A Guitar Story

Using a love of guitars as a means to regain my health and dignity after years of pain and tribulation.

Additional photos:

https://photos.app.goo.gl/ZXrY95yW4frF4tkB6

I’ve been at this, buying, selling, trading, and collecting guitars, since 2011. That might not sound like much time, but there have been countless hours spent reading about and researching guitars over the span of those thirteen years. 2011 was my fiftieth year on this planet and it brought with it a difficult move from my beloved Colorado to the Pittsburgh area of Pennsylvania and a virtual end to my physical life as an athlete. It would turn out to be one of the most challenging years of my life. After spending almost thirty years in Colorado working in engineering and project manageyment and spending every available moment outside of my work developing myself as a mountain athlete, my body began objecting to what I had put it through for so many years. I’d suffered from back pain since I was literally a kid, seeing my first orthopedist before I reached my teens but, aside from seeing a specialist a few times over my adult life in an attempt to obtain some bit of information that I could work with, I was left at a loss. Giving up or lessening the intensity of my beloved sports was not something that was ever on the table, so there wasn’t much that could be done at the time. All it ever came to was that I had degenerative disk disease (a catchall for arthritis and other indications that my spine was aging far more quickly than it should be). That I might have some genetic inclination at the root of the problem was not something anyone could help me with, so I would simply continue to use the first advice I’d ever gotten that could have a positive, real time result, which was to do a a particular set of stretches and however many situps I could manage each morning before I got busy with my day. I did 200 situps, 200 pushups, and 200 dumbell curls (I figured I might as well add a couple of other excercises to my routine) with my cofee each morning. I did this, without fail, for as long as I can remember and still do it to this day. Other than over-the-counter pain remedies which normal people take for the ordinary aches and pains, I hadn’t taken anything of any significance for my brand of back pain until just before I turned fifty and went on a successful Mount Ranier climbing trip with old friends, in 2010. My mother recalls a time when I was living a young skier’s life in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, that I kept a large bottle of Excedrin on my dresser. That may have been the last time I looked for “over-the-counter” help. It would be just two months after climbing Ranier that I would make the move to PA because of a major downturn in the economy and the loss of a very good job in Southwest Colorado. I’d been working my butt off to etablish myself with most of the major gas producers and the engineering firms that supported them. I had realized early-on in my natural gas engineering career that it was up to you, as in individual, to “make your mark”, and over a five or six year period I had come to know the key players who got things done in the San Juan Basin. I’d also been put in charge of the Paradox Basin for Williams, a heretofore under-developed gas play due to some longstanding technical difficuties. The thinking was that now we had the technical cabilities to work around the difficulties. We were just getting into the nuts and bolts of buiding some basic infrastructure when the company elected to walk away from all that we had done. I’d made it through some smaller downturn’s in the price of nattural gas, but none as devastating as this one and I would never recover from the loss of that job with Williams. Just six months before I joined the program management team for the Paradox work, my job in the San Juan Basin was going well and, had I stayed put, I think I might have survived the most recent budget cuts. I’ll never know as they had already backfilled my position in the San Juan Basin Operating Center. It is no wonder that my wife and I pulled over at some Cabela’s halfway across the midwest during our move that I got out of the truck an cried like a baby with the visceral feeling that this move back East was not a good idea. I’d always been able to make things work in Colorado, but we pushed on, just the same. I had no way of knowing just how bad things would soon be getting.

Something else happened in my fiftieth year. At the rate my back was deteriorating combined with the intensity of a new, high profile, position at work, I realized that the associated losses of no longer being able to recreate (“re-create”) in the only way I’d ever known could potentially be more than I could handle. I thought about what I could do to mitigate that kind of personal carnage and I remembered that I’d played a bit of guitar in college (who doesn’t?!) and, though I never dove into it seriously, I had thoroughly enjoyed the experience. Voila! A moment of clarity washed over me and, perhaps not unlike how the desert feels after a prolonged period without rain, I felt a sense of renewal in knowing there would be good things to come. The Saturday after my epiphany, my wife and I went to a nearby Guitar Center where I would go on to spend the entire day choosing what would be my first electric guitar – the above pictured Fender Telecaster. I thought it was one of the coolest and most beautiful things I’d ever laid eyes on. To say that I left the store happy would be a vast understatement. God bless my wife, but I’d finally found my one true love! (;-)

