by Julia Crowe
“You play guitar, don’t you?” Ernie asked.
“Classical guitar,” I said. “I don’t rock like you guys. But I could play you a picture of how Sid Vicious might have strolled down the street.”
A few weeks later, Gary had been fighting a wicked head cold when he announced to the band that I was officially in charge of “logistics and general repping” for Gods & Monsters, moments before a charity benefit gig for God’s Love We Deliver, which delivers meals to AIDS patents. I had struck up a friendship with Gary and his wife Caroline not long after the house concert where I’d found him sitting in the girl’s frilly bedroom tuning his guitar. He and I spent one late afternoon into early evening of migrating from the White Horse Tavern to an ice cream shop where he told me the actor Vin Diesel used to work before his film career took off. After spotting mice racing across the floor during his book interview, we relocated to yet another restaurant and split a slice of key lime pie as we learned that we had both worked in Black Rock a few floors and years apart. Gary told me about his old ad-man days at CBS Records. The venue for this benefit concert was in an upstairs room at the Pussycat Lounge, a dive strip club that had somehow escaped Rudy Giuliani’s purge of all things sleazy, perhaps due to its obscure location, a few blocks south of Ground Zero.
Having lived in New York long enough, any Little Miss Muffett propriety and skittishness I might have felt toward strangers and spiders had evolved, long ago, into a basic nonchalance. Yet I have to admit I felt squeamish about entering the Pussycat Lounge.
Someone must have shelled out real money in the 1960s for its marquee, which depicts a masked Catwoman extending a long cigarette holder elegantly beneath her chin with a look of inscrutable insouciance. But the rest of the lounge’s facade — from its battered front door with the mirrored porthole windows to the slack velvet rope on the cracked sidewalk outside — spelled one word: dump. The lounge abutted a sex shop, Thunder Lingerie. A headless mannequin perched in the front window and its scanty costume changed by season and holiday — a red lace teddy with sequined heart-shaped pasties for St. Valentine’s Day, a sexy leprechaun outfit with pot-of-gold panties for those looking to get lucky on St. Paddy’s Day and a slutty elfin look with candy cane hosiery for the Christmas season.
Leave it to a Yale Music School graduate classical guitarist to advise me to not to touch the walls or sit on the furniture inside the lounge. Past denizens showed some wit by taping a pair of Hogarth posters between the strings of Christmas lights. Alison Gordy, who once sang with Johnny Thunders, opened the show with her beautifully raw voice accompanied by acoustic guitar and violin. All seven members of Gods & Monsters then took to the tiny stage like angels dancing atop the head of pin. Billy’s wife, Ami, sang a few songs and endured the occasional belt in the back from the neck of Ernie’s bass, causing her to pitch forward onto her tippy-toes and regain her balance while she kept singing. The crowd’s faces looked tough, worn and thuggish, but they were clearly transported and enthralled by the raucous reverie of the band and Gary’s guitar playing, shimmering forth leis of sonic wizardry.
I had not encountered anything overtly lurid at the Pussycat Lounge up to this point, but then I made the error of following Gary and the band downstairs, where I was welcomed with an eyeful of topless dancers in identical platinum pageboy wigs moving, more wearily that sultrily, through the haze of cigarette smoke. The intention may have differed but the display of nudity was nothing more than what you’d see inside the women’s dressing rooms at Century 21 on any average weekend. Nevertheless, I beat it out onto the sidewalk, inhaled the cold air and felt relieved when the band gathered outside to say their goodbyes.
I booked the band to play at Austin’s South by Southwest convention, an annual, sprawling, cacophonous spree, where nearly every musician in the universe steps over random puddles of vomit with the hope of seeing and being seen by music industry professionals. When we assembled at the airport, I panicked seeing Billy had no suitcase in tow. “Aren’t you missing something?” I asked. He grinned and held up a small Duane Reade bag that flapped in the wind. It held his toothbrush, toothpaste and one change of underwear. He was not smiling later in the TSA line, however, because I’d screwed up the name on his airport ticket. “It’s WILLIAM Ficca. It says WILLIAM Ficca on my driver’s license.” I had put him down as Billy Ficca and we now had to convince the TSA that he was the same person. “Billy is short for William — like some people say Holland when they actually mean The Netherlands,” I tried.
