My First Guitar

by Julia Crowe

  Gary Lucas, ten years old, in Auburn, New York. (Courtesy Gary Lucas)

  About two years into this day job, I finally landed my dream of working with Beefheart. I’d seen his debut in New York when I was in my freshman year in college. He’d played in a little club on the Upper West Side called Ungano’s. I was a fan and he’d already been on the cover of Rolling Stone. My buddies and I drove down to check him out and it changed my life. I’d never heard a band that was so intense and great. That night, I said if I ever do anything with guitar, I want to play with this guy. They were using guitars in a way I’d never heard. He once said, “A guitar is merely a stand-up piano.”

  They used a lot of open tunings and bottleneck guitar playing. Their fingerpicking was amazing, simply because he wrote a lot of tunes on piano, just improvising, and then the guitarist would work for months to figure out their own transcription, which was sort of impossible. I secretly woodshedded, listening to his records, wondering how he was doing it and working it out in private.

  Don Van Vliet [Beefheart] came to play at Yale eight months after I saw him play at Ungano’s and, as I was his biggest fan and proselytizer, the program director of WYBC Radio at Yale asked me, the music director, to interview him over the phone before his gig to help promote it. I still have the tape somewhere. My voice is shaking at the beginning, as I am about to meet my idol, but he was really warm and put me at ease. When he showed up to play, I hung out with him all night and we became friends. Subsequently I visited him backstage at many New York–based shows for a few years afterward. I met him in 1971, but I didn’t tell him I played until 1975 when he was touring with Zappa on the Bongo Fury tour and they came to Syracuse to play. I’d thought, “He’s got a band. I’ll just keep working and someday I might get my chance.” Sure enough, one version of his band eventually walked out on him after different trials and tribulations and my big chance came in ’76.

  I saw in the paper that he was going to play with Frank Zappa, who was his patron, associate and nemesis, according to him. But I think overall Zappa was very supportive of Don Van Vliet. I thought, “I’ve got to see him.” I hadn’t seen him in years, but we were close and on friendly terms. I met him backstage after the concert and he remembered me. I asked if I could audition and he said, “What? You play the guitar? Why didn’t you tell me?” I told him I didn’t think I was good enough. I took the Greyhound bus up to their next concert in Boston and auditioned in his hotel. He was enthusiastic, but nothing happened. So I went off to Taipei and came back with my first wife. I called him up and he said, “Gary, great — you’re back.” Don was living in the Mojave Desert and working on a new album. He had a music piece he wanted me to learn for it called “Flavor Bud Living.” He sent me a copy. It was an angular, bizarre little instrumental piece and I worked my ass off to master it, modify it and sculpt it. I went out to the desert. He said, “You have to use my exploding note theory,” which is to play every note like it has no relation to the previous one or subsequent one. Like bombs bursting, pop-ba-ba-pa-bop! A very staccato phraseology and attack.

  While I was at Yale, I’d played in Leonard Bernstein’s Mass project. He was a big hero of mine, growing up. He’d written a Catholic Mass — a Jewish guy writing a Mass — and the Yale Symphony Orchestra, with about seventy singers and dancers and auxiliary people like me on guitar, went to Vienna for the premiere of this in ’73. I had a great evening with him telling me how to play my guitar in this piece.

  I like the guitar because you can get the sound of a human struggling through the sound of the bent strings. To me, you can get to the voice of god, which comes through a bent note. The physical act of bending a note, whether on brass, strings or whatever, it’s the closest thing to wailing. It’s a melismatic raising and lowering of pitch. The sitar or santur does this, too. It just feels right. And I can make a good guitar face, unlike with the French horn. The guitar is very sexual to me, honestly. Not in the phallic aspect of its shape but in hugging its body close and feeling this cavity resonating. I can see why Jimi Hendrix would do Electric Ladyland.

  I love the guitar. It’s my life and my living. I was a late starter in that respect. I didn’t get the impetus or nerve to do it full time until I was at the advanced age of thirty-six. Beefheart stopped making music to concentrate on painting in ’82, and his group had been my whole life for five years. I floundered for a few years, kept my day job and fielded offers to play with other lesser bands downtown but I thought, “Why, after having been in the best band ever?” I played on Matthew Sweet’s Earth album and with The Woodentops. I played with Adrian Sherwood, an English reggae mixer.

