Guitar Lessons E-Book

Bob Taylor

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 347

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

The inside story of the founding and growth of Taylor Guitars, one of the world's most successful guitar manufacturers Bob Taylor mixes the details of his experience as a tradesman and cofounder of Taylor Guitars, a world-famous acoustic and electric guitar manufacturer, with philosophical life lessons that have practical application for building a business. From the "a-ha" moment in junior high school that inspired his very first guitar, Taylor has been living the American dream, crafting quality products with his own hands and building a successful, sustainable business. In Guitar Lessons, he shares the values that he lives by and that have provided the foundation for the company's success. Be inspired by a story of guts and gumption, an unwavering commitment to quality, and the hard lessons that made Taylor Guitars the company it is today.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Foreword

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter 1 - Life’s Little Lessons

How’d You Know?

Get in Line

Chapter 2 - My Very First Guitar

Whatever it Takes to Get the Job Done

Music and Shop Class

It’s a Family Affair

Chapter 3 - Inspiration

Trust and Respect

Chapter 4 - The American Dream

Developing My Craft

$10,000 and a Dream

Chapter 5 - On Our Own

Planning for the Future

Where Plan and Execution Meet

Chapter 6 - Early Successes and Early Failures

Finishing What We Started

New Opportunities

Chapter 7 - Sweat Equity

Start Early and Work Hard

The Thing About Money

Making Decisions

Hard Work and Dedication

Our First Paycheck

Improving our Craft

Chapter 8 - Figuring It Out, One Guitar at a Time

A New Mind Set

Practice Makes Perfect

You Are Only as Good as Your Employees

Outfitting the Shop

It’s Business, Not Personal

Chapter 9 - Finding Our Place

The Rise of the Electric Guitar

On the Road

And Then There Were Two

Chapter 10 - Gaining Traction

Chapter 11 - On the Move

Chapter 12 - Making Our Case

Chapter 13 - We’re All in This Together

Split Personality

Admitting Our Shortcomings

Delivering Bad News

Chapter 14 - Embracing Technology

How Francis, Adrian, Dave, and Larry Changed Guitars

Chapter 15 - Building Our Brand

Chapter 16 - Innovation

Sticking Our Necks Out

Amplifying Our Efforts

Creating New Solutions

Chapter 17 - Artists and Celebrities

An Extra Fret Will Do It

Then Along Came Doyle

My Stint as the A&R Guy

You Have to Meet This Guy

Chapter 18 - In 10 Years, We’ll Be Glad We Did

Chapter 19 - The Third Owner

Our Hills and Valleys

Being Your Own Third Owner

EPILOGUE

Photo insert

Copyright © 2011 by Bob Taylor. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

Published simultaneously in Canada.

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ISBN 978-0-470-93787-7 (cloth); ISBN 978-1-118-03866-6 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-0386703 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-03868-0 (ebk)

I dedicate this book to my partner Kurt Listug, whose contributions to the success of Taylor Guitars are equal in every way to mine.

FOREWORD

My cousin, Bob Taylor, asked me to write a foreword for his upcoming book this summer. The request almost coincided with the death of his uncle, Robert Taylor, for whom he most likely was named, so a foreword seemed a just cause. The Taylors are a family who lived the hardscrabble life of Northeast Montana. They are a pragmatic, hard-working, intelligent clan that has married into my mother’s family twice. Regardless of our relationship, Bob has written a book that makes one admire his ingenuity and the perseverance of his partners in Taylor Guitars. As a young man, Bob Taylor found his passion in shop class—how to creatively build things—it consumed him. It reminded me of a statement I once saw above a dressing room mirror in an arena in 1970. It simply said: “Make your work your play and play your work”—Sri Chinmoy. Bob’s book is an intriguing story of making that concept a reality.

Bob’s grandfather, Pierre, whom Bob bears a light resemblance to, was a man of many words. He loved to tell stories; in fact, he wrote a history of his family for the successive generations. Pierre Taylor told stories about living on the homestead land in eastern Montana. He described the survival skills necessary to live on a homestead 100 years ago—the challenges such as traveling by horse-drawn wagons to Canada to catch fish and salting them in barrels to have food stocked away for the winter; making long trips to the woods by the Missouri River to gather enough fuel to survive the brutal winters on the plains. The Taylors spent much of their time scratching out a living, and Uncle Pierre wanted the successive generations to remember the harsh land and life that colored their family’s self-determination. What Bob does with his business reflects this determination that made his grandfather proud.