The bane of any guitarist is getting his or her guitar onboard the plane. It is up to the whim of the gate attendants, even if you’ve perfected the art of lowering your guitar case to fit in neatly into the small of your back and shuffling penguin-like to escape notice. Gary wrangled the Fender on board, affecting a “don’t mess with me” squint beneath his fedora. Jason Candler was the perfect picture of calm, with his enviably, easily disassembled sax squared away inside a case seemingly no larger than a shoebox. Billy tapped out rhythms on everything along the way. Once we’d landed and unloaded our stuff at a tiny motel on the outskirts of Austin, Jason drove us into downtown so we could case out the club.
I was in charge of stalking Tony Wilson to extend a personal invitation to him to attend our show. I had seen the film 24 Hour Party People, so I knew his history of being the manager of Joy Division and the force behind the whole, trippy Manchester sound of the late ’80s and early ’90s. So it took some time to reconcile that the Tony Wilson in front of me looked like a friendly British grandfather who would more likely be reading you Paddington Bear books beside a cozy, warm fireplace. When I approached him, he assessed me over the rim of his wireframe glasses. “That scene in the film in back of the van with the girls never happened, you know — pure fiction.” I did not remember the scene. He wrote down the venue and time of the gig on his hand. That he had been willing to deface his own palm in black ink for Gods & Monsters gave me a bright spark of hope. When I asked him if he had any managing advice to impart, he replied, “Never, ever let your band do smack.”
A wicked thunderstorm and bouncing hail crashed over Austin in the late afternoon as Michael Schoen, the singer with Gods & Monsters, and I were handing out flyers downtown. The remaining few flyers provided cover over our heads as we ran and took refuge on the stone front porch of the Driscoll Hotel. The rain swept in silvery arcs along the street and ended as abruptly as it started, leaving steadily streaming eddies swirling into the gutters. A rainbow appeared, luminous against the sky. I called Gary from my cell phone. He saw it, too. The rainbow brightened everyone’s mood.
The bars in downtown Austin are ghost towns by day. And then, in the space of one magical hour, they flicker to life with thumping subwoofers and glowing neon. The bartenders stocked the bottles in front of the mirror with dizzying speed and we matched the pace, loading in. Gary drew up the set list to accommodate the rigid time schedule that needed to cram 6,000 bands into six nights within a three square block radius.
The band killed it onstage. If Tony Wilson had turned up, I did not see him in the packed crowd, which seemed to take on its own amorphous, cell-like shape. I could have throttled the guitar tech for bailing on his duty to stand guard over the instruments, leaving me tethered to them until someone finally showed up with a car. We stumbled through Austin in the dark, following the music. We said hello to Jesse Harris, who wrote Norah Jones’ hit “Don’t Know Why,” and watched Sabina Sciubba croon as chanteuse with Brazilian Girls. We skipped past the bands that sounded like other bands and went hunting to hear something new.
Longhorn cattle horns and lone stars festooned almost every Austin pub and restaurant. Ernie noted that every restaurant we visited seemed to be members in good standing of the “Central Dispensary of Refried Beans.” Billy and Ami went off the grid, going for some strip-mall Chinese, which they paid for dearly the next morning. The rest of us found a favorite in Hoover’s BBQ. Gary raved about the smoked pork ribs, made sure I ordered
enough to eat and then happily devoured my leftovers.
Even as I was settling into my duties for Gods & Monsters, I still felt weird for being wedged between the rock world and the more decorous classical guitar world. When I pitched rock promoters, I received responses right away, usually salted with colorful invective that would scald the fur off a dog. Classical guitar promoters tend to politely hem and officially haw, neither saying yes nor no but ensuring that you knew that any future decision made would come down from on high to you, your lowly self. Frankly, I was starting to prefer the “Are you outta your fuckin’ mind,” opening gambit of the rock promoters to the “We shall see, perhaps,” of their classical brethren.
