by Julia Crowe
I knew I would be a musician for the rest of my life even before I had started playing. I just knew that there was no other route for me and this is what was I wanted to be doing. I never wavered. My very first gig was at a very big festival in Fargo called Riverfront Days, and we had rehearsed for weeks. Performing was nothing at all what I’d thought it would be, in terms of my preconceptions. Even from rehearsing, performing is about coming from a place of focus in a way I was not accustomed to. It was really challenging and hard for a while to get used to that feeling. Performing was not a fairytale, like imagining all these slow-motion moments of great choreography and sweat flying off your hair while you do some cool move. It was just this stark sensation of “Oh man, everybody’s looking at me and I’d better not mess up.”
I had this Telecaster that I bought when I was sixteen, after I had started falling in love with Telecasters. After I discovered Albert Collins, who is the master of the Telecaster, I was hooked on the idea of playing the Telecaster. I bought this 1976 Tele Custom and it wound up getting stolen with all the other band gear in Detroit one year. It was just heartbreaking. There was another guitar that I loved equally and the same thing happened, where gear had been stolen from the “security-guarded” parking lot of a hotel. It seemed like an inside job, though this really couldn’t be proved. Then a fan who used to attend our shows a lot with his son phoned and informed me he was an FBI agent. He’d heard what had happened with our stolen band gear and offered to help. He wound up getting us much of that gear back, including one of my guitars. It was like seeing your long lost love again.
During the “Lie to Me” video shoots, which were shot at the Black Market Music in San Francisco, there was a ’57 Fender Esquire, basically a Telecaster, hanging from the ceiling and that’s the one I used in the video. I just fell in love with this guitar. But it cost $6,500. I did not have that kind of money. The president of our label, Al Cafaro, heard that I loved this guitar and got it for me as a birthday present. That is a very, very special guitar for me because the whole experience I had early on with A&M and Al Cafaro and other people had been incredible. They were so kind and just great people. That is very hard to come by, especially these days in the music industry.
Frank Vignola
New York–born Frank Vignola is an American jazz guitarist who has worked as a sideman with artists such as Madonna, Leon Redbone, Wynton Marsalis, Les Paul and Ringo Starr. Known for his incredible technique, he has written eighteen instructional guitar books and recorded multiple instructional CD-ROMs. His record Vignola Plays Gershwin (Mel Bay Records) ranked #2 in National Public Radio airplay charts.
I started playing when I was six years old. My step-grandmother’s first husband, who was a guitarist, had a 1958 D’Angelico New Yorker guitar. That is the guitar I started to play. It had an eighteen-inch body with a blond spruce top, so the guitar was basically bigger than me. I don’t know if you’re familiar with a 1958 D’Angelico New Yorker, but they’re considered the Stradivarius of guitars, worth about $80,000.
I did not play any other instruments until I was about thirteen years old. I learned to play the tenor banjo. My father played it and I played a few chords, but I did this because I started to land opportunities to play in Dixieland bands. Once I learned a bit more, I started playing gigs with four to five Dixieland bands per week. My father had jam sessions with guitars and banjos, so the dynamic at first was that everybody in the house seemed to play an instrument. I knew I wanted to learn to play something, and I probably realized that it was wiser for me to learn how to play the guitar first rather than choose a novelty instrument, like the tenor banjo, at least as a start. My fascination came from desire to play guitar with these older guys. After a couple of guitar lessons, I remember specifically thinking, “This is what I want to do!” I knew from the age of seven that I was going to be a professional guitar player. I know that sounds crazy, but I never thought about anything else. I had no other interest besides the guitar. I just knew I was going to be a guitar player. I’ve always believed that either you’re a musician or you’re not. If you want to play the horn, you’re going to do every possible thing you can to play that horn, even starve, if your passion is there to do it. It is a gift to want to play. People who have another job on the side and play only semi-professionally — they’re not really musicians. Musicians are born with the desire to do that and nothing but that.
My father was supportive of my interest in playing and used to take me on his gigs with him. My mother was a little freaked out because at age sixteen I had started playing at a club with my dad’s friends and did not come home until the sun was coming up. We played until two thirty a.m., and then I went out to have breakfast with my dad’s friends, who were nearly my grandfather’s age, and then I came home. My mom told me that I had to get a summer job. I became a counselor at a camp that summer but then would take at least two days off each week to go play some gig. After that summer, I think she saw that I was making more playing two gigs than I was weekly as a camp counselor. She finally gave in at that point.
There is nothing more fun than being able to make music with people. That is the real joy in playing. It was a social outlet for me, too. I couldn’t stand school. I did well but I felt I was learning more for being able to practice along with Joe Pass! Socially, playing the guitar was great for me because it allowed me to meet other people who were interested in the same things I was.
When I was just supporting myself, playing the guitar professionally was relatively easy. I was fortunate because I always had about eight to ten gigs weekly ever since high school. Sometimes it was Dixieland gigs. Sometimes it was dressed as Santa playing guitar and strolling around a Macy’s department store. And sometimes I played music that I really enjoyed playing at a jazz club. When you have a family, it makes you look at all this again and ask if you’ll be able to get along by just playing the guitar.
