My First Guitar

by Julia Crowe

  What makes the guitar prized is its story: an unknown musician, Leonard Slye, purchased this guitar for $30 during the Depression from a California pawnshop. Slye had no idea it had sold brand new for $225 just two years earlier in 1930. In fact, only fifteen of these guitars were manufactured by the C.F. Martin Guitar Company in Nazareth, Pennsylvania. Slye changed his name to Roy Rogers and went on to become a Hollywood cowboy legend, twice inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame. He died in 1998 without ever knowing that his guitar was the very first OM-45 Deluxe Martin to roll off the line.

  The guitar features a 000-size body shortened so that the neck has fourteen frets clear of the body. Its shape, scale length of 25.4 inches, slimmer neck profile, solid headstock and pick guard glued to the top became the prototype that defined the American steel-string flat top guitar design for decades to come. The OM-45 Deluxe added a pearl inlay bridge and elaborate gold plated tuners with pearl buttons.

  Said Keane, “The photograph dates from about 1968 or ’69 and I am about fourteen or fifteen years old. The guitar was a Giannini made in Brazil. My parents purchased it for me from a music store in Westfield, New Jersey, called the Bandstand. I took lessons there from a young woman named Gale who was in her twenties, very pretty and wore a beret. Lessons were thirty minutes of classical from the Carcassi method book and thirty more of learning Simon & Garfunkel songs. I had a wild crush on Gale and practiced like a fiend for her.” (Courtesy Kerry Keane)

  The Christie’s auction room features two large screens at the front. One displays the item for sale while the other monitors the current bid in various world currencies. Those seated all gripped white plastic paddles with bold three-digit numbers. My first impression of the bidders in the room is that most of them look more like preppy yacht captains than any real working musicians I knew, for their taste in casual navy blue blazers, pink dress shirts and leather loafers. Two desks coordinated incoming bids through the internet and by telephone. Auctioneer Thomas Lecky called out the figures and bids. The entire auction of nearly 100 instruments took just under 90 exhilarating minutes to complete. The bids on the Rogers guitar turned into a white-knuckled drama as the figure soared beyond anyone’s expectations. In a space of a few dizzying minutes, the guitar sold to a private American buyer in a purple velvet jacket for $554,500.

  Once the Rogers guitar sold, the hipsters and black t-shirt types cleared out, leaving those in shirt collars and neckties to bid on the classical instruments. The Torres opened at $48,000 and sold for a final price of $86,500. The 1939 Hermann Hauser Sr. guitar opened at $45,000 and sold for a final price of $134,500. The Simplicio’s final bid was $15,000.

  When it comes to appraising an instrument, Keane says, “Sometimes it is instantaneous and other times, it requires research. There are 12,000 violin-makers, for example, and there is not always a body of work for each maker; even less so for guitars. With lesser-known makers, we look for something comparable that has been sold before. This also helps us formulate a presale estimate to drive bidding and competition. The whole auction model is built on making these estimates.”

  Keane sold two 1947 Hermann Hauser classical guitars in May 2000 that were unique because both guitars had been made for the same owner. “A doctor in California had ordered these guitars sequentially that year,” Keane says. “Each time he communicated with Hermann Hauser Sr., he kept a carbon copy of the letter along with the responses he received in return from Hauser. Because of this, we have an archive, which has enabled us to see how this relationship developed over the years. It reached the point where these two gentlemen started exchanging holiday cards. Hauser had asked $200 for the first guitar but had requested that the doctor not to send money because cash was still useless in post-war Germany. Instead, he had asked for bolts of cloth, needles and thread, penicillin, aspirin and dried milk. He also asked for these items to be sent in five separate boxes to increase his chances of actually receiving the goods instead of having them confiscated by customs. These letters were an eye-opening insight into life in Germany at that time.

  “When we looked at the Roy Rogers guitar,” Keane says, “That instrument extends into the marketplace on two levels. First of all, it is an extremely important guitar in the pantheon of guitar making. In 1930 it was the most expensive of all Martins made, and it is still a beautiful guitar. Then add to it that it was owned by Rogers throughout his entire career, and it makes for an iconic piece of American memorabilia associated with an iconic figure. These are two important facets that generated the figure on that particular guitar. If Segovia’s 1931 Hauser were for sale, there would be the same fanfare due to the guitar and the man.