I knew Bob as a youngster only by letters from his mom in our family “Robin.” In that day and age, before e-mail, there was a monthly letter sent out called a “Robin” that kept us abreast of the kin. The Taylors were a Navy family stationed in San Diego. Dick Taylor, Bob’s dad, was the tallest person in the family until I outgrew him a decade later. On the family ranch there was a pencil mark on the door frame of Dick’s height that I later would eclipse. Bob was reported in the Robin to be absorbed in his guitar-making business, which struggles from month to month to make ends meet. What Bob does with his business reflects the same determination that made his grandfather proud.

I called Bob about 15 years ago to ask him about purchasing a couple of guitars as presents for my twin boys. I had heard about how Bob’s struggling business had become a successful enterprise and that his guitars were exceptional. My former wife and partner, June, a music fan, while hanging around backstage at a Grateful Dead concert, saw the respect a musician had for his Taylor guitar and sent me on a mission. “Find your boys a Taylor guitar. It would make them a perfect gift.” By now, most of my family has a Taylor in their house. Some of them can’t play more than a couple of chords (like me) and others have a real feel for playing, but they all love their Taylor made guitars. I thought it might be nice to include a personal testimony from boys-to-adults about their guitars:

Ben: “Several years ago a friend of mine revealed to me that his father had been a painter and that he himself was a dedicated pianist throughout his childhood. When I asked him why he did not choose a path in the visual arts or in music, he explained that he did not want his art to be heard or seen during the moments of composition. Even the thought of an ear at the wall bothered him; even a distant eye on an unfinished brushstroke generated discomfort. He told me that he felt most at ease when he experienced a degree of privacy in the composition of his art, which ultimately led him to poetry.

After our discussion, I thought about my relationship with the arts and, in particular, poetry. As a poet, I understood that I, too, value poetry as one of the most private arts. However, during the late hours of the night, when I am not working on poems or when I’ve grown exhausted by my writing “voice,” I often pick up my Taylor 710 dreadnought and find a quiet nook to carve out an intimate bond with my guitar. Those moments provide a crucial outpour, an escape from language.”

Charley: “Graduation nears and my father tells me there’s a pre-graduation gift waiting in my bedroom; my father houses a four string mini-Martin in Montana, that at 6 foot 8 inches tall, I’ll never quite comprehend. I open an oversized box to find my first, my own, guitar: a Taylor CE, cutaway. The spruce wood oiled and rich, contrasted by the rosewood outline, and the mother-of-pearl inlays, is graciously inviting. I tentatively pick up my gift to hear what voice it has, for me and my buddies, around our campfire. A first scale is fingered, a chord strummed, and my love for this instrument is instilled for a lifetime.”

Once in a while, Bob comes to LA for business, gives a call, and comes to a game. We wave at each other from the floor to the stands. There is a professional pride in knowing we’re both working the same way at a different game. While on a plane, I was reading Bob’s account of when he got the “a-ha” moment of knowing that one guitar at a time is the right way to teach his workforce and build the guitars, when one of the Lakers captains, Derek Fisher, got up from his seat and asked me to read a portion of my book from 20 years ago, Sacred Hoops, which stated that the repetition of skills that is required of players is what makes the execution of our triangle offense possible. It brings a sense of accomplishment to refine these skills. Reading how Bob found a way to hone the basic techniques of making a guitar down to the easiest possible denominator verified my admiration for his perseverance. There is a way to work and make it enjoyable, and yet dignified, for those who want to have excellence in their work. Bob Taylor has cut that Gordian knot that makes his guitars things to be cherished.

—Phil Jackson

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I’m honored to say thank you to a few people for their contribution to this book. To Chalise Zolezzi, who first brought this idea to me and continually bestowed confidence in me during the writing process. To Matt Holt for believing it was a good project and for keeping it interesting along the way. To Shannon Vargo who took stories that I thought were pretty good and made them better.

