00 guitar

By Robbie on April 2, 2009

These last two weeks I've been getting wrapped around this little guitar that the luthier Roy McAlister built me a year and a half ago.  The first guitar of Roy's I played was in the late 1980s, and it belonged to one of the Two Arts, a pair of gentiles who are well-known to Wisconsin-area bluegrass enthusiasts.  It stayed in my memory, and about 18 years later, in a store in Santa Cruz, I played my second McAlister, a Roy Smeck-inspired marvel of wood and glue that I would have walked away with if it had been marked down to half of its $10,000 pricetag.  Instead I contacted Roy and asked him to make me something.  

I had been using a lot of a particular mahogany 00 Martin from, I think, 1935 for recording and for fun.  It was an exceptional and easy-to-play guitar with a plain and slightly mournful tone.  But it belonged to Tim Goss of Milwaukee, and Tim wasn't selling.  There was another small-body Martin that fit me instantly and that I nearly bought, at a store in Missoula in 1998.  "Double 0, the way to go," in other words, and mahogany as well.  Mahogany is a little to guitar wood as carbon is to the periodic table -- the least sexy, commonest, most-used element.  It flourishes in Honduras and other Central American climes, and luthiers sometimes pick it up at auctions, in the form of grandma's old end tables and so on.  During most of the years I've been playing, rosewood, from India and especially Brazil, has enjoyed a loftier status.  It's denser and heavier and the guitars made from it seem to sound mellower. If the two woods were Martin and Lewis, rosewood would be Dino.  So my recent acquisition is by the terms of that analogy a perfect complement to my longtime guitar, the 1965 triple-0 with the large pickguards that was handed down to me from my dad.  The former has a pretty brash bark, but mostly only in comparison to the latter.  Roy's guitar is a beautiful thing, a smoothly balanced box with a resonant and not-too-pushy low-end.

It was some time before it hit its stride.  Fresh out of the mail, it popped from its case with its spruce top beaming like a contest winner, and at first I felt a little self-conscious about bringing it into the taverns.  Shallow.  But one day I handed it to Robbie Gjersoe, who promptly hit it hard on a mikestand, and after a year of little dings like that and dust settling around the bridge, I stopped feeling like the guy at the Harley convention on a Vespa.

A more tangible problem was that the guitar wasn't quite set up so that I could play it like myself, especially on the unwound strings.  I had told Roy I played hard, but I neglected to say, "real hard."  He came out to the fourth gig where I used the double-0 and saw what to do.  The next day I drove out to his house, at the end of a cul-de-sac road in a little island community 45 minutes from Seattle.  He upgraded the bridge pins and adjusted the neck angle and action to where I could bang on it more.

I liked Roy at once, and liked the thought that I was supporting his work.  There are a couple obvious go-to places for classy flattop guitars nowadays; there's Collings and Taylor and Santa Cruz (for whom Roy worked for many years before venturing out on his own), and I believe Martin is making better guitars again since a downturn in the 1970s and 1980s.  But going with the guy who works alone out in the woods, building only 6 or 7 instruments a year -- not to mention a guy who digs Roy Smeck and Fred Eaglesmith -- makes a stronger statement.

For the next year, though, the guitar still seemed a work-in-progress.  A month into gigging with it, a tuner pooped out, and a month later, another.  The buttons stopped rotating the posts, which I then had to work with a wrench until I got back home and switched out all the Waverly machine heads with Gotohs.  In theory -- or at least I'm told this -- it's a step down in brands, but I haven't had the problem since (or before, for that matter), so I'm a Gotoh man now.  Then the neck started changing again, lowering the action overall but rendering it unplayable on the treble strings about the 14th fret, where the neck attaches to the body.  I brought it to Terry at Guitar Works, who took a 9/64 Allen wrench and turned the truss rod 90 degrees clockwise.  Voila, restored.  Imagine my shame.  45 and can't crank his own rod.