I didn’t realize it at the time because, at first, I was more than content with learning to play and I spent much of what little free time I had attempting to become halfway proficient, but I was embarking on a journey that would be a significant source fulfillment for the rest of my life. Between my work, chasing my back pain, and playing guitar, I  had left little time to worry about my situation. I’m sure that was by design. After the hugely reluctant move to PA, I went from being tremendously fit to getting soft with my quickly worsening back condition and the big hours I was sitting behind a desk, along with the loss of everything near and dear plaguing my psyche. I had dreamed of a life in the Rocky Mountain West since my early teens. While being completely aware of what was happening, I was losing myself, looking all the more haggard with each passing week and feeling the sort of hopelessness that comes only from feeling hopeless. Over forty years of pain came barreling down the hill behind me like a truck driver hauling an out of control load and seeing the fast approaching end of the road with no time to react, and nowhere to go. It was about a year’s time into our move to PA that I had my first surgery. A couple of weeks beforehand, my wife and I went on another guitar hunt. Months ago, I’d put-in for a temporary replacement at work, but it never came. My boss was the CEO and I could easily see that the only thing that concerned him was the potential loss of his “Golden Goose” (I’d been hired for my expertise in a particular area of the industry (midsream natural gas) which was new to the company and there was literally no one in a company of 2,000 employees who could step in and run with it for even a short period of time). He responded by saying that he’d take care of it while at he same time pushing me all the harder. Of course, the help never came and I was forced to resign as regional director in order to get my much needed back surgery. This was a lot for one person to process in such a brief period of time and I began to fall into a deep, dark place.

My wife (also an engineer) landed a great job in Texas and, just a month  after that first surgery, I would find myself making yet another big move only this time it would be to Texas, a place where I’d spent enough time in my career to know that I’d never want to live there. While I couldn’t have been more pleased for her (she is from San Antonio and still had family and friends there), it was taking me no closer to my goal of getting well and finding my way back to Colorado. Fortunately, I’d landed three more guitars before the surgery, a Guild acoustic and two PRS singlecut electric guitars, and was busy at work with my playing and had begun what became one of the most gratifying activities I’d ever pursued: collecting guitars. As a last gasp, I also spent considerable time looking for another job and landed a couple of small consulting opportunities, but nothing long-term. I was at a high-point in my career and had ample experience to do consulting work. I’d also owned and operated a forestry company for nine years in Southwest Colorado, right in the middle of my engineering career, so I had acquired the skills necessary to run my own business. But, there was still one significant hurdle and that was my back. As much denial as I could conjure wouldn’t be enough to alter what I’d recently come to know as a truth, that I was done for and the surgery I’d just had only made matters worse. No matter how much I felt compelled to go back to work, my back wasn’t allowing me to sit for any period long enough to be effective from behind a desk, in a conference room, or, least of all, flying, which, the higher I’d risen in the corporate ranks the more of a requirement travel had become.  I could no longer even stand in one place or slowly move about without it being some form of back-friendly exercise, like yoga, which I’d started not long after our move to PA. Just like that, at the height of my career and a final push to set myself up for retirement, my working days were over. I’d had a few times in my life where I was under considerable financial pressure but I always believed them to be temporary, and that’s how they played-out. But this time was different and I had no idea as to how I was going to spend the rest of my life. I did what I’d always done to manage stress and, no matter how much it hurt, I began running and cycling again. I had always required an inordinate amount of exercise to deal with a high-pressure career and extremely busy lifestyle full of things that were more important to me than my career ever was. I think it is safe to say that I’d already packed two lifetimes into just one…the only one I had. I don’t think it was that bit of running and riding that landed me in a second surgery precisely one year after the first. I was inexorably heading in that direction and regardless of what I might be doing to my back at the time, I was probably already there. When I earnestly began looking for help not just for the pain (the symptoms) but to attack the root of the problem, I had already seen several doctors and had acquired the imaging to determine what the next step would be. It didn’t take a genius to view the most recent X-rays, MRI, and CT-scan to see the extent of the damage. I decided that during this go-round, I would take adequate precautions in my search to find a high-level surgeon. I “interviewed” three of the most lauded candidates in the Houston area and chose the best surgeon I could find. My back problems were much more extensive than the surgeon in PA let-on and, in retrospect, I realized that his quiver of skills ended at performing laminectomies, so, while it was clear that I needed a fusion, and not a small one, I was sold a laminectomy which alleviated just one of my problems while exacerbating a number of others. I had lost precious time with the wrong surgeon in PA and this next surgery would be done to keep me out of a wheelchair as my lumbar spine was expensed well beyond ever having a “normal” life again. This surgeon specialized in athletes with backs like mine and scheduled me for a “360 degree circumferential fusion” of three vertebrae which would happen five weeks after my initial visit. I spent that relatively short period of time hitting the gym and swimming everyday so that when the surgery had been completed, I would have gotten a “jump” on the anticipated year-long recovery. This was going to be a tad more invasive than some laser surgery which promised immediate relief with virtually no recovery period.

