Tag Archives: “Norman Blake”

The Day My Guitar Gently Weeped

EpiphoneLike most guitar players, I’ve long known that having just one is simply not enough. I have my sweet-smelling mahogany Martin 000-15 that I keep inside the case next to my bed and only bring out on special days. There’s the Takamine Jumbo custom for playtime; a cheapo Ibanez black laminate, thin-body, acoustic-electric that sounds totally awesome when I plug it into an amp once or twice a year; the lap steel I’m still fussing around with, in C6 tuning; and two guitars I bought when I was a kid that are now classified as vintage. As am I.

Other players will chuckle and tell you truthfully that I am as far from a serious collector as one can get. In fact, for someone who has played as long as I have, it’s an embarrassing assortment of wire, wood, and glue mostly constructed across the Pacific. If I had ever chosen to show up at a bluegrass festival parking lot with my Epiphone 6830 dreadnought, they would likely have run me over with a John Deere tractor. I speak in the past tense because this week it ceased to exist as anything other than wall art.

When I bought that guitar back in 1971 – it is an ‘it’ because I don’t name my instruments – it cost me about $200. That was a lot of money back then for a starving student to spend. People would often ask why I didn’t have a higher end Martin D-whatever, and I always said that if I could find one that sounded better than this one, I’d buy it. Honestly, the Japanese craftspeople who made my Epiphone did one helluva job. I’ve kept it in great condition, with only a few nicks and bruises that one might expect after too many nights of dim lights, thick smoke, and loud, loud acoustic music.

A few years back I began to notice it wouldn’t stay in tune for too long, and I started to play it less and less. Still, every guitarist needs at least one dreadnought, so I drove up north last week to a small town in the Hudson Valley to see a luthier named Doug about what it might cost to repair. After he examined it inside and out, and explained in detail the issues, he picked up a calculator, punched on the keys like Liberace, and held the display up for me to see. $1,800. Goodbye.

Like an addict who needs a fix, I’ve been staying up late all week, surfing the web to brush up on what’s out there that might fit my tight budget. I’ve solicited suggestions from musicians and dealers I know, and read up on the pros and cons of manufacturing and design from America, Canada, Mexico, China, Korea, and Japan. I’ve learned about solid wood, sustainable wood, laminates, satin finish, high gloss stain. I’ve considered guitars with a thin neck, wide neck, open or closed tuning machines, acoustic both with and without pickups. I’ve looked into large companies, small companies, handmade, oven-baked, extra crispy, and gluten free. The choices are endless.

And where do you buy a guitar these days? Just like with hardware stores and booksellers, there seems to just be one or two companies that dominate the marketplace. They look the same, price the same, have the identical inventory and selection. Most of the guitars on display have never been set up, the strings are oxidized, and they buzz and squeak. I’ve also visited a number of smaller retailers and they can hardly compete with the big guys on price, so they tend to stock the lower-end models for beginners. Even here in New York City, it’s hard to find someplace that doesn’t either require a ferry ride to Staten Island or a trip to the Village where it’s often hard to hear above the din.

Being someone who loves to curl up with a good spreadsheet, I’ve been doing some research. According to www.musictrades.com, last year in the United States almost 1.5 million acoustic guitars were sold; about 350,000 more than electrics. Thank you Mumford and Llewyn Davis, I suppose. Of that number, about two-thirds sold for $500 or less, a third priced between $501-$1,500. And only 25,200 sold above that. Wow. If you’ve ever picked up a magazine like Fretboard Journal or Acoustic Guitar, you’d think everybody is buying that custom $15,000 Martin or Taylor. Nope. I think those magazines are mostly hedge fund manager pornography these days.

Jim Isray, the owner of the Indianapolis Colts’ football team, paid $335,000 last February for a Gibson Les Paul to add to his collection, which includes Dylan’s Fender that he played at the Newport Folk Festival when he went electric and Jerry Garcia’s beloved Tiger. The Washington Post quoted Cheap Trick’s Rick Nelson – a Les Paul collector himself, with over a hundred of them – as saying the price was reasonable, and “I’m happy it didn’t go for $2.1 million.” And that Garcia guitar? Isray paid $850,000 for it in 2002. That’s much less than the Hendrix 1968 Strat that billionaire Paul Allen bought in 1993. Boys and their toys.

So anyway, here I am: minus one dreadnought and ready to go on a shopping spree. While I’ll try not to succumb to Madison Avenue-style advertising and marketing, it’s hard not to want a new six-string that will “bring back memories of the great instruments of the Golden Era of guitar building. Those were days when all work was done by gifted craftspeople, by hand, using simple tools. Heirloom-quality instruments which may be enjoyed by future generations of musicians.” God bless great design, low overhead foreign manufacturing plants, and American Express.

