The Mystery Box

I was given my first guitar at the age of nine after pestering my folks and assuring them that I would practice…which I’ve never been terribly disciplined at doing. But my folks were not musicians, only admirers of those who were, and they knew kids were supposed to take music lessons, weren’t they?

I fell in love with having a guitar and made up my first little ditty with the three chords I knew. I did take some lessons, and to my folks’ credit, I did learn some good habits from my one teacher. I stuck with it because I wanted badly enough to play and sing the songs I heard on my transistor radio I kept tucked under my pillow at night.

I could hear guitar everywhere, and I listened closely. I tried to imitate what moved me from John Denver, to Loudon Wainwright III. From Leo Kottke to Pat Metheny. Not that I really could, but I was figuring out finger picking patterns and interpreting, which soon lead to tentative songwriting.

And I was fascinated by the guitar as a sculptural object, as a tool, and as something made of wood. A guitar could give me a voice that I was having a hard time accessing and was an available creative outlet. I couldn’t quite imagine, though, how an acoustic guitar was made. There was some complex mystery inside that box that I couldn’t see and didn’t try to. My guitar was precious—I only tore apart and inspected other mechanical and electrical things once they were broken. I knew it was a big deal that I had a guitar in the first place and I wasn’t going to risk not having one.

I actually wished, though, that I had a different one from the classical nylon string Yamaha my folks had been talked into as being a good beginner guitar for a kid. Every player in the world had a steel string dreadnought, right? And the classic rock that was birthed right through my youth was often on electric guitars. But those were kinda scary, frankly. And cooler than I was. And they probably scared my folks, too.

So in high school, I saved up and went in to Boston to buy a Guild 12 string. All black. It was cool and had a big sound and I loved it. And it was a guitar I could embrace as mine, so when it needed a little work here and there, I tried it myself. Nothing crazy, just a new nut made of ebony when the plastic one split. Adjustment to the truss rod to keep the neck in line. Fixes that gave me confidence, but didn’t require opening up the mystery box.

Fast forward to age 56, past years of a wooden boat school internship and many house renovation jobs (including on my own) and being a professional potter (for decades) and even trying my hand at building a mandolin from a book and scratch. I even end up falling for a black Gibson Les Paul that I could not live without, and finally felt like I deserved.

I saw online that there was a lutherie school nearby in Denver and say out loud near my wife, Ellen, “Hey, they do a ten-day intensive to build a guitar! That would be so cool!” I look at the price tag. She says, “I’m going to give that to you for your birthday.” Just like that. I point at the price. She shrugs. “I’m giving it to you anyway.”

Little did I know that my life was about to take an abrupt turn into a realm that I had never quite allowed myself to explore even though, in retrospect, I am quite suited to venturing into. I had collected everything around me: experience in creating objects, problem solving, and ease with tools. What I needed was the initiation into the mystery box. At the beginning of the first class when asked what I wanted to learn, I said I wanted to understand how our guitars from this workshop wouldn’t sound like a shoebox with rubber bands. I spent those ten days madly taking notes every break I had, unloading my head into my notebook all the while telling myself that I was just doing this to make myself one guitar. I was the first one in my class to be done and so I strung it up and sat by myself to give it a strum. It was all I could do not to start crying. I can feel myself right back there now.

I went home knowing that instead of this guitar being my ultimate guitar, it was my initiation and that I had now been charged with a quest: I must convert my mess of a tiny disrespected workshop into a lutherie shop and build another guitar as quickly as possible so that I didn’t forget what I had learned. I have had a guitar in process on my bench ever since, both acoustic and electric.

Nothing would make me happier than building you the guitar you didn’t realize you could have.

The first guitar at the Colorado School of Lutherie