Note: These X-rays were taken in 2012 and are not up to date. There was a surgery in 2019 to fuse the vertebra at the top of the “cage” to the vertebra just upstream of it, (L-4/L-3) and, though it couldn’t be seen in these views, way down below I’d had my SI joint fused in 2023. I can tell you from experience that carrying this much foreign material in your body will almost invariably add significant pain to your daily life and will likely impact your sleep, leading to chronic exhaustion. The two most painful things for me are sitting for over ten minutes and standing still for any period lasting longer than five minutes. I can’t drive to travel like I used to (road trip adventures have always comrpised some of my most joyful times), nor can I sit on a plane. If people want to see me, they must come to me. This has greatly limited my ability to see friends and loved ones for over twelve years, leaing me feeling all the more isolated. The pain is so pervasive, it even affects the amount of time I can sit and play guitar. In fact, things got so bad that I was forced to take a four year hiatus, contributing to one of the worst times in my life. Thankfully, I am back at it now. It still hurts to play but this time around, I refuse to give up in hopes that there will be some sort of “someday” that will be any better. I can tell you that losing your physicality to the point where you can no longer enjoy even one activity that you’ve done your entire life and then losing something you’d picked to help you get through the associated pain and sadness is harder than anything I’d even remotely thought possible. This is where I began to struggle on a sprirtual level, not comprehending what God could posibly want from me and thoughts like “what had I ever done in the course of my life to bring about such harsh punishment?”. I thought about it a lot and never came close to finding answer.

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As you probably guessed, as soon as I was able to get around just enough to go guitar shopping for a day, we again went into “guitar hunting” mode. It seemed as if these two things were intertwined. Aside from my work, trying to obtain help with my quickly deteriorating spine and playing guitar were the two things on which I’d been the most focused for almost two years. I had a need to offset the negative impact of one with the positive impact of the other. By now, I’d come to know much more about guitars than I did when I started playing. This is where things would begin to get seriously interesting and I would be needing some additional gear to accompany any new guitars that found their way into my home. Being a serious guitarist means more than just having a few decent guitars. Thus far, I’d purchased three guitars, two electric and one acoustic, but had invested only in a low-to-mid-priced amp, an electronic modeling pedalboard, and a few cables to make the limited number of connections. It was a good foundation on which to build but I had a long way to go before I would have what most experienced guitarists would consider a “guitar studio”. I had spent considerable time thinking about the direction I wanted to go with my playing and just how serious of a financial commitment I would be both willing and could afford to make, sustainably and over the long-term. Though it would go further than I’d ever contemplated, this is where the seed of having a nice “someday collection” was planted. I certainly didn’t have the financial where-with-all to make this sort of thing happen overnight. First things first, I needed a good place to play and would have to concentrate on creating a studio which would mean having a temperature and humidity controlled environment that guitars, particularly acoustic guitars, require to maintain stability over many years. After that, it would come one guitar at a time. Our plans included staying in Houston for no more than three years before we would find a place more to our liking. I had gotten tremendously lucky when looking for a rental house and found a small home on two acres in an area roughly an hour northwest of the city, right where suburbia left off and “country” began. The area we chose had once been part of an east Texas tree plantation with rows of Southern yellow pine that had grown to a height of 140-feet and were 24 to 32-inches at the base. These were big, mature trees with huge limbs providing enough collective shade to keep our place livable in the extreme heat and humidity during the long summers in this region of Texas. 100-degree days with 80% humidity were not unusual. Those pines made life for our two beloved dogs bearable and there were several parks with trails within a 10 minute drive, with a good-size creek running through them. I would take the dogs for a run in the cool of the morning and swim them for twenty minutes before heading home. Inside the house, there was a perfect room to turn into my guitar studio and the rest of the layout was just right for a couple in transition or for a small family. We’d left many of our belongings in long-term storage in PA, to be retrieved when we finally settled down. My wife and her mother would return to load evrything for the long drive to Texas. My back wasn’t able to make such a trip.