I’d like to thank Jonathan Forstot, for his good sense, and for naming this book. Thanks to Cory Sheehan and Rita Hoffman for their quality design on the book jacket and photo inserts. And to the staff at Taylor Guitars who are always on my side and help me in every way they can.

A special thank you to my friend and guitar-building mate, Larry Breedlove, for 25 years of guitar building. Nobody could have helped me shape my ideas into real guitars as well as Larry.

And I’d like to thank my wife, Cindy, and my daughters, Minét and Natalie. They are my biggest fans, and have a way of keeping it real. I love them more than Taylor Guitars.

INTRODUCTION

RUST NEVER SLEEPS

“I heard he plays one of your guitars in it!” said Steve Phillips, my best buddy in those days. “We have to go one night this week, the sooner the better.”

Steve and I had been friends for years. It was 1979, I was 24 years old, and we had both been married for about two years by then. We’d met in church, our wives became best friends, and the four of us did everything together.

Steve was more into music than I was, as well as books, movies, and news magazines. He kept me informed. People always thought that since I was a guitar maker I must be an avid musician, and therefore, be in the know of what is going on in the music scene around the world. While there is a bit of truth to that, I was primarily a woodworker with dirty hands and jeans, and a desk piled high with tool catalogs.

However, with my brother-in-law Mike, I played my fair share of music—years’ worth, in fact—starting when we were just kids. Mike was Neil Young’s biggest fan and together we spent countless hours playing Neil’s songs. In fact, I’m sure I’ve learned more Neil Young songs from Mike than from listening to Neil’s records. But I am a fan of Neil’s music, and when Steve told me that he heard Neil was playing one of my guitars in his new movie Rust Never Sleeps, I had to go.

What 24-year-old, in those days, didn’t have memories of driving to high school as a senior in a car with an eight-track tape deck and a copy of Neil Young’s Harvest playing over and over? We screwed tape decks to the bottoms of our dash boards and put a couple plywood speaker boxes on the floor somewhere, filled up the tanks for 29 cents per gallon and drove to wherever listening to “Old Man,” “Heart of Gold,” and “The Needle and the Damage Done.”

If you’re my age, you know what I mean. And when we sold those cars we owned and relieved their back seats of the junk—along with the towels and some swimming trunks, the tools you used to keep the car running, and maybe a hair brush, or a map that was never folded back to its original condition—among the pile of stuff was usually an eight track of Neil Young’s Harvest.

There was a big theater in the Mission Valley section of San Diego called Pacific’s Cinerama. It was one of those huge 70-foot-wide curved screens, and all the big movies played there. When I was a kid, I went with my childhood friend, Greg Robinson, to the movie Grand Prix at this same theater. We sat in the front row eating Flix Nonpareils chocolates with the cars racing around us across the big screen. I got so car sick I had to walk to the back. I still can’t eat a Flix to this day. Then there was Star Wars some 14 years later and now, Rust Never Sleeps.

Steve and I scheduled a night and got a few other friends together and we headed to the theater. I was nervous. I hated the anticipation that something was going to happen for fear that it might not. I prefer to drink my disappointment alone, not with an audience of friends interviewing me. Of course, news travels fast when a celebrity buys your guitars. I had been told that Neil Young had bought a Taylor guitar by the dealer who sold it to him. Then, I’d heard from Steve that Neil Young played a Taylor guitar in this movie, but I didn’t know it for a fact.

When I walked into the theater, I was met with a flurry of questions:

“Hey Bob, how did you know Neil plays a guitar in the movie?”

“What song does he play?”

“Have you met him; is he a cool guy? Can you get us his autograph?”

“What are you gonna do when you see him play it? Are you gonna just freak out?”

Of course, I didn’t have the answers. I was going to find all this out myself, but by the time we’d walked in I was somehow feeling the responsibility to make it turn out good. It was hard for me to bridge that gap between how I felt about it and how everyone else did. They were on my side; I knew that.

We took our seats and I was just hoping that the buddies I was with wouldn’t start telling the row in front of us that Neil plays one of my guitars in the movie, because I didn’t want to live through it if he didn’t.

But he did.

It didn’t happen right at the start, it was a while into the film. Every new song he played was somehow a tease to me, waiting to see if this was really going to happen.