I used the guitar daily for a while after that, learning some new fiddle tunes and writing "Caked Joy Rag" on it, if you've heard that.  But when it came time to record that, I used the Martin, because the double-0's neck was shifting again.  I had dicked with the truss rod, but it's hard to get at -- accessible just by shoving your fat hand through the soundhole -- impossible to see without a mirror, and not easily grippable  -- I was scuffing up the area more than I was moving the rod.  When we came to New York it was one of the very few non-carry-on-able items I brought along.  I wasn't giving up on it, by any means.  A friend recommended me to a repairman and luthier named Flip Scipio, who works out a loft in Bushwick, not far from our sublet here in Brooklyn.  This Flip Scipio was something else.  He looked over Roy's guitar and admired the bracing (the tricky bit of guitarchitecture that needs to be strong enough to keep the instrument from collapsing but delicate and minimal enough not to impede the soundboard's vibration), wood quality, and tone.  He explained to me in very simple terms the action of humidity on wood, which underlay the shifting of my fretboard.  He found out a little about how I played, and asked whether I wanted it cleaned up.  A little superstitiously, I thought I had better decline.

For the better part of the next hour, we talked about music in general -- mostly I listened.  A cartoonist who loved and drew old bluesmen.  A composer who was working on a movie score on a pawnshop guitar, then dropped it and knocked it out of tune, and finished the score in the new tuning, for fear of messing with the rickety old thing.  The entrepreneur who bought up Martin's overstock of second-rate rosewood around 1970.  A banjoist who angrily returned to a repairman who had cleaned the muck and grime off his banjo head without asking.  Guitar makers who were cutting holes in the sides of guitars as well as the front, so players could hear better as they played.  The aggravation of live sound engineers.  In short, Flip was one of those rare people who master a technical body of knowledge -- the physics and architecture of string instruments -- and then devote the rest of their lives to putting all that information into the service of something higher than technique.  He took enjoyment from the colorful and telling details at the margins of the picture; he liked the weird and the wrong -- he appreciated the mystery, shall we say.

Technical details are awfully important, though.  The green humidifier snake that you buy for a couple bucks and plug conscientiously into your soundhole every time you case the guitar?  One of those would have prevented almost all of my troubles with this guitar.  A pretty simple bit of maintenance, like the truss rod -- but I'm one of those guys, you know?  The guys who want the grime to remain on the head.  Scott Ligon has a Telecaster that he's loved and used in all the years since he dropped out of high school to play with an old bluesman.  You take it out the case, plug it in, play it, go home, repeat until dead.  It grows, it changes, it gets scarred and creaky in places, and it heals itself, mostly.  You treat it with as little thought as you would your own body, unless you're one of those people that hangs around the middle section of Whole Foods where they push all the crazy hippie placebos (and in that case you're probably an ugly unhealthy person, from all I can tell).  Anyway, Scott called me one day.  "I fell for it!  Me, of all people!" he moaned.  "You know how everyone's always talking about 'setting up your guitar.'  Who knows what that means?  All I know is that I've never had my guitar 'properly set up,' while around me they're getting their guitars set up like crazy.  Twenty years I ignore this, but now here come three weeks of gigs and recording with Terry [Adams, Scott's musical mentor].  So I start thinking: maybe I should be smart and get that guitar set up. These are some of the most important musical weeks of my life -- better not risk getting through them with an improperly-set-up guitar!"  You can see the end of this anecdote coming from the far end of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, can't you?  "So, I take the guitar in to S--- [one of the Chicago hotshot guitar guys].  And now it's ruined! Listen to this... [Receiver hotly dropped; far-off twanging and clunking noises.]  This guitar is one hundred percent... UNPLAYABLE!"  [Further expletives deleted.]

Stories like that, which reinforce a prejudice against positive action, you don't need many of.  Remember the green snake, my friends, don't do as I have done!  This double-0 guitar is now the main reason I wake up in the morning. (No offense, wife, kids!)  I can't wait to get my hands on it and see what happens.  Right now I'm going to go work on "Lost Indian."