During what would be our next day-long guitar seeking mission, I passed on buying a guitar altogether and instead began a hunt for a high quality amp and other equipment that I’d be needing for my guitar studio. I realized quickly that I hadn’t yet learned enough about what kind of amp would be the most suitable for my needs and that an amp would come only after I’d done my homework. Of course, there were enough options to make my head spin but I enjoy researching such things. Instead of another guitar, I invested in the infrastructure I would need to serve-up the music that I would be playing to. Music that could be turned-up to suitable levels to match the output of a powerful amp, without losing listening quality. In other words, I wanted to be able to match the fidelity of a high quality amp, playing along to whatever music I wished to emulate and have it all merge, like a crucible of music, to provide me with the kind of sonic experience I was looking for. Insofar as this aspect of guitar playing, the “listening”, the choices (other than a small transistor radio like so many of our guitar heroes turned to in the dawn of electric guitar) were seemingly endless. I’ve always had mixed feelings about “technoloical advancement” but I felt like I was living in a wonderful time with so many options to choose from when it came to “backing music” (music that I would play along to, whether a “backing track” which was expressly designed for that purpose, or streaming blues or southern rock, or rock albums and mixes). I would leave the store that day with a mid-size PA system, a hi-powered speaker (a stage monitor, for those guitarists reading this), and all of the cables and fittings I would need to string it all together. I also bought a good quality microphone to take the sound coming from my amp’s speaker cabinet and run it to the monitor. I would now be able to use Pandora or Spotify, or whichever platform I liked best at the time, and stream that music to the amplifier/control board on the PA. I had my guitar sound equipment on one end of the room and the PA on the other, making for an ideal “surround sound” setup. This would be my final trip to the guitar shop before having major surgery which had been scheduled for November of 2012, falling precisely on the one-year anniversary of the PA laminectomy. Unfortunately, the search for an amp would have to wait.

The surgery took about three hours and, if I remember, I spent the next two nights in the hospital before they were ready to release me. I felt every bump and crack in the pavement during the hour-long drive home. My wife had had to work from the hospital for the week of the surgery and by the time we got home she was feeling the pressure to get caught up. She went back into the office the following Monday and I was left with the dogs to sort through my post-surgical days. What really put things over the top in terms of the level of difficulty in achieving my recovery goals was that about a week after the surgery (I was now carrying around a pound and a half of stainless steel, a cage built around three vertabrae using twelve three inch-long screws and stainless steel plates) I began having difficulty breathing. For the first few days, I didn’t think much of it because it felt like a bad case of bronchitis, something I’d had several times in the course of my life, but, by the fourth day, I could barely breath and my face had turned some combination of ashen and blue. One evening that week, I had encoutered a few minutes of severe chest pain that radiated down through my left arm, and I was sweating profusely, all traditional signs of a heart attack. But my wife hadn’t been home to witness it (or she’d have most certainly held a gun to my head and urged me to go to the hospital…it was that obvious, symptoms known the world over!) and I’d jut gotten out of the hospital and the idea of going back must have clouded my judgement. But there was no messing around on the following day when my wife was home to see that I was in serious need of medical attention. She got me into the truck and we drove just two miles down the road to the closest hospital. I needed to be wheeled into the emergency room and my wife provided hospital staff with the reasons for our being there. When she informed them that I’d just had major back surgery, they quickly connected the dots (there is a definite relationship between having a major surgery which involves considerable blood loss and the onset of pulmonary embolisms) as I was getting closer by the minute to having a massive heart attack right there, on the spot. They put me on oxygen immediately as I had turned blue while they were conducting an ultrasound and found a 6 cm x 2 cm clot in my heart, flitting about between the chamber walls and trying ever so hard to find its way out, through the valve and into my left lung. The reason it hadn’t been able to complete its journey is because of its size…it was too big. I was lying there in an acute life or death situation. If the clot got pushed to the valve entrance it wouldn’t have gotten through and I would have had a massive heart attack and died. I was later told that at that point, there would be nothing they could do to bring me back as the heart would have been damaged beyond any sort of last-ditch repair. Each minute that ticked by was a minute that I was still alive but only by chance. They assembled a team of doctors and rushed me to an awaiting operationg room. The cardiologist and pulmonologist agreed that the best (and only) course of action was to put me under and administer a “clot-busting” agent and pray for the best. They were in a race against the clock and little time was available for them to explain what was happening. One of the nurses was charged with the task. After learning what was about to go do down, I asked where my wife was. I’d already signed the DNR and a small stack of other documents and I told them I wasn’t going to do the procedure until they located my wife and had a chance to say goodbye, in the event that I didn’t make it to the other side. I think I was the most relaxed person in the room probably because there was nothing for me to do but submit to what was happening and remain quietly present so those around me could stay focused on what they were trained to do. Somehow, I’d meandered into some sort of state of grace and felt at peace. I sent off a quiet prayer and told my wife that I loved her very much and that I would see her very soon.