Working on this book left me confused, feeling that I had far more in common with the rock guitarists than I did with classical players. The rock guitarists, who played mostly electric guitar, struck me as deeply self-motivated, independent-minded and heavily ear-oriented, whereas classical guitarists, in order to establish a respectable career, are required to be sanctioned by conservatory guitar department degrees and competition prizes. Had I been playing the wrong kind of guitar all along? Could I have been a sheepdog raised by ducks? I loved ducks. All I had ever known musically had been how to waddle, flap and fly in formation — yet listening to these other players speak gave me a disconcerting, unexpected glimpse in the mirror at my own musically shaggy countenance. I couldn’t fully wrap my mind around it because most classical guitarists who dabbled on an electric make sure to let the world know they are merely slumming or perhaps nobly elevating this Eliza Doolittle of an instrument into classical society by performing an “electric guitar concerto” — avowed classical guitarists would never actually marry themselves to an electric guitar. Unthinkable.
My friend Peter Van Wagner had been encouraging and nagging me since I was fifteen years old to go electric. I was on the verge, teetering, not fully convinced it was for me. “But you’ve met Jimmy Page, for god’s sake! You have to play electric now!” he insisted. Peter, or The Riffmaster, as he was known at the Practical Theatre Company, is a rock ’n’ roll electric guitar guru disguised as a professional actor. One summer I asked him to help me with notating music from a cover story with John Hammond for Acoustic Guitar magazine. Peter listened for a moment, and then stared at me like I was crazy. “Write it down? He’s been playing the blues longer than you’ve been alive! You can’t write that down!”
I told Peter what my dream guitar would be. I wanted a solid-body Gibson with a 1960s slim neck, milky green tuning pegs, a trapezoidal pick plate and mother-of-pearl fret marker inlays, top-hat knobs and Gibson-issue humbucker pickups, solid color, no sunburst pattern and the kicker to all this — my Rumpelstiltskin-impossible feature — I wanted it to weigh less than eight pounds. There is no such thing as a Gibson that weighs less than eight pounds. I assumed that Peter would now spend the rest of his life trawling guitar stores on my behalf, and I could safely continue paddling about in my duck pond.
Peter phoned me two weeks later to say he had found it. It was at 30th Street Guitars in Manhattan, an old school guitar shop off 8th Avenue run by Matt Brewster. I dropped everything to visit this dusty cave of a store, frequented by a few men with long ZZ Top–style flowing grey beards, sunglasses and knowledgeable running commentary about any guitar on the wall, to the point where it was impossible to tell who worked there and who was merely keeping his opinions to himself. Near the guitar repair table, a languid pet iguana watched it all.
My first impulse was to summarily execute Peter for the crime of finding exactly what I wanted, but then I had to accept with resignation that it was entirely my fault for conjuring it, for having been so thorough in describing my perfect electric guitar. It was a chocolate brown ’90s-era Gibson with worn gold-tone hardware and covered humbucker pickups as well as everything else I had spewed out off the top of my head, right down to the weight being under eight pounds. It was one of 150 Gibsons manufactured in Nashville as a batch intended for shipment to Japan, and so the body had been entirely hollowed out to accommodate a smaller player. The left-hand action flew with impossible ease and the tone sounded like angels singing through six strings.
The price tag, however, sent me searching for some other, more reasonable option. Peter and I headed up to 48th Street to scour Sam Ash’s selection of back-breaking eleven-pound ’70s-era Gibsons. I was torn, yearning for that special sound a Fender makes and recalling Dick Dale’s passionate tale of working with Leo Fender to make that sound right. Yet Les Paul’s voice came back, too, as I recalled his desire to make a guitar as beautiful as a violin, with the same graceful surface curves. We also visited Rudy’s Guitar Stop at the end of the block. I picked and plucked my way through their used electric guitar selection upstairs like Goldilocks sticking my fingers into various bowls of porridge. I liked the feel of an ancient sky blue Hagström with a filthy-looking waffle grille that looked as if movie popcorn butter had petrified on the pick guard. Though it was more affordable, the Hagström was not, by any means, in the same class as my eight-pound chocolate Gibson.