  Once at a session, I was playing on a session with Vin Diesel, who used to work in this very store when it used to be Minter’s Ice Cream Store. Vin Diesel’s real name is Mark Sinclair, and he was this skinny little kid who used to stand on the other side of the counter selling ice cream, and I got him a deal to make a rap record. I was helping out on the session with him, which was being produced by my friend, the great Arthur Russell. Arthur was an incredible cellist, dance music writer and songwriter, minimalist composer and an influence on Philip Glass. It was Arthur who gave me the impetus to return to playing on that session, saying to me, “You know, Gary, you’re always happiest with the guitar in your hand.” I was really scared because I knew how hard it would be, and I had this cushy security day job and the prospect of leaving it was really scary. But I’m glad I did. It took a few years.

  The Knitting Factory opened up and it was a nice little space. This girl dared me to perform there and I thought, hmm, well I’ll show her. So I got busy and put together a program. Then I arranged for my debut and they gave me the worst possible night, a Tuesday. The day of the show, the newspapers didn’t even list my gig. They left me out by mistake or whatever. I put up signs around the Village and the show sold out. They turned people away. I was so thrilled with the reception. I got many encores and they handed me a fistful of money. I said, “This is what I should be doing.” A friend told me it was like my life had changed overnight. I was determined to hit music about as hard as I could, and this time, when I did another show there, the New York Times came and wrote me up as “guitarist of a thousand ideas.” I started my band Gods & Monsters after this.

  I had a guitar that I got for $200, a Fender Strat, in ’64 or thereabouts. It might have been a hot guitar, but there were some kids at Yale that ran a little company called Guitars Unlimited, and I got a couple very good ’60s guitars from them worth more than what I paid for them. The ’64 the guitar I used when playing with Beefheart. It was my workhorse guitar. A couple years ago I was on a train leaving New Haven after visiting a friend that night. Right before the train departed, smoke started welling up in the compartment and the conductor came running in, ordering everybody off. Stupidly, I left my guitar up on the rack overhead and ran out with my other bag onto another train across the platform. And when the doors were closing, I’d realized I left my guitar on the other train. I made frantic calls, spoke with the conductor, filed police reports and never saw this guitar again. I lost this beautiful guitar — well, it wasn’t that beautiful — it had a warped neck. But it was my guitar. I had it insured and managed to collect $10,000 so I bought another ’66 Strat for about $3,000. I’m pretty sure someone found my guitar and said, “Hey, look, let’s give this to Johnny!” and it’s sitting in someone’s rec room in the middle of suburbia.

  One more thing I have to say is that when you move from amateur status to professional, there are some paradoxically frustrating and interesting things that happen. For me, before I even contemplated going professional, I liked to play for fun. That is the root of amateur, ama, or love. I was open to other people’s music, collecting it and going out to see it in a much more expansive way. When I decided to do this for a living, one of the unfortunate fallouts of that decision was I found it increasingly painful sometimes to sit in a concert that wasn’t my own because I’d sit there, torturing myself, thin
king, “How does this relate to what I do?” Or, “I should be home, practicing.” I think I’ve loosened up a little bit. But I was more driven to want to shun new music once I turned pro. I always thought the trick was to make a pop artifact that could function as an avant-garde object of art. I was trying to develop my own voice in an original, singular way.

  Michael McKean

  New York–born actor, comedian, composer and musician Michael McKean appeared in parody metal band Spinal Tap as David St. Hubbins. He is also known for playing the character Leonard “Lenny” Kosnowski on the sitcom Laverne & Shirley, releasing an album as Lenny and the Squigtones. The album also featured guitarist Christopher Guest credited as “Nigel Tufnel,” the name Guest used again for the rockumentary spoof This Is Spinal Tap.