I don’t know just how long it was that I’d been under, but I woke to what seemed like an electric environment. It seems the drug had done its job and I’d made it back from the edge. I was now in critical condition (there were still numerous clots in my lung that hadn’t yet been broken up by the drug) and it would be another hour, or so, before I was stable enough to talk to the doctors. They’d moved me to critical care and had me hooked-up to every machine imaginable. If I remember, I spent the next week there until they had the clotting under control and had rendered my left lung clear. What’s really scary is that, since dozens of clots had already made it to my left lung, logic and numbers would dictate that any one of those clots could have been large enough for the same thing to have occurred in the days before I ever made it to the hospital. I quietly confirmed for myself that that must have been what happened that one evening with the chest pain and other obvious symptoms. I had no business making it through all of what had transpired that week. If I was a cat, it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that I used up the majority of my nine lives. I was obviously fortunate to have such a qualified team of doctors just up the road from my home. It turned out that it was one of the best heart treatment centers in the Houston area. I never before did, but I now considerered myself to be a lucky person. I was forever changed by my very own brush with death. But, with this event stacked on top of the surgery, I was looking at another two months of anticipated recovery time for a grand total of about fourteen months. I would have to dig deep.

I wasted no time and picked up where I’d left off before the surgery and began the “comeback of all comebacks” by first using a walker and walking up to two miles a day. I believe I was in such a hurry to get well that I walked about a mile on my first outing. It would go on like this, using the walker every day for perhaps a month and then I was back at it at the pool. It seemed like forever but, I finally got up to a mile and after a few weeks of swimming every day, seven days a week, I started all over again in the gym. I reserved two hours of every evening to play guitar. The surgery had occurred in November of 2012 and I had set a lofty goal in that, by the end of August, 2013, I would return to Colorado for a solo archery elk season in September. A full month of camping at almost 10,000 feet and hiking up to 20 miles a day. Contrary to what many people think, hunting can be an all-encompassing, extremely rigorous affair. Not unlike many sports, your goals are defined by what you hope to get out of the experience and, if you think it’s some sort of huge, antlered head to put on your wall, then your form of hunting is much different than mine. It took me eight months of constant training, both in the gym and riding my bike, but by mid-August I was feeling good enough to make the trip – four months ahead of schedule and a miracle later! I had lost the 70 pounds I’d put on between recovering from the PA surgery and undergoing this one. My doctors were left in amazement, which had me feeling pretty darned proud of what I’d managed to in such a relatively short period of time. My heart and lung tests were virtually “off-the-charts” and left them scratching their heads. This is what a life long athlete can do given the opportunity and enough motivation to get it done. All I knew is that I wanted my Colorado body back, from before my health fell through a trap-door in Pennsylvnia and continued its nose dive thus far in Texas. It took years to develop that kind of physical endurance and the muscles that come with it, and less than a year for it to come crashing down.

Sometime during those recovery months before my Colorado hunting trip, my wife decided that I had “earned” myself a dream guitar and we spent a week’s time going to all of Houston’s finest guitar shops. At a shop I’d never before been to I would obtain my first lesson into the world of “boutique” guitars. The salesperson inquired as to what my playing goals were and the type of guitar I was most interested in. Early on in my quest to learn everything there is to know about guitars, I’d purchased my first Fender Telecaster and of the three or four guitars I owned at that point, I’d found early-on that I was a “Telecaster Guy”and enjoyed playing my Telecaster far more than the two PRS single-cut, Les Paul style guitars I’d gotten. He asked if I’d ever played a Gibson and I told him yes, that I had played a number of Les Paul’s and, though I liked them, they were quite heavy and not something I could envision hanging from my neck for long enough to enjoy playing one. I also didn’t like the overall feel of a Les Paul when compared with a Fender Telecaster. He replied with something like “wait right here, I think I have something you should try”. My eyes about popped out of my head when he opened the case to reveal a gorgeous “Sweet n’ Sour Sauce” red Tom Anderson Bulldog, a high-end custom, one of a kind, Gibson Les Paul-style guitar. I was clearly infatuated as he set me up to play in a separate room with a boutique 40-watt Dr. Z amplifier and a couple of overdrive pedals. It was at least two pounds lighter than a typical Les Paul and the fit and finish were superb. I’d never had the luxury of playing a guitar that was so playable, with its shorter scale, ebony fingerboard and medium-sized stainless steel frets. The guitar had been set-up professionally by one of the shop’s techs and had a super-slinky feel to it because of the low action and shorter scale. I probably played for 45 minutes before I reconvened with my wife to see if we could truly afford such a guitar. She was more in-tune with our finances than I was and I just didn’t feel right about throwing down that kind of cash on a single guitar, but the salesperson knew what he was doing as he walked back over with a couple of beautiful Les Paul’s for direct comparison. I handled and played them and in that moment realized that what he’d been telling me was true, that the Anderson was undoubtedly a “Les Paul killer” and I loved everything about it, particularly the light weight. It was so much more comfortable against my body and played effortlessly, even for a less experienced guitarist such as myself. I fell in love with the guitar at the shop, before ever plugging in at home. I was feeling a bit of guilt over such a purchase and made a promise to myself that I would practice until my playing was worthy of the guitar. No matter how long it took, I was now a man on a mission and added two or three new effects pedals to enhance the tone and get one step closer to having my very own signature sound. I added three pedals to the chain of pedals I’d already acquired and these seven (only five are pictured) pedals would be all I would ever need in terms of finding the best possible baseline to experiment with and find the various tones I was after.

