Old Guitar
It’s genuine slothfulness that keeps me from posting photos of the two guitars in question (Update: Squirk has cured my slothfulness!). Use your mind’s eye. The new was reported about recently, so scroll down a bit. The old one my dad built. I inherited the thing after he passed away, and I showed it off to a few friends and then didn’t really open the case much. But then one day I did and discovered that the headstock was cleanly cracked off the neck (actually not so cleanly). Horror of horrors – and I who broke everything I touched hadn’t been anywhere near this thing. Through channels I made my way to Don Alfieri, a luthier on Long Island, and gave him the guitar to work on. Was it worth fixing? No way to tell, it’s a one of a kind. How long will it take? Quite a while. How much will it be? We’ll see. And then for the next, what, sixteen months, maybe 37 coats of lacquer, a hundred dollars here, a hundred there, hundreds upon hundreds, and one day the guitar is fixed, and turns out to be a simply brilliant instrument. My dad had a couple of How To books, and he just followed the directions. My sister designed the label. And here some seven years after his passing, was this miraculous guitar. I took it to college.
Early off in school I was a singer-songwriter and I made my name (such as it was) on this unique machine. One of a kind, with a blissfully low and clean action, and a sound so distinctive that I can pick it out on a recording these twenty years later. I spent so many hours with that guitar. Late nights, writing. Bouncing my voice up against it, traveling. I had revelations, growth spurts, countless Eureka moments (a good, unexpected chord change is the whole, hot universe unfurled). I performed, and quietly looked down on all those
poor guitar-slingers with their Takamines, their Guilds, their Ovations, even their Martins. I had something special, we were tight.
At some point my guitar playing slowed down. I became a composer. Two paths diverged and well, I took the one less traveled (for better or worse). The guitar sat in my overheated dorm room for a semester or more, and one day I went to play it and the action had crushed down. The strings hugged the fretboard bitterly, and the guitar’s resplendent, songful voice was reduced to drunken, angry scratches. I managed to make the thing sound a little with a capo, but the golden era was over.
Years later in my New York apartment, the case fell over, the headstock separated again. Went back to Mr. Alfieri, this time with neither the time nor the funds I had had at my disposal last time (as an 18-year-old with no rent to pay), and he gave me a less holistic repair. The instrument played, but the action was troubled and the finish scarred. My choices were rough ones – drastic measures, none guaranteed to yield a result. (No telling how a unique instrument responds to rejiggering).
So I have suffered these many years with a crippled but beloved instrument, and only recently did I acquire (again, this is described somewhere on this blog, not far from hear I reckon) a replacement. A flawless instrument, a Martin, the D18 Golden Era (this a reference to a different golden era, though, a time before I was even hatched). The guitar has depth, versatility, brilliance. It is lovely to behold. But I can never love it the way I love that ailing grandmother, she who sits in her cage and remembers her youth, when diva-like she owned the stage and filled small halls with wonder. My father endowed her with a bold and brassy soul, a singular essence that can still be coaxed on occasion, though few (other than I) will tolerate the belches and hiccups and squelched, clawed-out tones she produces.
I’m trying to find new love, spending my nights with the new brunette, she has all the right moves. I’ve even (finally) started writing on the new guitar, melding my heart and mind with that shining concoction of wood and brass and wire. We may grow to love one another indeed – but it’s still primarily a lust thing now. Lust and guilt, but clean and round. Building my calluses with another, and life goes on.