  I was fourteen years old when I got my first guitar, which was a nylon-string off-brand guitar from Mexico that my dad had picked up for a song. I think it needed work, but at the time I thought a guitar was like furniture, that is, that you just accepted it for how it was. The action was ridiculous — the strings were like a block away from the frets. Playing this guitar made it easier for me later on to play a steel-string because it made my hands strong.

  My first steel-string was a Harmony Sovereign. This is the guitar I began writing songs on and playing when I was sixteen years old. Before that, I had borrowed a friend’s Gibson and learned to flatpick a little. Then I started playing a Gibson J-something. I can’t remember the models, but it was a cheap Gibson electric. Gibson sort of became my guitar for a while.

  My era of rock music was inspired by The Beatles, The Who, The Kinks and The Yardbirds. One of my favorite folk guitarists was Jimmy Driftwood, from Arkansas. He was a musicologist and social studies history teacher who wrote the “The Battle of New Orleans,” which was a big hit in ’56. Driftwood loved to collect great old songs that were catchy and fun. He also wrote “Tennessee Stud,” which was a big hit for Eddy Arnold. He had a way for coming up with these wacky, obscure American folk ballads. And I liked listening to show tunes at the time, too, because I was into theater. I liked acts that had humor. The Limelighters is another group that came up with a great range of stuff, and I also liked Paul Butterfield’s blues band, Michael Bloomfield and Electric Play. I lived in New York City in my teens, and we used to be able to go up onto the rooftops on summer nights to hear the concerts in the Fillmore East. They used to keep their upstairs doors open, and one night, we listened in on three sets of a Who concert. If you mention guitar to my dad, the first player he’ll think of is Charlie Christian and Kenny Burrell. He was into jazz and blues but not completely sold on folk or rock. My mom was fine with my playing because at least it wasn’t the trumpet.

  Playing is a pacifying state to be in. If you’ve got a lot of concerns and things are not going easy, you can always put everything at an arm’s length long enough to play a song. For me, that song is “Bye, Bye, Blackbird,” a slow song that’s somehow cheerful. I also like a Hoagy Carmichael song that Johnny Mercer wrote called “Down to Uncle Bill’s.” It’s just complex enough to make you feel like a great guitar player but, of course, you’re all alone when you’re playing anyway. Also, learning to play a little leads to songwriting, which is a lot of fun. My wife and I are a cottage industry for writing songs. If there’s any challenge I’ve had with the guitar, it’s barre chords! It’s comparable to watching someone change water into wine and then say to you, “Don’t worry, you’ll be able to do this, too, no problem.” I can’t handle the idea of barre chords, and do not play them to this day if I don’t have to.

  The first time I ever got paid to play was for the groundbreaking of a church. I also played in a jug band called Cold Fish when I was in college. Arthur Sellers got us a gig to play at the apartment of the Dean of the Drama department at nyu, and I think we were paid $25. I saw him recently and he has completely forgiven me for that night, mainly because I put a lot of it on Arthur Sellers. In my twenties, I also got paid to do parodies for radio commercials.

  For the most part, I’m vague about what happened to my first guitars. That Harmony Sovereign evaporated. I think I left it at some guy’s house and forgot to pick it up. I lost my 1970 Gibson in ’92 during a house move, and my old white SG that I played in Spinal Tap was stolen, along with two Les Pauls and a Fender Telecaster Deluxe. I don’t recommend moving with guitars because these things can happen.

  These days, I’m playing a Martin guitar that was a gift from Christopher Guest after making A Mighty Wind. I also have a Gibson acoustic with pickups, a Music Man guitar, a Paul Reed Smith guitar and an Ibanez that was a gift from Joe Satriani, who I met when Christopher and I needed an escalating guitar jam for a recording of Break Like the Wind. We had Jeff Beck, Steve Lukather of Toto, Slash and we needed one more monster guitarist, but we didn’t know Joe Satriani personally. We asked him and not only did he pay his way to fly in from San Francisco, but he did it in one take and was on the plane back home. And just for us asking him to do this gig, he had his designer make a guitar for me, Chris and Harry Shearer. We were stunned. To say thanks we sent an autoharp off to Joe’s designer in secret to have him make one just for Joe, incorporating all the exotic designs from the guitars he’d given us, that is, inlays of skulls and Stonehenge. They’re just amazing designs, very fancy guitars. This designer then made a truly psychedelic autoharp and we sent it off to Joe.