It was time to take a break from buying and selling guitars and pay some attention to replacing my 35-watt Egnator combo amp that I started with. It had been a great amp and I don’t have a bad thing to say about it. It was less than a third of the price of a US made, hand wired tube amp and that was due, in large part, to  its place of origin – China, where the cost of labor is relatively low. But, as I had gotten to be a better player and, as is the case with most guitarists, there was a particular tone I was after and I just couldn’t get there with such a basic amplifier. I wanted an amp with a lot of clean headroom that would take pedals well and have some good tone-shaping capabilities.

I spent a good three months reading about various types of amps and trying some of them out at my local guitar shops. I finally went to a shop in Houston where I had bought and traded for several guitars. I’d gotten to know the owner and viewed him as an expert on anything to do with electric guitars. He was a dealer for Two Rock (my new favorite amp builder) and had in stock the amp I had decided upon. He knew the direction that I wanted to take in terms of guitars and I asked him to weigh-in on my amp of choice. He thought it would be the ideal platform for what I had in mind. He plugged me into a Two Rock Exo 18 head and matching 12″ x 12″ speaker cabinet. I liked the modern, modular design and I already had the PA and powered speaker I was going to use with the amp. As advertised, the amp had a huge amount of clean headroom and by using only the various control features and special “Presence” knob we could get the amp to where it began to “breakup”, but I wanted to have a bit more “dirt”, so we added an Xotic drive pedal that was designed to simulate the sound of an overdriven Marshal stack. This one pedal gave me the approximate tone I was after. He added compressor, reverb, echo, and boost pedal.  We made enough adjustments such that we were almost where I wanted to be. I was confident that I’d be able to tweak things and find a happy spot which would give me the precious tone I was after. I added well-reviewed Full Tone and Tubescreamer drive pedals so I could instantly go from using one to using another of the three. This gave me all the tone shaping options I wanted and by the end of my first weekend with the new setup, I couldn’t have been more pleased. The 18 wants provided ample power for playing any venue this side of a stadium concert, which clearly were never part of my playing goals. In playing through it for just the first fifteen minutes, it was clear that this setup, along with the use of the powered speaker and PA, would more than I would ever need.

About two years later I found a very slightly used 40-watt Bogner Alchemist to use in the loft space of our house, which has become my acoustic studio while the barn houses my electric studio. This has worked out perfectly. I have a list of things that I still want to do with the barn studio, but I can take my time, adding to it bit by bit. It is a work in progress but already has the necessary equipment to suit my essential needs. Now come the final touches which are predominntly aesthetic in nature. I want the space to inspire me to play beyond my wildest dreams! That said, I’m already a happy guy with any time I get to spend in the barn. Many people struggle with finding a place to play without bothering their wife of neighbors. It had taken years, but I now had that space and was immensely thankful for it!