Finally, he strapped on the Taylor 855 12-string, put on his harmonica, and walked around the stage, playing “My My Hey Hey (Out of The Blue)” on this glorious guitar and singing. Just him, that 12-string we’d made, and a harmonica.

That guitar was two stories high on that big screen, you could see every detail, it’s shape, the name on the peghead, the bridge—it was all there. And the sound would have been George Lucas approved, I’m sure of it.

All at once, I was overcome by a feeling of total satisfaction, alone with myself, soaking in the moment, followed by total embarrassment as my buddies slapped me, looked for reaction, and told people around us that I had made that guitar. Not much has changed to this day in that department.

I walked out of that movie a little more confident, proud that I’d come that far, that I’d made a guitar that Neil Young would buy and play in a movie like that.

The next morning I went to the shop and looked around, realizing that, as great as it was, the night before hadn’t changed my life all that much and I still had a lot of work ahead of me if this business of ours was ever going to pan out.

I strapped on my apron and started cutting wood.

1

Life’s Little Lessons

When I was in the second grade, my grandpa told me that if I were able to shake salt on the tail of a bird I would be able to catch it, easy as pie, if only I could just get the salt on its tail.

This excited me to no end. It was all I could think about, so I got a saltshaker and went outside. Even though I hadn’t thought much about it before this, I decided I wanted a pet bird, and wondered who had been keeping this valuable information from me until now. There was something magical about the idea of capturing the mind and body of a bird. I imagined going to school with a bird that sat on my shoulder and ate from my hands. He’d live in my bedroom perched on a stick just waiting to join me in whatever adventure we’d have that day. I couldn’t wait to see it up close and to feel the feathers. I wasn’t sure how the salt on its tail changed a bird’s mind but I was willing to try my grandpa’s advice.

I spent the day creeping up on every bird in the neighborhood. I was patient. But soon I learned that most birds weren’t really on the ground where I was, and so I started climbing trees, stretching out, waiting, hanging from branches, putting myself at risk. This went on all day and into the next. I was singly focused, and worked toward that reward. Soon I realized that getting the salt on the tail of a bird was impossible for a kid to do. Maybe I was just too young. I wondered if anyone ever really got so close that they were able to actually get that salt on a tail. Eventually, I started tossing salt at birds but that just made them fly away.

After a couple days I asked my grandpa about this and he explained that a bird isn’t about to let you get close him, and if he let you get close enough to put the salt on his tail then you were also close enough to catch the bird. I felt a little ripped off, but at the same time I now understood. By then his lesson was making sense and the two days I spent trying to get salt on a bird’s tail didn’t seem like a waste to me. I had to let the short-lived dream of having a trusty bird-mate fade away, but I thought that somehow I was a little smarter because of it all. In fact I remember telling other kids at the time what I’d been up to and that it really was a bit of a mental trick, a play on words, and I became proud of the fact that I understood the more subtle lesson. They didn’t understand because they hadn’t spent two days trying to actually do it.

I never regretted the time I spent trying. In fact, I spent a lot of time in thought, and considerable time thinking of other ways one might catch a bird. I even designed and set a couple traps when I figured out how hard it was to get the salt on the tail. I got creative and for those two days, I believed in the goal enough to work pretty hard at achieving it.

It’s a funny story to remember at this point in my life, but I do, along with a hundred other stories where I literally dogged it, trying to figure a way to reach my goals. My life is filled with these stories that hold within them precious lessons, advice, and experience. Some are simple, and some took years to unfold, but the experiences went into my quiver, and either a skill, attitude, or habit was put away, to be utilized at some future date. I will share these stories and their lessons in this book.

I often wonder why it is that as children we will work to death on a project, but then as we get older we give up so easily. I realize we are each wired differently, but this pattern is common with so many people. I can’t answer the question of why some of us will figure things out and some of us won’t, or why some of us will work until we get it and some of us won’t, but I can say that those who are willing to work toward their goals and learn, will eventually get there and accomplish something above average.

Nearly all of us can think back to the simpler times of our youth when we were passionate about an idea and worked on it as though we were going to be successful. What if those youthful passions had been nourished and exercised from the very first days? How far along the paths to their dreams would many people be? What if you could help revive or redirect your efforts back into some of the passions and interests that were lost along the way? Or if you could simplify what needed to be done to get closer to where you want to be?