  Christopher Guest

  New York–born Christopher Haden-Guest is an American screenwriter, composer, musician, director, actor and comedian who cowrote the improvisational mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap, in which he played the character Nigel Tufnel, the lead guitarist of an English heavy metal band that embarks on a disastrous tour of America.

  My first guitar was a Gibson LG-1, and I played clarinet at the school of Music and Art when it was in Harlem. I first started listening to folk music, then rock. I was mostly self-taught and learned to play guitar by ear — opposite of my experience with the clarinet, which was all about sight-reading. I’d found this Gibson guitar from somewhere — could have been a pawnshop. It was used, cheap and crappy.

  My first musical influence was Doc Watson, then bluegrass. Jazz came later. Now, it’s a collection of stuff, but Doc Watson and bluegrass are the first to come to mind. I also taught myself to play the mandolin.

  My family didn’t really have any reaction toward the guitar, not until I started playing electric guitar, which was loud. Acoustic guitar, they didn’t mind. I got into playing my guitar eight hours a day. The reason for this is I couldn’t sing and play the clarinet at the same time. I mean, I tried every conceivable way, but it just didn’t work out. I like playing harmonics, especially on an acoustic guitar, and holding the instrument against my body and feeling it. I like playing all kinds of music and stuff that I’ve written from a comedic slant. Lately I’ve been playing mandolin more than the guitar.

  Chris at age fourteen. (Courtesy Christopher Guest)

  You can always tell a beginner, especially on steel-string, because they’ll say, “I want to play … ouch, it hurts!” Either you love it enough that you don’t mind and you keep going or else you go home, stash the guitar in your grandmother’s attic and get yourself a cat instead.

  My first professional gig was playing the autoharp, the same instrument you see Catherine O’Hara playing in A Mighty Wind. This gig was in 1963, the day after John F. Kennedy was shot. We showed up at a New York hotel to do this band thing for someone’s birthday, and we were paid a couple bucks to go home. Film composer Michael Kamen was in that band.

  I’ve been collecting guitars since the late ’60s. I’ve got an old Martin D-28 from 1946 that is very valuable. I bought it from Matt Umanov Guitars in New York, and it has a stencil on it of a band’s name, “The Melody Kings.” It also has a stain that looks like someone spilled beer inside the guitar. I’ve always fantasized that The Melody Kings was an older band that played outside of Nashville. But I never found out if this is true.

  I
have a Les Paul electric guitar that I had Les sign, but now I feel imprisoned by this because now I don’t feel free to take it out anywhere. Though his autograph makes the guitar more valuable, I almost regret asking him to sign it. This is the guitar I played in This Is Spinal Tap.

  I was visiting Jeff Beck at one of his sessions in Hollywood and gave him the leather jacket I’d worn in Spinal Tap. Later, he gave me one of his guitars. He called and told me to pick it up from the recording studio. When I spoke with him again, he asked, “Did you get them?”

  I said, “Them? You mean, guitars, plural?” There had been two guitars. Someone had apparently lifted one of them. But at least I have the one. It’s a Jeff Beck model Stratocaster in a color called sea foam.

  A Sheepdog Raised by Ducks

  The brick walls of Loho Studios are lined with a gallery of memorabilia signed by musicians who have recorded there — Joan Jett, Ryan Adams, Joey Ramone, Willie Nelson and Patti Smith. I was there sitting in on a recording session of Gary Lucas and his Gods & Monsters crew, which included Ernie Brooks of The Modern Lovers and Billy Ficca from Television. Gary and I took a break at a Chinese bakery and spent a few minutes debating the merits of steamed barbeque pork buns versus saffron yellow, sugar-crusted sweet red bean. We returned to the studio where saxophonist Jason Candler was experimenting with reverb effects on David Johansen’s recorded vocals on the song “One Man’s Meat.”