I’d gotten into the next stage with my playing, the same place that most players reach in their quest for getting better. This is an important stage but there are a few pitfalls to be aware of, as many “good” (intermediate) guitarists get caught up in this stage without ever moving beyond it. It is in that quest for a signature tone or the sound that one’s guitar heroes have and, in wanting to sound like them, that many players get forever caught-up in moving from one amp to another and investing in dozens, if not hundreds, of different pedals thinking that they’ll somehow find that magical combination. It’s sort of sad to see someone caught in this trap, I believe it to be a lot like a gambling addiction, spending thousands of dollars and thousands of hours “chasing tone”. It can certainly be addictive. What’s more important is to understand some basic tenets before going into some Guitar Center looking half- human and half slot machine. I think these guys have a sixth sense when they see people with a serious “GAS” (Gear Acquisition Syndrome”) walk into the store. Predator and prey! Fortumately, there is a ton of information on the internet, with a particular emphasis on YouTube, so, with any luck, by now a given player should know enough to avoid 85% of it and hone in on that all-important fifteen percent. It’s in there and, with enough search time and reading, a player who has any mechancical and electrical abilities at all should be able to locate it without too much trouble. Do the research first and, only if it becomes necessary, use YouTube to help you make your final decision. Otherwise, you will only find yourself overwhelmed with information and so many different tones ringing in your head you that you risk becoming an impediment to your own process. Ideally, you’ll first purchase your amp and only after playing without effects for a month, or two, begin to add pedals. Remember, most of an individual guitarist’s tone comes from technique and the fundamental interaction between their fingers and the fingerboard. It’s a big pill, but you’re never going to sound like Jimmy Page or Jimi Hendrix, no matter what your rig looks like, so just swallow it and look for that tone to come from your own sense of sound and your own fingers and fingerboard. Whatever or whomever it is that your chasing, try first to get somewhere reasonably close by using only your guitar, amp, and an overdrive pedal that is designed to emulate a certain tone. Play that way for several months experimenting with and making incremental adjustments to those three things alone. Only then should you think about adding other pedals. Read and understand what each type of effects pedal is supposed to do, and build your pedalboard out one pedal at a time.  Allow yourself six months for the process to take place, stop, and work with what you’ve got. You will get a lot further down the road than by using some random approach or investing in some new pedal board your buddy is using.

Until I’d gotten to this juncture, my journey had predominately been focused on electric guitar. Thus far, I had acquired just one acoustic from a shop near my parent’s home in the Adirondacks Mountains of northern New York. It was mid-priced Guild and was a special guitar because of where I bought it. Whenever I’d pickup that guitar, I would be flooded with memories of home. My playing goals were sometimes shifting but my new goal was to become equally adept at both modalities, electric and acoustic. For me, this would be a primary focus from then on. Along with looking at current options, I’d begun researching vintage Martin and Gibson acoustic guitars but wanted to become more knowledgeable and be a more proficient player before pulling the trigger on one. Let’s just say that I found myself completely fascinated by them. This search would run separate but parallel to the modern guitars I was reading about and perusing in guitar shops, local and online. The search for a vintage guitar would be a project in and of itself and I treated it as such. In the coming months I would end up purchasing a Reverend Flatroc, a very cool offset style Telecaster model, a 2012 Martin D-18 (mint), and a 2012 Gibson Advanced Jumbo Pro (mint). The two acoustic guitars were incredible acquisitions, both purchased from Craigslist postings, they were my first high-quality acoustic guitars and the two belong as staples in anyone’s collection. I bought the Reverend and not long after I acquired another boutique (“gently used”) electric from a builder named Matt Nowicki of Red Rocket Guitars from the same shop, in Houston. I really enjoyed the Flatroc. It was the perfect fusion between a Gretsh solid-body and a good Telecaster. The Red Rocket was an Atomic Six model, a Telecaster style, hand-built guitar that set me back a few nickels (even used and combined with a decent trade) but was worth every penny. It took a while for me to realize that I  just didn’t get along with the neck, so I sold it a couple of years later to buy a nice acoustic, but it was one of the best Telecaster-style guitars I had ever owned and I played it a lot over the course of it’s two years in my stable. One thing I wish I’d had some help on in the beginning is if someone had sat me down and discussed guitar necks with me. I ended up going the “long way around the barn” in terms of experimentation with differing neck profiles and dimensions. I have owned several otherwise perfect guitars and was sad to watch each of them go when I finally decided that I didn’t find the guitar’s neck to my liking and sold them a few years down the road. I didn’t know at the biginning that my large hands with lanky but strong fingers would make finding guitars that I fell in love with a difficult proposition. Now, I know from the published dimensions of the neck whether or not I will find the neck suitable for my fretting hand, which has made buying a guitar online a much more definitive and less worrisome experience. In fact, there are a number of specifications to which a guitar is built and I know precisely what I’m looking for when entertaining the idea of acquiring “just one more guitar”.

