I bought a guitar today on eBay because I've been obsessed with acoustic guitars for the past couple months, and this is where obsession leads: now I'm a collector.I've been obsessed with guitars before. After getting my first--for Christmas 1960--when I was fourteen, I was a goner. It wasn't long before I got ahold of a 1963 C.F. Martin catalog from my local music store--Berry & Grassmueck--on Colorado in Pasadena--and started poring over the pages and reading the specifications of various fine instruments, none of which could I afford. At this age I had very little else going for me other than doing school work and learning the guitar. Conveniently, both came easily for me and I stuck with them.
But I always longed for a better quality instrument, so I spent far more hours than I should have reading and re-reading guitar catalogs (I soon had catalogs and price lists from Gibson, Guild, and Goya as well as Martin). Considering that $250 at the time was more than I'd ever been master of, purchasing one of these items seemed permanently beyond my means, but by 1965 I had scraped together about half that amount and talked my father into loaning me the rest. I bought a brand new Gibson from a dusty little guitar shop in El Monte.
In 1965, at the very height of the folk music boom that was sweeping this country and western Europe, new acoustic guitars from the two quality makers, Martin and Gibson, were exceedingly difficult to come by and massively back-ordered by every music store in America. I counted myself a lucky young college kid, though I didn't stop perusing those damned catalogs.It was a perhaps ten years later that I came to realize that I should have sidestepped music stores altogether and kept an eye on the classifieds for a used instrument--say, a not-too-abused Martin dreadnought of about 25 years of age or so (in 1965). It would, no doubt, have cost less than a new one at the time, and I'd have been well on my way to guitar nirvana with a "pre-war Martin."
Now here's where my humble life as an amateur musician takes a remarkably fortunate turn. In about 1977 I acquired a 1946 Martin D-18, a guitar whose serial number identifies it as emerging from the Martin factory in Nazareth, PA a few months before I was born. Not only was this truly a "vintage" instrument, but amazingly it had belonged perviously to the much-revered guitarist Clarence White. White sold the guitar to a friend of mine who had been taking lessons from him at that guitar shop in El Monte at just the time in the late 1960s when the seminal bluegrass flatpicker--killed in 1973 by a drunk driver--was turning inexorably to electric guitar work and had been recruited into the Byrds. My friend played White's D-18 for a few years, but eventually pawned it to my brother, who sold it to me for a mere $700, when he realized it wasn't going to be redeemed. Good specimens from this era are extremely hard to find, but a D-18 in comparable condition from the same year sold earlier this month on eBay for $6,700. I'd never part with mine, but the obsessive need to keep an eye on the market, including vintage shops across the country and in England, does shoot a good portion of my days currently.
I hadn't been gripped by this sickness until relatively recently. But coincidentally just before we took a little vacation trip to New York City in late May I came across a fascinating feature article in New Yorker magazine about a guitar maker named Ken Parker. The article referred repeatedly to Matt Umanov's guitar shop in Greenwich Village, so it was natural that we'd want to look the place up when we did our own little self-guided walking tour of the Village.
Talking to a salesman in Matt Umanov's, where they offer an awesome array of vintage instruments, I mentioned my own guitar. The congenial clerk perked up, but immediately had to check that I wasn't claiming to own the most famous bluegrass guitar of all time--Clarence White's 1935 D-28 that had decades ago come into the hands of guitar wizard Tony Rice. I knew the guitar he was talking about--the most incredibly beat-up, scratched, and modified piece of work I'd ever seen in the hands of a serious musician--but no, I assured him, that's not mine. I'd for years looked quizzically at pictures where Clarence was holding this funky, battered old D-28 and assumed it was the source of all those super-fast, inventively syncopated guitar licks I'd listened to so closely on the small collection of Kentucky Colonels records in existence. But I hadn't known that Tony Rice--another of my favorite instrumentalists--had been playing that same guitar throughout much of his career.Hearing that tidbit got me refocused on the background of my own instrument, and I was soon to discover that the famous White/Rice D-28 had primarily been Clarence's rhythm guitar; those amazing leads had been played on his D-18. I'm still trying to determine whether as a young man he had more than one D-18 or if the one I own was his one and only in that period of the early 60s. His playing on the most widely known Kentucky Colonels album, Appalachian Swing (1964), is so complex and explosive, and the rest of the band so confident, I've never tied it to anything I hear while I'm practicing at home, but on the collection of home-recorded solo practice sessions released well after his death--33 Acoustic Guitar Instrumentals (Sierra Records)--I can clearly recognize the sound of my own instrument in the hands of an 18-year-old prodigy. I sense this in the same way a mother recognizes the unique cry of her own baby.
Anyway, that more famous guitar--the 1935 D-28--involves a curious history, and over the past 20 years or so has had a major influence on guitar makers. Legend has it that Clarence's father bought the instrument for his son for $35, but it had already had a hard life. The wood around the sound hole had been seriously cracked so the previous owner had simply sawn the circle to a slightly larger dimension. And the fingerboard was damaged as well, so the Whites had it replaced with a new-made non-Martin item that had no position dots whatsoever on its face, fancy inlay or otherwise, but had a 21st fret where it extended oddly out over the edge of the enlarged sound hole. Whether it is these haphazard "adjustments" or simply the effects of well-seasoned wood and the unique pre-war Martin bracing is a mystery, but the result is a particularly fine-sounding guitar. Many consider it the best sounding flat-top acoustic known to Man--or some such hyperbole that's impossible to prove.Nonetheless, guitar makers have long sought to duplicate this phenomenon. Right now I know of three major brands who are making models that try to replicate the visual and sonic appeal of that wacky original specimen: Santa Cruz Guitar Company, Collings Guitars, and C.F. Martin itself. They all treat the project with special reverence and charge a considerable premium for their efforts. Martin names theirs for Clarence White; Collings names theirs for the annual National Flatpicking Championship in Winflield, Kansas; and Santa Cruz, who developed theirs in conjunction with Tony Rice, names their model after him. They all reproduce those quirky traits of D-28 tonewoods and dimensions, delicate bracing, and an undecorated fretboard that juts out into an enlarged soundhole.
It is a 3-year-old Santa Cruz Tony Rice that I bought this morning from a musician in upstate, New York. His eBay ad started this way, "I love this guitar but I've fallen for another." I know what he means.
Will that stop me from poring over eBay listings and online inventories of guitar shops around the country? I doubt it. When I started down this path I saw listings for Gibsons exactly like the one I bought in 1965 and sold in 1977, only now they're going for over $4,000. I've gotten over the self-recrimination, though, and simply marvel at all the great pieces from various luthiers available in all corners of America.
I think I'll be very pleased with my new guitar when it arrives in a few days, and I hope it fires a continued devotion to mastering the instrument. Perhaps I can equalize my obsession as a player with that of a collector.