Every college brochure I looked at for studying music said that you could not work professionally during the first year of study. My thought was “What? I have to give up a living in order to study?” I found a place to live in Manhattan and started playing professionally. I was very lucky, but I had worked very hard, too. I auditioned and played for people. You go knock on doors. My first break, so to speak, came about this way. I was playing society parties at the time, wearing a tuxedo and playing with a big band. After about a year of this, I started feeling down about it all. I felt it was not working. I was not happy. So I remember walking straight into Michael’s Club, which was a big cabaret in New York — I was still wearing my tuxedo — and Michael, the owner, had a reputation for being a little odd. But I walked in there anyway and asked him if he would consider hiring a Django Reinhardt tribute band. He said to me rather gruffly, “I want to hear a tape! Send me a tape!” The next night, I went into the studio at about three a.m., had a little faith and handed a tape to him the next night. He called back a few days later to tell me he had a spot open for two weeks. I did not even have a band and this was a three-week-long engagement in New York City in one of its top clubs! I got a band together and put a show together.
When I walked out onstage, the entire front row was filled with music critics from the New York Times, Newsday, New York Post and Variety magazine. They loved the show. It turned into a feature story. This just proved to me that you’ve got to knock on doors, whether it’s the top club or a little storefront. You’ve got to knock on doors to get work because no one else is going to do it for you. They do not teach you how to do this in college.
I taught at Arizona State University for two years. I started a jazz guitar program there. I had all my students out there working, playing. I would help them hook up with little church cafés and the Starbucks. Once they started making a little extra cash, they couldn’t stop. The other wonderful thing is that my students set themselves to learning fifteen songs they could play within an hour instead of simply choosing to learn two. That is how anyone learns to play. I
remember that the head of the Jazz Department called me into his office and said, “Listen, I understand you have the guys out there working but you’re taking away the teachers’ work and the lesson plans that you should be using.” I thought, “You know what? Back to New York I go.” That was it for me. What are these guys going to do when they get out of school? So what if they have a degree they’ve paid some $80,000 for? They’re not going to know how to get a gig, so how are they going to be able to pay off their student loans? Not only did my plan for them work in the sense of encouraging and teaching them how to go get work — it taught them how to play. With gigs comes rehearsal and that is what we do as musicians, whether you are in school or not. You rehearse and try to get gigs. It never stops.
A Cup of Coffee with Jimmy Page
Five minutes before my appointed time with Mr. Page, I moved away from the bus stop, repositioning myself just outside the London coffee shop. I was wearing a long brown silk scarf with red poppies, easily identifiable, especially as the ends floated upward like the tail of a kite twisting in the breeze. Not to mention, I was the only one standing outside this place like a doofus. From halfway down the block, I heard his voice: “Juuuulllllliiaaaaaaa!”
Jimmy Page was walking toward me, smiling, with tousled black hair and a sportsman’s jacket thrown on over a gray wool cable sweater. I’d expected him to be taller and larger for some reason, possibly because every time I have seen him, he fills the entire length and width of any magazine cover. He surprised me with a bear hug that swooped me off my feet.
“Nice weather, no?” he remarked.
“The Cuban composer Leo Brouwer has a piece that would describe it — ‘Un Dia de Noviembre.’”
“What do you make of the sky? It’s unusual, isn’t it?” he asked, scanning the enormous grey-bellied cumulus clouds hung low and luminous against the winter sun. They were unlike anything I’d seen back home.
“Silvery,” he said.
“Pewter. It’s a pewter sky,” I offered.
Jimmy’s eyes widened a little. “I like that!” He nodded toward the door of the café.
He ordered two cappuccinos for us and winked at the flustered girl behind the counter who, along with other patrons in the restaurant, reflected instantly knowing looks and perceptible smiles as the tumblers finally fell into place as to why the Yankee had come in earlier asking mad questions about possible telephone messages left for her at a café. It was vindication mixed with embarrassment all over again. Jimmy stuffed a generous tip inside the jar at the counter and we carried our milk foam–topped cups toward a table in back and settled in. Jimmy removed a small matchbook-sized plastic case from his pocket that neatly dispensed one sugar-free sweetener tablet into his cup and gave me a bit of a self-conscious look because he probably knew I was taking in that detail.
“I have a feeling we know a few people in common,” he told me.
I was stumped and surprised. “Oh you must mean Santa Claus? The Tooth Fairy?”
He pointed out I was from Chicago, the home of Chess Records. Let’s fast-forward a moment through the pewter sky of this day into the not-too-distant future, when I would complete recording my first CD and meet with my eighty-three-year-old great uncle, great aunt and cousin downtown at a restaurant called The Chicago Pizza and Oven Grinder. The restaurant is housed in a building where Al Capone’s lookout counted the men walking into a long gone garage to meet their fate on St. Valentine’s Day. And it is located a few blocks away from the Biograph Theater, where John Dillinger saw his last moving picture show. You can’t get any more Chicagoan than this collision of old gangster history with Sicilian-style pizza.