This was originally published by No Depression, as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column.

Memories of 1975…Tom Russell, Norman Blake and Bruce Springsteen

Springsteen 75

The horses are in the barn, the chickens in the coop, the cat is laying on my toes and the glow of the fireplace makes this room seem like an old time moving picture as the shadow of the flames dance across the walls and ceilings. While the talking heads spent the last several days whipping up everyone into a frenzy with their warnings of the impending blizzard, here in the Hudson Valley we awoke this morning to find maybe a foot of snow dusting the meadows…merely a freckle on the face of a red headed girl. Oh it’s indeed cold and windy as promised, which makes me feel not too guilty as I do some inside chores while listening to both old and new music, and taking the time to let my thoughts and memories spill out across this electric screen.

The year was 1975, and I was a twenty three year old purveyor of recorded music in the form of singles, albums and eight tracks. In my light blue VW Super Beetle I traversed the turnpikes and back roads throughout Eastern Pennsylvania, going from town to town with a thick binder of catalogs that offered for sale roughly thirty-five per cent of all recorded music. It was a time when independent distributors ruled the airwaves and sales charts, unknowingly just four years away from the shift to a corporate controlled American art form.

Allentown, Scranton, Williamsport, Lock Haven, Lancaster, Reading. These were coal and steel towns standing on the edge of the cliff, still surviving on their last gasp of breath. Tom Russell from California wrote a song about those days, and I often find myself listening to it at times like these.

In the little town of Bethlehem along the banks of Monocacy Creek in the Lehigh Valley, there was a record store called Renaissance Music and a fellow who ran it named John helped me get a handle on the Flying Fish and Rounder titles I was selling. Even forty years ago both of these labels offered a large repertoire of traditional American music and it was John who helped guide me through a world of great bluegrass and string bands, Delta blues musicians, the hammered dulcimer players and Welsh folk music. Being a guitar player transitioning from electric to acoustic music, John thought I might like this new fellow who had just released one or two albums by the name of Norman Blake.

If you’re reading this you probably don’t need me to tell you about Norman, nor his spouse and musical partner Nancy. If you’d like some education, just enter his name into “The Google” and you can spend a day or two reading his credits and sampling his work. I remember seeing these two perform at an outdoor venue in Ambler, and sitting on the lawn at his feet just staring at his left hand. With fingers that flew effortlessly across the fretboard, and vocals that took me back to some nineteenth century porch in Georgia, I thought he was the most amazing guitarist I’d ever seen.

In 2006 when he and Nancy released Back Home to Sulphur Springs a publicist whispered in my ear an ominous message that “this will be the last record they’ll ever make”. Hardly. At least five more have come out since then, and most recently Devon over at Hearth Music sent me Norman’s latest recording of all self-written songs. His first of such in thirty years.The voice has grown tired and at times a bit shaky, but the guitar playing is simply as traditionally-innovative as always. Guess I could drop in a sample here if I was trying to sell it to you, but frankly I’m partial to this older clip with Nancy.

Since it seems as if today I’m stuck in this time bubble of forty years ago, let us take a moment to talk about Bruce. There was a disc jockey back in Philadelphia by the name of Ed Sciaky who worked at a number of local radio stations, but is mostly known from his time (twice actually) at WMMR-FM. Along with promoting the hell out of Billy Joel’s Cold Spring Harbor album, his real legacy is the role he played in exposing Springsteen to an audience beyond just Freehold and Asbury.

A man schooled in mathematics and self taught in musicology, his shows were like doctoral thesis on the origin of the songs and artists we listened to back then. I can still hear his deep voice that he kept soft as it worked its way through the speakers of my car radio late at night. The sadness came when diabetes caused his right foot to be amputated in 2002. Two years later while in Manhattan with his wife, he collapsed while on the sidewalk outside Penn Station and died at age fifty-five from a massive heart attack.

He and Bruce come to mind because the other day I found myself in possession of a digitized soundboard recording (we used to call these bootlegs) from Philly’s Tower Theater on December 31, 1975. It was the last of a multi-night run, and although for decades the tapes have been reproduced, sold and traded among fans, a different mix from Sciaky’s collection is now in circulation. I like the name of this album…Last Tango in Philly…and you can find more than one version from start to finish on You Tube.

While during this time frame Bruce was in the midst of his Born to Run tour, the track list includes a few oddities, including the oft-bootlegged “Mountain of Love” and “Does The Bus Stop At 82nd Street”. Seeing that it’s the official beginning of our New York winter, here’s a 1978 version of one of my favorite tracks, “Tenth Avenue Freeze Out”. Until we meet again…