  “Our instrument buyers tend to be personal collectors who are talented amateurs and have made their careers in other areas. In the classical guitar auction market, I’ve noticed these buyers are at an age when they want to understand and associate with the type of instrument that music is played upon — so there is much crossover among American guitar collectors with both Spanish and classical guitars.”

  Keane recalls summers spent in the Pocono Mountains where his mother dragged him and his brother to various local auctions and bought them off with and Coca-Cola. When he was twelve, he bid on and won his first musical instrument: an A-Style mandolin for $30. He adds, “I knew exactly how many lawns I had to mow that summer to earn that money.”

  Lee Ranaldo

  Guitarist Lee Ranaldo is one of the cofounders of the rock band Sonic Youth, an alternative rock band that formed in 1981 in Manhattan. Stylistically, they are known for their scordatura guitar tunings and performing on “prepared” guitars, inspired by John Cage’s “prepared” piano, with objects like chopsticks and paper clips that alter the sound quality of the instrument.

  I was probably seven or eight years old when I received my first guitar, that is, one that wasn’t a tennis racket — it was a pink plastic ukulele with The Beatles’ pictures silk-screened on it. When they appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1964, I caught that Beatles fever. My dad had brought home their first records. I probably had two or three other pseudo-guitars after that. One of these guitars was also made of plastic, but it was more of a guitar size and a dark burgundy or maroon with speckles in it like metal flake. It was a cool guitar, which I somewhat discounted at the time for its being plastic, but I have wondered recently if it might’ve been one of those Maccaferri guitars I’ve read about.

  I finally did manage to buy a serious acoustic guitar, a big-bodied Martin D-18 copy made in Japan; it was still a piece of junk even though it was way more real than these other plastic guitars I had as a kid. I owned an old wooden Stella guitar as well that was cool at the time, but it still wasn’t a serious guitar. I remember when we visited my grandmother, who lived in Sheepshead Bay, we went to this new shopping mall there called Kings Plaza and that’s where I bought this guitar. It was probably about $75 or $100, which was a lot of money for me to spend on an instrument back then and yet it was still pretty cheap for a playable guitar. This was the guitar I played in high school, learning folk music and Beatles songs, and it’s the guitar I played in my first band, Tumbleweed, when we played in our high school talent show — my first “gig.”

  The first serious acoustic guitar I had — a beautiful guitar, handmade by a luthier who owned the company — was a Favilla. These Favilla guitars did very well for a while. Then, at certain point, the market was not as good so he started farming out the guitars for manufacturing in Japan and finished them in the U.S., where he put his name on them. His claim to fame at the time was that Paul Simon was playing Favilla guitars — this would have been during the early ’70s, when I was in high school.

  When I started playing guitar, it was performers like Crosby, Stills & Nash, Neil Young and James Taylor that were important to me. A girlfriend in high school taught me the chords for some of the acoustic songs off The White Album, “Rocky Raccoon” and “I Will” and “Julia” and “Blackbird.” I started trying to play fingerpick s
tyle. Then, a year or two later, an older cousin of mine who is still a pretty decent guitarist showed me a couple songs in open tunings. These were songs off the first Crosby, Stills & Nash record in open E tuning, like “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes,” and stuff off Neil Young’s After the Gold Rush album in drop-D tuning.

  These tunings struck me because they sounded beautiful and it was easy to play something in an open tuning and have it sound nice right away. You didn’t have to be that proficient a player, actually — yet it gave me a whole new way of thinking about the guitar and new approaches to playing the guitar. I continued along this path of exploring alternate tunings until Sonic Youth started. Shortly before the band began, I was playing with a guy named Glenn Branca who was making orchestral music for oddly tuned electric guitars and Sonic Youth stepped into this as well. We were tuning guitars in odd ways. From those Crosby, Stills & Nash songs I discovered David Crosby’s tunings and Joni Mitchell’s and from there I fell into older music like Reverend Gary Davis and people like that who were playing slide or fingerstyle guitar.

