps I should go back and try to relearn theses pieces from the sheet
music. I try to encourage my students to learn that way, too. It’s very interesting to me that it takes people a long time to memorize pieces from sight. But when learning from hearing, it seems to go faster. There are no symbols involved. It’s a direct process of the finger motion and your awareness of the fingerboard.

  I once had a Reyes flamenco guitar, a nice guitar when I was gigging a lot out of college. I had to take two guitars to this gig in my Volvo station wagon, an old beat-up thing. I was in a big rush one day — I ran out to the car, put everything in the back, got in and started backing up. As I was backing up, I heard this BANG! I got out and realized I had left the Reyes tilted against the back bumper so when I backed up, it flipped backwards and the car ran over it. It wasn’t totaled but it was smashed up pretty good in one place. I managed to get it repaired and it plays well — I think it helped that the damage was confined to a localized area, just one part of the guitar. The grain on the top of the guitar had been compressed, but Yuris Zeltins, who is legendary for guitar repair in San Diego, managed to fix it. He has restored, modified and repaired every one of the Romeros’ guitars since the ’70s.

  It’s all a process of evolution when you’re starting to perform. Your first departmental recital turns into your junior recital and turns into your senior recital and your masters degree recital, and then you’ve got some crummy little gig and it keeps creeping upward. I first thought, “Wow, this quartet is really going somewhere” at one gig at a big hall for a classical guitar congress in either Baltimore or Washington, D.C. I remember walking out onstage and seeing the place packed. People were screaming. It was weird. We had played some pretty big concerts up to that date, like one or two GFA (Guitar Foundation of America) conventions, but it was still early in our career. It was the first time we became aware that people really liked us, that we were reaching some kind of critical mass. All of us had a little chill go down our spines.