To Make the Wood S
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work was that the whole lifestyle just wasn’t
for me. I thought I wanted to be a musician
so bad. It was like this big, cathartic thing
one day – I just came to the revelation that
it just didn’t work for me. Whatever it is
that makes musicians so devoted to trying
to play music for other people, I just didn’t
have it. I didn’t have that kind of relationship
with music. I like music and I have musical
talent, but I don’t feel compelled to share it
with the public, and certainly not at the cost
that most musicians pay to do that. Plus, I
was interested in guitars and woodworking.
It was something I could do during the day
and have a relatively normal schedule. Once I
started getting into that I felt more like, “This
is me, this is what I should be doing.”
When did you build your first guitar?
I started out building solidbody electric
instruments, which came about because I
had picked up the bass. I grew up playing
guitar but I picked up the electric bass and
was playing in a rock band. I was playing
an imported student bass that I bought
from a friend of mine for 50 cents, although
I thought that I should get a better bass
because this one was kind of junky. I started
looking around, and being a guitar player,
the Fender basses were just too bulky and
Gibson basses of that era didn’t sound very
good. I really couldn’t find anything I liked,
so I thought, “let me try building a bass.” I
built my first electric bass in 1977, and it was
technically the first instrument that had my
name on it.
I got off to a very slow start with the archtop
stuff. I initially went to this local music store
because I was looking for a five-string banjo
– I had picked that up and was having some
fun with it. This store had a lot of repair
work and when the owner found out that
I had built some electric guitars he asked
me if I wanted to do some repair work, so
that’s how that started. I started working on
archtop guitars, which again raised my interest level. The owner had an archtop in there
built by a guy by the name of Glen Markel
who used to work at Guild in Westerly. I had
thought about building one, but I didn’t have
the tools and I didn’t know anything about
it. But I figured if Glen could do it I could
do it! Glen loaned me some of his carving
tools and I started putting my first archtop
together, which was around 1988.
I had built half a dozen or so archtops by
1991 and I went to display them for the first
time at a symposium in Pennsylvania. From