  By the time I entered high school, I was getting more into electric rock music, especially the San Francisco scene, stepping off from Sgt. Pepper and the wilder Beatles experiments to The Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane. Around that time, I bought my first electric guitar — a Hagström II, a Swedish brand. This electric guitar is the first one I started playing rock songs on and using in the first band I played in, but I was actually mostly just the singer in that band. I was playing with a bunch of guys who were really good players at the time, and they wouldn’t always let me play!

  Lee Ranaldo in his high school band, the Tumbleweeds, at age eighteen. (Courtesy Lee Ranaldo)

  The Hagström II had been stripped of its paint, and I repainted it a glossy black. A couple years later, when I was about to graduate from high school, I bought a Fender Telecaster off a friend of mine — a cream white Telecaster like the kind George Harrison played at the Bangladesh concerts. It was a Fender — a real guitar. I owned that guitar for several years until I traded it in for another Telecaster, a Tele Deluxe, at about the same time I started my first band in Binghamton, New York, which was called The Fluks.

  The guitar became an obsession. I remember getting, along with that Hagström II, a little Sears & Roebuck amplifier. My room was on the second floor of our house so I remember just closing the door and turning this little amp up to 10 and going crazy with the guitar, trying to get all kinds of wild feedback after seeing Hendrix and The Who in the Woodstock movie, and trying to figure out what more aggressive type of stuff the guitar could do. My mother was musical so she was always happy that there was music in the house. My parents didn’t really understand ’60s music as it moved along, but they were always encouraging of the fact that what I was doing was musical, so I was always playing my guitar. I also sang in vocal groups throughout high school. I think my parents were surprised that it turned out I did something professionally with music and was making this really crazy music, as they perceived Sonic Youth to be, and that people were paying money to come and see this!

  When I first went to a university, I had a roommate who was into that kind of music, so I moved from ’60s folk and rock music to a little further back in time and was learning how to play some of that real fingerstyle stuff, often in open tunings as well. Joni Mitchell songs and some by Jorma Kaukonen in Jefferson Airplane, he had beautiful acoustic guitar songs in open tunings that I figured out how to play. At this point in time, I rarely touch a guitar with a normal tuning. Two other artists whose music influenced me a lot are Leo Kottke and John Fahey. What they were doing with acoustic guitars in strange tunings really knocked me out. I came to Leo’s records first, that first record called 6- and 12-String Guitar that had been released by Fahey on Fahey’s label, Tacoma, and I came to Fahey’s records through that. I still hold that stuff near and dear. I managed to get to know Fahey during the last decade of his life, and we did a little tour together. He never failed to be inspiring in his approach to the instrument.

  My kids just recently wanted to start learning how to play guitar so I tuned up a guitar in normal tuning for them — and I recently wrote a couple songs on it for just picking it up. I approached it the way I do with my other non-standard tuning guitars, that is, not by playing a G chord or A chord, but just putting my fingers down to see what happens and that was kind of cool. Normally if I pick up a standard-tuned guitar I revert back to the songs I learned how to play in high school, because that’s really the last time I spent much time playing in normal tuning. But now I picked it up as though it was one of the other alt-tuned guitars I have lying around and just forgot that it was tuned standard!

  I love the history and tradition of the guitar, and I found the history of stringed instruments particularly fascinating, especially as I moved further into playing in various open tunings. Stringed instruments have a long history with opening tunings. The piano is a stringed instrument. I think that’s where my heart lies. Over time, as I’ve been playing guitar, I’ve experimented with lap steel, autoharps and zithers and recently with 4-string tenor guitars — maybe I’m getting back to that little plastic stringed ukulele I once had! I’m back to looking around for 4-stringed guitars. I love that it’s a portable concert instrument, whether it’s acoustic or electric.

  An electric guitar has a whole other set of connotations in terms of what you can do with the power of the volume and sound and what it does to sound in terms of overtones and all these things that happen when you plug a guitar into an amplifier. All that beautiful stuff is there in an acoustic instrument but it is just magnified in different ways in an electric guitar in a way that seems so modern. I love to pick up any instrument and fool around with it, and it’s probably the reason I have many instruments because each one has its own particular character that I find interesting.