I had not seen my uncle (or my aunt) since I was seventeen years old, and my basic recollection of him was as The Uncle Who Gave Us Dreaded Fruitcakes every Christmas, which my grandmother hung out on the back fence with suet for the birds to eat, a favor they’d repay by shitting all over her white Pontiac. Reputedly, he had a hit song from back in the day on his basement jukebox. Whatever it had been, I did not have a clue because, as a ten-year-old, I had been more interested in hitting the jukebox buttons to play Jim Croce’s “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown” to hear the word damn.
“Is that a Les Paul?” my uncle asked of the guitar I had carried protectively with me inside the restaurant. I unzipped the case to show him. “Have you met Les Paul?” he asked me. “I used to play with him on the WLS National Barn Dance show.” My jaw fell open. And stayed open as he told me he had been friends with Stan Kenton, Harry James and Nat King Cole, for whom he’d written the song “Pretend,” the song he had on his basement jukebox. My uncle, it turns out, had been a producer at Chess Records. One day he received a phone call from his pal Sam Phillips, asking his opinion on some new kid named Elvis who had recorded a demo. “Not my cup of tea, but the kid’s got talent. He will be a hit” had been his response.
Elvis later invited him and Aunt Maryon to be on the film set of Love Me Tender. Toward the end of his career, my uncle had also managed The Buckinghams — and played the trumpet section in their hit song, “Kind of a Drag.” My uncle told me that he does not really play his trumpet or saxophone anymore except on rare occasions, with a few buddies of his at the retirement home where he lives out West.
Let’s rewind to the pewter sky now, back to a thin ray of light shining through the coffee shop where I sat with Jimmy Page. Guitars … Chess Records … of course we had something in common, and I had to come all the way to London to find that out.
“I hear you are a rather mobile young lady,” Page said, referring to what he had evidently learned from the office regarding my adventures in London, which included covering a concert at Wigmore Hall. “I’ve not ever been to Wigmore Hall! What is it like?”
I could scarcely believe I had been to a concert hall in London that Page had not. I explained that my boss Maurice had taken pity on me and proposed that I accompany him to a guitar and flute concert to write a review for Her Worshipful Society of Musicians, an ancient guild of English formality dating back to the Middle Ages that holds itself in service to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.
The following morning after the concert I had spent criss-crossing London in search of guitar shops. Later, I wondered if this had not all been a strange test that I had passed unwittingly, one that revealed my true heart and devotion to the guitar and had allowed me this interview. Jimmy surprised me by wanting to hear the details of where I had gone and what things I saw. “I cannot go inside guitar shops anymore,” he said.
He told me of taking classical guitar lessons from Len Williams at the Spanish Guitar Centre on Cranbourn Street in Soho and how distracting it had been when people outside the shop caught sight of him in the window and made him feel like an animal at the zoo. I suggested that if we visited some shops together and played “Stairway to Heaven,” it would provide a magical cloak of invisibility.
Jimmy asked if I might have any recommendations for a decent child-sized electric guitar for his son. The perfect child-size electric guitar he envisioned happened to be one he had seen twenty years ago when he was last on tour in Japan and he was now kicking himself for not buying it on the spot, though of course, this had long been before his son arrived. His son was showing interest in playing now, though he was still physically a little small for a full-sized electric.
“He’s good! He’s talented! And I’m not just saying that because I am his father. He is fearless about trying to get sounds out of the guitar in a way that I had never tried or even thought to try when I was his age.” Jimmy told me they had gone outside to the park the other day and his son had brought along his guitar. Not only had a couple of girls stopped to listen, “but he made £8 from busking! That’s good money!”
Let’s linger here and freeze-frame this moment because nothing more really needs to be said. I was no longer talking to a rock star in a café in London. This could have been absolutely anywhere in the world, any parent, speaking with pride and wonder to see their child dis
covering themselves and finding ways of relating and interacting with the world — all from the simple enjoyment of a guitar.
Jimmy Page
British guitarist Jimmy Page had been a member of The Yardbirds and founded the rock band Led Zeppelin.
The guitar that was my first guitar — it’s a bit of a mystery. My parents lived quite near London airport and we moved from there to a house in Epsom, which was, relatively speaking, in the countryside. The guitar was there in this house. I remember seeing it. It was just there in a corner, hanging around. We certainly didn’t bring it with us from Feltham. Whose was it then? My guess is maybe the guitar might have been left behind at this house. So it was there.
When I was about eleven or twelve years old, I’d really been seduced by this music that I heard coming out of the speakers from the radio. It drew me in, along with what limited access we had to music through television. At the time, skiffle and rock ’n’ roll was tolerated by the authorities, but there soon came a point when it was no longer tolerated and they tried to stamp it underground. And that didn’t work. But it became quite a rebellious thing to tune into AFN radio, the American Forces Network in Europe, and listen a Ventures or rock ’n’ roll tune, or whatever.