How’d You Know?

Often people ask me how I discovered my passion. It didn’t happen that I was walking along and all of a sudden, wham, a bolt of lightning came out of the blue. Yet many feel they haven’t been so lucky as to hear their calling about what to do with their lives. They express that if they had met their lightning bolt, then maybe they would have more meaningful lives.

Many people think my passion is music, that I’m nuts about guitars and that my life was a long road of playing guitars and becoming an expert on music. Most people who follow that path become famous guitar players, not famous builders. My passion, instead, is making things, understanding how stuff is made, and figuring out how things work.

I’ve broken nearly everything I’ve ever owned at one time or another, trying to figure out how it works. There was the folding travel alarm clock that my folks bought me for Christmas that by the next morning wasn’t working right because I’d disassembled it. I took it apart and put it back together, and through that I got a great look at the inside of a clock. Maybe the only lesson I learned was to not take a new clock apart, because it never really worked right after that. One might think that was careless and disrespectful, but I disagree. I learned how disappointed I was to have a clock that worked and then a clock that didn’t. I also learned to take things apart more carefully in the future. I managed to make it work well enough.

With experience one can learn how to look at things and find out how they come apart and go back together. By learning how other people make stuff, it will help when one day you’re learning how to make your own stuff. I’ve experienced as much as 30-year gaps between learning something and applying it. It’s not always immediate.

I also learned that you can’t let the speaker wires on your stereo touch each other or they will short out and you might blow the amplifier. There are some amps that will and some that won’t. The stereo that I worked all summer to earn the money to buy when I was in seventh grade was one of those that gets ruined when you touch those particular wires together. I found that out just a couple days after buying it while trying to hot-rod some other speakers. I looked at the inside of it for hours, because I’d fixed some similar things like it before by looking and thinking and finally seeing something that was off. But this one needed a pro, so my dad took me to get it fixed. I learned a lot by breaking that stereo—mainly how to be more careful in my exploration. This comes in handy when your car acts up and you have to look and observe carefully to get it going again, and you simply can’t afford to break it by careless exploration into the problem. Other people learn different things by breaking something. They learn to stop taking things apart, or they learn to hire a professional, and that professional would eventually be me, or someone like me.

I learned how to take my friend’s bicycle brake apart slower and more quietly than I took mine apart, being more observant and more deliberate. Like defusing a bomb in a movie, you have to be quiet and thoughtful and pay attention.

So my story is about how my interest in building things and my interest in playing guitars merged, and how to this day the two burn off each other like two logs in a fireplace. It’s about how I took a talent and an interest and combined them into one, where they both could be nurtured and where I could gain satisfaction from the work. And it’s about learning to make a living from doing what seems impossible, namely, starting at the beginning, with no assets and working until it grows into something. And there was a lot to figure out, not just the guitar, but the machines, the factory, the employees, the government, the marketing, the sales, the finance, the R&D. I’ll say right now that it took two of us, my partner Kurt Listug and myself to tackle all that needed to be learned. Kurt figured out the marketing, sales, and finance, while I figured out the guitars, the factory, and the training of people.

Get in Line

My colleague and friend Greg Deering, of Deering Banjos fame, has been involved with the Boy Scouts of America for most his life. When organizing his troop for an activity he says, “Okay, form two lines. This one on the right is the ‘I can figure this out myself line’ and the one on the left is the ‘I have to have someone show me everything about it line.’ ”

The amazing thing is that some actually get into the “show me everything about it” line. They do that willingly; they make that decision for themselves, and take the reward that is appropriate for that effort. We all have interests we want to learn about or put effort into and other things in which we’re just not interested. When you’re involved in something you enjoy, and you’re there for a purpose, how much effort do you put forth? For me, there are activities that I am willing to dig into, work toward, and learn about—those are the things I am passionate about.

That willingness to figure out how to do things on my own might have been why I cut the neck off my first guitar. I had no fear of trying things on my own. I also knew that I wouldn’t get in trouble for trying. My friends would have gotten in big trouble, but their moms and dads didn’t make things like my folks did. My mom sewed clothes and my dad fixed things around the house, built furniture, and worked on the car. My folks also didn’t buy me much stuff, so I had to either learn how to make things or earn some money to get it on my own.

