Gazette | About | Archives | tspae.com


My Son the Guitar

12/06/06
Not everyone can claim to have reached their life's goals by the age of 27. All those longings of the heart, those distant filmy desires that wrap themselves around us like winding sheets at five or seven or eight or ten or fifteen or seventeen or twenty one or fifty five or ninety nine -- who can say they've tasted even a fraction of them?

Well I can, anyways. My two life's goals were to become a wandering minstrel and to meet and marry the love of my life, and by the end of the first year of the Carter administration I had achieved both. We need more presidents like him.

But even though the rest of my life has been one long retirement party, until last year I'd had a sneaking, unrequited craving. From the moment at age 16 when I first ran a thumb across one hanging in a music store at Grossmont Shopping Center in La Mesa California, I wanted a Martin 12 string guitar. Wanted one very very much.

I waited nearly 40 years to get one.

I was raised in San Diego, and it was natural, or at least predictable, that I'd start my playing career (if that's what you want to call it) on Especiale de Tijuana nylon-string beaters. Tinny, high-actioned (especially when I switched to metal strings), gawdily-purfled and all, they gave me at least a fretboard and strings to unravel the mysteries of harmony on. But at every folk-jam and concert I attended I saw other guitars, different from mine, real guitars with immortal names on their headstocks, names like Martin and Gibson and Guild that needed no introduction or justification. Martin, Gibson and Guild -- but the greatest of these was Martin.

There was a natural law of economics at work in the distribution of Martins in those days. The lovely things were so screeching expensive that picking one up was the mark of either a pro with the taste and income to settle for nothing but the best or a tyro with a trust fund attempting to pass for one. That particular parsing held me Martin-less for the first ten or so years. But in those ten years, two things happened.

The first was the beginning of an inflationzeit for fine American-made stringed instruments. Martins, Gibsons, Guilds, even such ungainly oddities as Mosrites and Silvertones, became coveted commodities, purchased and hoarded by filthy rich musicians and collectors alike. Heirloom makes and models approached commodities in some markets, with their value increasing way faster than inflation. A quality, first-rank name instrument became a remarkably sound, and expensive, investment.

The second was the introduction of a zillion cheap instruments from the Mystic East, plywood Yamahas and Takaminis and such, which not only muscled the low end of the market away from pitiful plywood Stellas (which then became low-grade collectibles on their own) but also changed the whole economics of the field by separating quality from cost.

Now I could purchase any number of off-brand Korean counterfeits that served every bit of the street-performing purpose I put them to and could be blown off the roof of a car without fear or favor into the bargain. I passed those first ten years banging luxury fakes and glorying in the privilege. Then I got married and spent another six or seven years pounding my sweetie's Yamaha FG-75, a much better instrument than the fate it ultimately suffered under the wheels of a craftie van at the University Street Fair would warrant. I had put aside my unseemly social-climbing fantasies. Or so I thought.

Then in 1988 I strolled into a pawn shop and met Homer, the equivalent of an AKC registered junkyard dog -- a Guild 12-string, small-bodied, unrepentingly ruptured and gainfully mended, at a price so low I merely howled in anguish as I forked over the contents of my grouch-bag. Homer was the best guitar I'd ever owned, and over the next decade I and the road played him right through the pearly gates and on to glory.

The chief disadvantage of pawn-shop bargains is that they're not conveniently replicable. After Homer bit the dust I made do with a knock-off that sorta kinda sounded right, but the itch long laid to rest had been rekindled by possession of even a minor member of the Holy Trinity. I fingered grotesquely-priced duodecaphones and muttered in my nonexistent beard.

Last year, flush from an obscenely well-paying remodel job I'd blundered into, I had enough extra cash to retire one whole credit card's worth of debt, a fiduciarily prudent action I had every intention of taking until I dropped by the Folk Shop in the U District, a store notorious for fine instruments, to put up a Bard's Cathedral flier. There on the wall in the back was the spittin' image of Homer, back from the grave, same make and model and year and virtually unused. It was fate! Kismet!

I took it down and strummed. Ugh! It sounded like a guitar that had spent three decades in its case and still thought it was a tree. I rationalized that I could always, you know, train the dear thing, reanimate the spirit of my departed friend. It didn't really sound that bad, did it? Just to prove it, I did the necessary A/B test: I picked another 12-string, a Martin as it happened, and tried it.

I bought the Martin.

For weeks afterwards I was tormented by a tag-team of Voices In My Head repeatedly slapping me like ghostly Stooges: "You can't afford it!' Whap! "You don't deserve it!" Whop! Not an unlikely result for an orgasm delayed nearly half a century, but still a bit more neurotic than I anticipated. After a while, though, I stopped peaking and freaking and began settling into my new life as a Martin Owner, finicking over string gauges and constantly the object of admiration at open mikes. "That's a Martin, isn't it. What year?" "1974." "Ah, good year..." In honor of the 12 String National Anthem, I named him Justin, the Hammer of Justice.

Little did I know just how intimate my relationship with my new axe could be until S and I went to play for the Victoria Folk Music Society last month. For logistical reasons too obnoxious to relate, we took the Victoria Clipper, a hydroplane service that gets you from Pier 40 to Victoria Inner Harbor in 2 and a half hours. Upon arrival for embarking I was informed that my proposed carry-on luggage, being a musical instrument, would either have to be checked or be subject to a child's fare ticket. Having no intention of consigning a fine instrument in a gig bag to the tender mercies of teenage baggage smashers, I coughed up. That I neither raised my voice nor used profanity may be held as evidence in favor of my admission to Heaven.

At the subsequent gig, I introduced Justin as My Son, The Guitar. After all, I had paid for his passage.

And I didn't even know I had a son. Born in '74, yet! Why, we have so much catching up to do...


Gazette | About | Archives | tspae.com