  Even the crappiest guitar, you can pick up and find something inspiring in it. In the early days of Sonic Youth, all we had were crappy guitars, so we were looking to do what we could with these guitars that would prove them useful. We were not going to tune them normally to try to get G chords or C chords because in five minutes they would go out of tune and sound terrible, but you could tune them all to one note or in different ways and obtain wobbly choruses of notes or insert sticks under the strings and turn them into percussion instruments or whatnot. We gravitated toward better guitars over time but never lost the idea that you could pick up any instrument and prove it to be useful.

  Playing an F-chord and a B-flat chord, also the A-barre and E-barre were definitely the two biggest challenges I faced when learning the guitar. They were so difficult at first! I also remember starting to play on steel strings and how difficult that was on the fingers. I’m working on a solo record at the moment, and I’ve been playing an awful lot more than I normally play and the steel strings still kick my ass sometimes. They really dig into your fingers and these days, I like to use the absolute heaviest strings possible so it’s even more intense of a workout. Definitely getting all the regular chords down was the hardest thing to accomplish early on with the guitar, along with figuring out fingerpicking, and keeping the bass moving with the thumb. I still hate the B-flat chord and will avoid it if I can. The early days were the hardest. After that, it’s kind of like you’re on a discovery mission, especially when the open tunings came in. You can walk into a shop and pick up a guitar that hasn’t been tuned in five years and obviously it is in some tuning and start finding interesting things. It’s not that difficult. You could pick up a box made out of wood with some strings on it and an amp and make some sound come out it.

  I definitely have photos from my first public performance showing me with my cheap $70 Brooklyn guitar. I can’t find any with the Beatles ukulele, but that photograph of my performance in the Brooklyn guitar shows that pre-Favilla halfway-nice acoustic. It was at my high school auditorium, I was in eleventh grade with two other guys playing and we called ourselves Tumbleweed. We all wo
re flannel shirts with really long hair. We played one original piece and a Stephen Stills song and a Chuck Berry song with a piano player and another guy singing. So it was a trio of guitar players, and then these two other guys.

  Sonic Youth had all of our gear stolen at a show in California in 1999 — an entire truckload of stuff. I told you that I’d gotten the Hagström II followed by the George Harrison white Telecaster, which I later traded for an even better Tele, which is a guitar that is super significant in my whole playing history. It was a Fender Tele Deluxe, with a dark wood grain, made in the early ’70s, with a white pick guard and an f-hole on one side, so it was kind of semi-hollow as a lot of the Tele Deluxes were. It had these pickups in it called wide range humbuckers, which Fender manufactured at the time. Most Telecasters had single-coil pickups at the time but the Deluxes came with humbucker pickups.

  At a certain point, this became my favorite guitar. It was the guitar I played all through my first band, The Fluks. And it was the first official guitar that I brought to Sonic Youth. Thurston had a Harmony guitar and I had this f-hole Tele Deluxe, which was by far the best guitar in the band at the time because we had all these other cheapie ones that I was telling you about. So that guitar continued to be played throughout Sonic Youth’s career and can be heard on a lot of those early records, and those pickups, to jump around a little bit, became my favorite. I really liked the warm sound of those pickups, so we started buying more of those guitars. Now I’ve got four of those Fender Tele Deluxes from the early ’70s and they all look identical — that boring brown wood grain. These guitars did not come in an array of fancy colors.

  At a certain point, I gravitated toward playing Fender Jazzmasters, and at one point, between myself and one of our crew guys, we got the idea that since I liked the wide range humbucker pickups and I also liked the Jazzmasters that we ought to put these humbucking pickups into the Jazzmaster guitars. We tried making one and dubbed it the “Jazzblaster,” we took out the single coil pickups that Thurston loves and put in these wide range Fender humbucker pickups. Doing this launched an entire odyssey. I really loved it — I loved the shape of those Jazzmasters and the sound of those pickups. And at this point, I have about seven or eight of these Jazzblasters.