There seems to be a lot of formulas for success out there, and most of them are true and have much merit. But one thing that is common to just about all the stories is the positive effect that work and experience has on your success. Now, there are many things that can thwart the work, and they might not be your fault. Nevertheless, people who, one way or another, manage to get a lot of experience in an area of interest usually get good at it.

2

My Very First Guitar

My dad, Dick Taylor, was a seaman in the Navy when I was growing up. He eventually retired as Interior Communication Electrician, Senior Chief Petty Officer, right about when I graduated from high school, but with four kids at home there never was much extra money for my parents to buy all the things we might ask for.

I bought my first guitar from Michael Broward when I was in the fourth grade. He was older than me and already knew how to play guitar. He lived across the street from the house I grew up in and I used to stand in his garage and watch, as he’d strap on that electric guitar and plug into an amplifier on the floor. It was small, maybe knee-high, and he’d plug a microphone into it as well. Then he’d play “Wipe Out” or “Ghost Riders in the Sky” or my personal favorite, “Mrs. Brown You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter.” He even sang the word “douaghtah” just like Herman did.

Next door to Michael was another kid and one day we all ended up in the garage singing folk songs. In fact, they started talking about starting a group, and they even had tryouts. We had to audition by singing “Michael Row the Boat Ashore” to each other. I tried out, but I can’t remember if I made the cut. I do remember that we were all still friends the next day.

After tryouts, Michael showed me an acoustic guitar he had and said he’d sell it to me for three dollars. I’m not sure where the money came from but I bought it and took it home. Playing chords was a bit of a stretch for me, and I don’t remember learning how to tune the guitar but I do remember learning how to play “Green Onions” on the low strings and “Wipe Out” on the high strings.

At that age, there were forts to build and bikes to ride besides the guitar playing and I made time for all of that as well as building models. I loved watching monster movies on Saturday afternoon TV, and I had all the monster models. There was Frankenstein, Dracula, The Mummy, Phantom of the Opera, and the Creature from the Black Lagoon. I had accumulated a pretty good collection of Testor’s Model Paint and some small paint brushes from those models.

This was when I noticed that the white lines along the edge of my little guitar were painted onto the guitar, and that there were some dings and scratches in them. I got out my white paint and a brush and painted over the dings, but the white didn’t match. It’s amazing how many colors of white there are. Well, the guitar looked worse rather than better so I sanded off the paint I’d put on and the problem grew. Before long I had masked off the entire guitar and sanded all the painted binding away and repainted it totally. This time there were ugly brush strokes so I started over. In all, I think I spent a week and three attempts before I got the white binding painted back on and was satisfied. I should have just left it alone, but that wasn’t in my nature.

I spent more time messing around painting and sanding that guitar than I did playing it. But its playing days were numbered once I rode my bike to Apex Music and fell in love with a little electric pickup on a pickguard in the showcase. It was probably twenty-something dollars, but I wanted it bad. I thought that an electric guitar like the one Michael had would suit me better so I would make my acoustic guitar electric. Maybe I had played his and found it easier, or maybe I just thought he was cool, but I think mostly I was interested in the guitar itself. I remember imagining how cool I’d be with a bird on my shoulder at school, but I never remember thinking that about playing guitar. I wasn’t interested in guitars to be cool or to impress a girl. I was just interested in the guitar for itself.

There was no sense in buying the pickup right then and I didn’t have the money anyway, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t prepare the guitar. So I took a deep breath and sawed the neck off, trying hard not to ruin the neck in the process. The neck was what I wanted. The acoustic body had to go in order to allow me to put a solid wood electric guitar body onto the neck, add the pickup, and end up with an electric guitar in the end. Some onlooker or naysayer would think it a careless act, but it was filled with care. I planned that neckectomy for days and finally performed it successfully.

