My Guitar Gently Weeps
Awhile back I took my little six string guitar into the shop up north to have some work done on it. My guitbox looks like it was on the losing side of the last War, missing perfling, broken neck up at the top fixed not by a luthier but by a medic with epoxy, odd bridge, ragged scar on the spruce top, break in the tuning head. When I came back a week later to pick her up, the entire backroom of repair luthiers came out with her. “What’s the story with the guitar,” they asked, not quite in unison.
As always, there’s a story….
I had an irascible buddy whose girlfriend had bought a few stained glass pieces from me and would ‘pay me later’. When I brought it up to them a year later, Bill went ballistic, called me a greedhead and drove away after Marge told him I was correct, they did owe me for those windows.
A few years later she came down with terminal cancer so I ended up on hospice duty. Which meant a small rapprochment with Bill. A couple months after Marge died, he stopped by my shack and handed me a moth eaten Persian rug and a guitar. “What’s this?” I asked and he told me it was payment for the glass. Not feeling like another knock-down drag-out fight, I simply accepted the ruined rug and the broken guitar. “What’s the story on the guitar?” I asked.
Turns out some guy had it up at the Pilchuck School of Glass, our little world-reknowned glass blowing headquarters just off island. They’re fairly infamous for their parties, wild bacchanalias of international instructors and rich kid students, and somehow this guitar had been leaning up against a wall, got knocked over by some drunken reveler who managed to step on its neck before falling directly on it, crushing the soundbox flat and breaking the neck in three places. Its owner next day brought it down to Bill to fix. Bill’s no luthier, but on the other hand, Bill was the kind of guy who could fix anything made of wood.
The owner, probably figuring no one could put that shattered jigsaw instrument back together, never came back. And since Bill didn’t play guitar, it sat in his shop for a decade or so. Until it got handed over to me. Inside its soundhole you can barely see the maker’s label, but when you do, it says Martin Guitar, Nazareth, PA. For you non-guitarists, Martin is the gold standard of early guitars in America. Mine, it turned out, was built in 1963 which means it was constructed of Brazilian rosewood before it got banned from import into this country. Brazilian rosewood is THE tonewood of tonewoods. And I have one of the last guitars made with Brazilian rosewood.
If you are of a certain age, you might remember a band from the 60’s called The Association. They wrote Along Comes Mary, Cherish, Windy, all kinds of hits back then. And when they recorded these or played them live, my little guitar was on stage or on the album. It says a great deal about Bill’s woodworking skills that this double ought-21 still plays, much less that it sounds beautiful, perfectly balanced from high string to low. You know, if someone other than me plays it, someone who knows his way around a guitar.
I think the boyz in the music shop knew that too. Too bad, they probably thought, that a certified luthier hadn’t done the repairs because now the little Martin might be worth a small fortune. Maybe so, but I’m not selling instruments and if I were, this would be the one I’d keep. Or like the song Cherish sez: I could say I need you but then you’d realize/ That I want you just like a thousand other guys.
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Tags: luthier repair, martin guitar, pilchuck glass party
Wonderful story.