My oldest friend, Ed Mohoric, came by my studio one day.
“What are you up to, Ed?” I asked.
“I'm going to the music store to sell my guitar,” he said.
“Really,” I answered. Over the years I have slowly come to the realization that I am the music store he refers to.
At this point I have owned many of Ed’s cast offs. “Lemmie have a look.” I said.
He went to his car and brought in a steel string acoustic guitar in an old case that was supposedly hand-made in San Diego, California by an amateur guitar builder.
It had 5 different kinds of exotic woods including birds eye, maple, Hawaiian koa, spruce, flaming maple and ebony for the fret board. The shape of the top was noticeably imperfect which I thought added to its charm. The guitar had a ‘Fishman’ electronic pickup installed, and I knew the pickup alone was worth over $400 new.
“How much were you thinking of asking for it?” I asked, casually, as I checked for buzzing at the highest frets up the neck.
“I just want to get what I paid for it,” he said.
I handed the guitar to him as all potential buyers of instruments anywhere will do when they really want to hear what it sounds like. “Play something for me.”
Now my friend Ed could make a cigar box with one wire string sound great and
before he handed it back to me to try for myself, he recognized, like any good salesman would, that
my mind was already made up. I played it for a few minutes and as I tried a few chords he casually inserted; “I'd probably take 500 for it, as that's what I paid for it.”
I slowly nodded my head and pursed my lips together knowingly then walked over and picked up my chequebook.
“You'll be happy with it,” he said. “I just don't like it any more”.
“ Yeah, I know what you mean,” I said as I handed him the cheque.
This is an old ritual and like two old chess players in the park we had played
this gambit many times before. As my collection of ‘hand me down guitars’ has grown over the years I can thank my friend Ed for most of them. My favourite part of this game is that sooner or later Ed forgets how good a guitar he has sold me actually is. He will visit again years later, pick one up and play it for a while. I will take on a “oh that old thing” attitude and smile as his eyes light up while he dances with an old friend. He will sometimes say, “If you ever sell this guitar let me know. I’ll buy it off of you.”
To this day I have, on principle, never sold a guitar back to Ed.
I am afraid to. He would invariably get sick of it again and sell it to someone else.
He is constantly looking for that perfect guitar; the musical equivalent to the play: ‘Waiting for Gadot’ and in all the time I have known him, he has owned over a hundred guitars, amps and pedals.
After some months of playing my new instrument I noticed that there was some
buzzing now appearing near the 12th fret and concluded that the guitar needed a fret dressing to smooth all the frets to the same height. I contacted a guitar technician highly recommended by another friend of mine and asked him if he could do the work. He suggested that I get a fret replacement as some of the frets had worn down quite low. It is a standard procedure where the old frets are carefully taken out and replaced, much like the replacement of the break shoes of a car. Even guitars can wear out and usually this would cost around $250 and take a couple of weeks to complete. I agreed to the quote and dropped off the guitar at his workshop, noting that I would be doing a tour of Sweden in a couple of months and would definitely need it before then. He said that would be no problem and would call me when it was ready.
Now I can't remember exactly how many phone calls transpired in the months that followed but I can tell you that there were many. The first call was to tell me that the technician had some good news and some bad news. The good news was that the fret job was completed and it turned out fine. “What's the bad news?” I asked.
“Well,” he said slowly, “I had a bit of an accident on my workbench.
I had a wrench lying there and it marked your guitar.”
There was a long silence and I then asked how bad it was. “Well, it's quite obvious but I think I can take some wood from under the bridge and, as it is the same wood grain, I should be able to patch it in a way that you won't see it,” he said.
I was worried. “I think I'll come over and have a look at it,” I said. I drove over to his shop and he showed me my guitar. The gouge in the top was not as bad as I had imagined it to be. It was a gouge, however, and it was his fault so I listened calmly to what he had in mind to rectify the situation. He suggested that I take the guitar and use it on the tour and bring it back when I returned home. I agreed to this and when I returned from Europe I went back to his workshop with the guitar. He told me again how bad he felt and how he would fix the mark and re-varnish the body for me. I was excited about getting the guitar re-finished so I said, “make it so” like John Luke Pickard and I left the guitar with him again.
Some months went by before my next inquiry and when I called I was told that
the guitar was coming along nicely but the spray booth he was going to use to spray the guitar was not set up yet and that he had to wait to set up the room for it.
“No problem,” I said in my most reassuring voice. I didn't want to seem at all
impatient. I wanted him to do a good job so I told him that whenever he could get around to it was fine with me.
In retrospect I may have been a tad relaxed in this attitude but I did hear from
him again in 2 months. He called to tell me that he had another problem with the top sheet. When he had tried to sand it down, the rosette design around the sound hole had rubbed off rendering the whole top sheet unusable. “I'll have to replace the top sheet. I hope you don't mind but it will take a little longer.”
“No problem,” I said again. “As long as it gets done right.”
The next call regarded the struts of my guitar and how many of them would have to be replaced, as the original maker of the guitar was, as he put it, “inexperienced.”
“Fine,” I said “Whatever it takes, you do it.”
By the next call, the guitar tech was excited as the guitar was nearing completion. This time he informed me that the body of the guitar was ready but now the neck finish was wearing out in many places and would not match the newly varnished body so it would have to be sanded and varnished as well.
The reader has probably guessed my answer but there was a new urgency now detectable in my voice as I was soon to be teaching at the Hornby Island Blues Festival and needed the guitar for the workshop.
At last the day arrived when, low and behold, almost one year after I had given him the guitar to do a 2-week fret job, my guitar was ready. When I arrived to pick it up my friend was lovingly putting on the new set of strings I left with him. He looked like a true craftsman as he explained all the things he did to my guitar. The new top sheet and binding he had used were perfect and completely flawless. He had filled the small cracks in the back and the finish was like glass. He played the guitar for a while and for the first time I detected a hint of melancholy. I suspect he felt much as one would after preparing a favorite puppy from a new litter to be picked up by new owners.
The guitar was gorgeous and sounded so bright and clear that it was like owning a brand new instrument. In a way I couldn't help but feel bad. I’d written him a cheque for the fret job and now I took out a 100 dollar bill and handed it to him. “For the top sheet wood,” I said. “It's the least I can do.”
When I put the guitar back in its case it smelled of my friend’s little workshop. “Are you going to make any more guitars soon?” I said.
“That was my last one for a while,” he answered. “I think I'm going to switch to violins.”
To this day that guitar smells of that workshop and remains my favorite one.
As an epilogue, one only has to imagine the look on Ed’s face when I opened up the case and showed him the completely refurbished guitar that he had pulled out of his car over a year before. He was flabbergasted to put it mildly, and no, I didn’t sell it back to him.
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