Off to the Boy’s Club in San Diego I went with my guitar neck strapped to my bike; the one and only bike I ever had in my youth. It lasted me from the second grade all the way to my driver’s license. I repainted it four times; I re-spoked the wheels, rebuilt the brakes, and had to find a garage to weld on one of my pedals because the threads of the crank were stripped. I learned a lot working on that bike. In fact, one time I took the Bendix brake apart to service it, but it sprang apart with force when I opened it and scattered its parts on the floor like a pile of marbles. I had to talk Michael Broward into letting me take his apart to see how to put mine back together. He wasn’t excited about that. He’d get in trouble if his folks found out, but they never did because his went back together. And armed with the knowledge I gained from reassembling his bike, I fixed mine. I was probably nine years old.

The Boy’s Club had a small woodworking hobby shop. Today, they’d probably have a skateboard park or a computer game lab instead, but mine had a band saw and piles of wood. I snagged a big piece of thick plywood and drew an electric guitar shape on it. With some help I sawed it to shape and then the sanding began. I sanded that thing to within an inch of its life. I didn’t know how the neck was going to attach or how the pickup would go in, so I just kept sanding it. Eventually, I lost my head of steam because as I tried to figure out solutions to those problems they all looked impossible. Ultimately, I did not finish making that guitar. I really was too young for a project of that scope, and I saved the parts until the next spring-cleaning at the house, and then it was gone.

Whatever it Takes to Get the Job Done

When I was 11, we moved to a new house in a different part of town, where nobody knew me as the boy who sawed the neck off his guitar and ruined it. So with my reputation intact, I arrived at our new place some eight miles away and we started a bit of a new life. I turned 12 years old soon after moving to that house and asked for a new guitar for my birthday. Back then, there was a local store called FedMart that sold neat things at good prices. We found a guitar there.

That guitar probably didn’t cost more than twenty dollars. It was a solid body electric guitar, had a chrome pickguard, and a single skinny pickup. A volume and a tone knob made up the rest. All the tuners were on one side of the headstock, and years later, I realized it was a simplified copy of a Fender Stratocaster. I could still only play “Green Onions” and a couple more songs, and I had no amplifier but my dad figured out that we could plug it into the stereo amplifier and I could play through the stereo speakers. Our stereo was homemade from a bunch of stuff my dad collected and put into a cabinet that he built to house it and the TV. It was like one of those consoles you’d buy at a department store but my dad made ours. He built in our old TV, turntables, speakers, and a couple of tube amplifiers, one for each channel of the stereo.

The channel switching knob on the TV acted up and didn’t work well. Behind the knob, it looked similar to the bullet holder on a revolver, and there were channel plugs around the cylinder—13 of them—each with a long threaded chamber and a screw that turned inside to tune in a channel. My dad and I uncovered ours when it failed to tune in well. We would manipulate the factory settings and fine-tune the stations ourselves. Our reception was so bad that eventually he made a special tool out of a screwdriver by removing the plastic handle that lived permanently in the TV; touching the metal screwdriver while it was in the tuner, you’d act as an antenna and we’d get good reception. That often ended up being my job. I’d lie on the floor in front of the TV holding the screwdriver and the family would watch. It all made perfect sense to me, and with each funky thing like that in life, I learned a little more about how stuff works. By the time I was 13, I was fixing things around friends’ houses.

There were different inputs on the back of my homemade stereo amp, some which amplified the guitar very little and some that amplified it really well. I had to find the right input, and then plug my guitar into it. This was done by lying down on my back, sliding the console out a little and with my fingertips, and plugging in an adapter cord that eventually made its way to my guitar.

That also meant that I had to play guitar in the family room where everyone could see and hear me. I hated that, because I was shy and not a very good player. I didn’t advance quickly and had a hard time figuring the instrument out on my own. But over time I learned chords and some songs while playing in my bedroom, unamplified and alone. My friend, Greg Robinson, had an amplifier but no guitar, so sometimes we’d ride tandem on his Stingray bike, him on the front and me on the back holding his little amp, and we’d ride over to my house where we’d plug in and take turns playing.

Music and Shop Class

In the late 1960s, the Beatles had hit the scene and began to change music. Consequently, guitars were becoming more popular. Although I was unaware at the time, when I was about 14, guitars were experiencing one of their highest rises in popularity in decades.

Guitars also became a symbol of rebellion, because most adults did not play guitar. As a kid listening to the radio, you had to learn to play a guitar in order to play and sing the songs you heard. Most parents either didn’t understand or thought there was something wrong with the music.