My Gibson. It had felt like my own Excalibur the minute I’d had it in my hands. After years of playing an oar-necked classical, playing an electric felt like I switching to a modern-day keyboard after years of pounding on an old Royal — my fingers flew unimpeded all the way up to the frets in its upper bout with ease.
I was not the only prospective suitor to the chocolate brown Gibson. It had the cool demeanor of a suave pickup artist, changing its voice to suit whoever played it. I endured hearing it crunch out some wailing, gnashing chords in someone else’s hands in the back room, with Matt’s iguana mirroring my baleful expression. I had no choice, really. I asked the bank teller to count out my life savings in twenties and was prepared to karate chop anyone who looked at me the wrong way as I headed back to the store. Whenever I walk into 30th Street Guitars, Matt still says, “There’s the heartbreaker who bought that chocolate Gibson guitar.” Five people had been circling my guitar, and Matt had the dirty job of telling them it had been sold.
With my new guitar in hand, I had no more excuses. It was time to figure out if it walked like a duck and quacked like a duck, it might just be a sheep dog.
Kerry Keane
When I was compiling the interviews for this book, I was struck by the pained memories artists had of stolen guitars. Who but the lowest form of humanity steals a guitar? Why? What for? To a thief, stealing a guitar is not about the value of making music as much as how much money they can surreptitiously obtain for a guitar, which can quickly and easily change hands. But what is it that makes a guitar valuable? To a musician, a guitar is valued for its playability, craftsmanship and voice. It is a physical and musical extension of the artist, almost magically so, for how it allows this expression. The first guitars discussed in this book are, with rare exception, mostly cheaply made, humble instruments that have achieved pricelessness for being the guitar that launched a career. There is, however, the phenomena of the fabled guitar that sells at auction for a fortune.
Part of the mystique and allure of collecting such an instrument is the idea of proximity and transference—to be able to view up close, each nick, ding, worn fretboard and character incurred by the instrument over the years which hints of a secret life along with the idea that some magical understanding might rub off for being able to hold the instrument that created such memorable music. I knew there was no other person in the world who comprehends this dynamic better than Kerry Keane, the international department head of fine musical instruments at Christies. Keane began his career as an apprentice to master guitar builder Augustino LoPrinzi in 1975 before enrolling in the Violin Making School of America in Salt Lake City. He studied Italian violin-making in Cremona, Italy, and ran his own violin shop in New York from 1985–1994. He joined Christie’s in 1999.
Keane invited me to attend their auction named “Trigger,” for the star attraction of the collection — Roy Rogers’ OM-45 Deluxe Martin, which
he used for much of his career. The guitar was expected to sell for $250,000. Other guitars at the auction included an 1864 Antonio de Torres, a 1939 Hermann Hauser Sr.; a 1929 Simplicio and an assortment of Kalamazoo-era Gibson electrics, Fender guitars and basses, Martin guitars and ukuleles. Keane oversaw the Christie’s auction of the world’s most expensive guitar in 2004 — Eric Clapton’s Blackie ’56–’57 Stratocaster, which sold for $959,500. Clapton had originally purchased six vintage Stratocasters from a store in Nashville in the early ’70s. He gave one Strat to Steve Winwood, one to George Harrison and another to Pete Townshend. With the remaining three Strats, made between the years of 1956 and 1957, Clapton took the best parts of these guitars and cobbled them together to create his Blackie Stratocaster.
The proceeds from this guitar auction benefited the Crossroads Centre in Antigua, an addiction treatment facility Clapton had founded.
“Auctions work because they are theater,” Keane told me, “The key is to offer a great property and have the right auctioneer.”
The pedestal displaying the Roy Rogers guitar was festooned with a confetti-like array of printed guitar picks from the Christie’s–Crossroads Centre auction as a totemic gesture of good luck. Two screens flickered with black-and-white footage reels from Rogers’ career. The varnish on the back of the Rogers guitar was worn and flaked, more evidence it belonged to a singing cowboy and his belt buckle. On the soundboard just below the bridge gleamed a silver star-shaped sticker.