Guitars

Guitars are a big part of my life. I play music every day that I am not traveling away from home. It's my medicine. It's sooths me when I need comfort and it gets me pumped up when I need it.

When I was ten years old living on an island off the coast of Alaska, I heard my first rock and roll song. The year was 1964, I was at a friend's house and he put on an LP by The Ventures. We listened to several songs and then the song "Walk, Don't Run" reached inside me, shook me to the core and said, "you must get a guitar so you can do that too!". I was instantly hooked and HAD to have a guitar to learn to play that song. It's all I thought about for weeks. I finally talked my mom into buying me a used Silvertone acoustic guitar for $10 (with painted on tiger stripes, woo hoo!). We had a music teacher at school who knew how to play guitar and he tried hard to get me to take lessons but why fool around with learning musical scales when I could, instead, sit in my room and figure that song out by myself?

My mom got a music book from somewhere that had traditional folk songs such as You Are My Sunshine, Hang Down Your Head Tom Dooley, and On Top Of Old Smokey. I was interested in the book since it had chord diagrams which I could learn to play by myself. There are several milestones in a guitar player's evolution that open up whole new worlds. Learning these chords was milestone number one for me. I could take some of these same chords and apply them to new rock and roll songs I was hearing on the one radio station broadcast on the island. Groups such as The Dave Clark Five, The Beatles, and Herman's Hermits were being played over and over and I was learning how to make the chords I knew fit those songs...in the crudest of fashions of course but it set a foundation for me to learn to play by ear.

In 1966 we moved to a small town outside of Washington DC where rock and roll was in full swing. I had access to so much more music than I did on that tiny island in Alaska. As I heard more songs and learned more chords I could play a lot of the hits songs of the time by all the hot bands: Buffalo Springfield, The Rolling Stones, The Doors, Jefferson Airplane, The Kinks, Strawberry Alarm Clock, The Electric Prunes, The Hollies, The Mamas and Papas...the list was endless. I got all excited by a group that originally hailed from Boise, Idaho called Paul Revere and the Raiders. It was their song Just Like Me that led to my second milestone as a guitar player - bar chords! Once you mastered bar chords, you could play damn near anything.

When 1968 rolled around we moved back to Alaska, this time to Anchorage which was a big city and I still had access to a lot of music. There was lots of rock and roll to be had at that time: Creedence Clearwater Revival, The Byrds, Steppenwolf, The Moody Blues, The Who, Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels, and while I learned to play all that music, it was then that I joined my first band in junior high school. It was very cool to be a guitar player in a rock and roll band, on stage in front of your whole school at the dances but it was Simon and Garfunkel's mastery of folk rock music that really captured my interest at that time. Learning to play Paul Simon's intricate guitar riffs was very difficult for me at the time but it led to my third milestone - finger picking. What a whole new world opened up with that skill. No other guitar players I knew at the time were learning how to finger pick so it enabled me to get into some music groups I might not have been invited to otherwise. For the first time I was playing music with people that knew how to harmonize vocals and intertwine guitar runs.

After many years of playing in talent shows, pizza joints, coffee houses in Europe, bars, state fairs, corporate parties, and weddings I still have that drive I started out with 43 years ago. Every time I hear a song that appeals to me I grab a guitar and start figuring it out. I hope to keep doing that until the day I die.

Today, now that I can afford really good instruments, I have come to view my guitars as pieces of art as well as fine musical instruments. They just look great hanging on the wall! I built a workbench specifically designed to work on guitars and set about building my own electric guitar. It's a Stratocaster shaped body but I wired it a bit differently, replacing one of the tone pots with a switch that will give me the two pick up positions you never get from a Strat.

Here are some of my favorites...my Gibson Les Paul Custom, my Gibson Hummingbird acoustic, my Gretsch Double Anniversary, and my Spector LX-4 bass.