Because I had started playing electric a year or two before I got serious about playing acoustically, it took me some time before I could play an acoustic as well as an electric and gain an equally abundant interest in the two. But, along with the rest of my collection, these four guitars kept me busy for a year, or so, before I was ready to pull the trigger on my next guitar.

That 2012 surgery had given me a new lease on life. While I remained in considerable pain, I was in less pain than I’d been in for years. Paradoxically, while I was on substantal doses of opioid pain medication, I began what would become the fittest period of my life. Being liberated from so much pain gave me great hope for the future and renewed energy. I was taking the dogs on runs several times a week and was increasing both my mileage on the road bike and time spent at the gym. I’d been a mountain bike racer for almost twenty years in Colorado, riding in just one category below professional mountain cyclists, while married to a full-time professional career, and now, since there were no mountain trails to be found where we lived, I was concentrating exclusively on road riding. I’d worked my way up to averaging 200 miles a week and was hitting the gym for five two-and-half hour sessions per week, with an emphasis on total body fitness. I had never in my life used a gym until we’d moved to Texas as I no longer had all of my differing sports to keep me fit all the way around. Every athlete has muscular imbalances as a function of using muscle groups as related to their primary sport much more than others. Part of my pain had historically been caused by having much stronger quads than hamstrings, which, over time, contributes a lot to lower back pain due in part to the lengthening of my topside muscles and the shortening of muscle groups on the backside. Many cyclists suffer from this baseline pain even if they don’t have skeletal issues to exacerbate it. I would spend 90 minutes each workout using the free weights and strength training machines and 90 minutes on aerobic fitness using a number of machines. I’d also bought a very good spin bike which I used in my guitar studio while looking around at my collection for inspiration. Boy, I love the beauty of a nicely made guitar!

In 2014, I decided to enter one more road race. I’d effectively retired from competing in mountain biking, road riding, and trail running at forty-six (I continued to pursue my favorite activities, I just stopped racing) wherein I’d had a second place finish in my home town of Durango’s Iron Horse Classic, one of the most highly respected events in all of the US. A mile from the finish I’d ridden past the last remaining rider and put enough distance on him that I checked one last time over my shoulder, and relaxed, dowsing myself in water on the unusually hot Memorial Weekend Saturday. It would be an easy finish – not! This turned out to be a foolish move as the now second place rider was watching as I sat up and began an he began an incredible effort to catch me just 30 meters from the finish , where I was both caught off guard and too close to the end to react to his sprint. I gave it my all but he had the momentum and beat me by a wheel at the finish. It would be my final lesson in racing , racing in my final race.

For this event, I chose a 100-mile road race smack in the middle of an East Texas summer and entered some time earlier that spring. I was fifty-three and regularly beat the odds by passing-up hundreds of respectable younger riders during my training rides on the weekends where all of the area cycling clubs and teams were busily grinding out the miles. One of the biggest differences between me and them was that I’d spent a lifetime riding the mountains of Colorado, developing a very effective cardiovascular system and a lot of endurance and power from climbing Colorado’s many steep mountain passes. Plus, during the week, I seldom saw another rider out in the full heat of the day, which I did as a regular part of my training routine. These guys almost invariably rode during the much cooler hours of the morning and I would see them getting back from their rides just as I would be headed out for mine.

The event was scheduled for July 14th, a Saturday. More than 2,000 people had registered for that hellish day, as it was already over 90 degrees at the 7:30 AM start. The summers can only be described as heinous throughout the whole of Texas, but the thing that makes southeastern Texas particularly brutal is its relative proximity to the Gulf and the associated winds and humidity which circle inland. Most days, spring through fall, morning’s start out between 85% and 95% humidity. You’ll begin to sweat just walking out to get the morning paper. This by itself makes living there uncomfortable at best and downight horrible if you spend much of your time outside. Even our dogs were affected, as all that moisture in the air makes it dense and difficult to take in. You literally feel like you could eat it with a spoon. As the heat increases towards the middle of summer, hospitals fill with patients suffering from heat stroke. While I don’t believe I ever got so bad as to have had heat stroke, I’d bet my last dollar that I’ve had it’s close relative, heat exhaustion, regularly while either riding in the heat or just after getting home from a long ride. I called them “heat rides” and they typically went on for between fifty and eighty miles as an important part of my training regime. Occassionally, I’d feel good enough to press the 100-mile button, but that could be dangerous in the heat and I’d have to get up and be out of the house by sunrise in order to be both physically and mentally prepared to take the day on. The few people I had gotten to know thought I was insane, but I’m an extremely competitive person and, anywhere I’ve lived, there’s been something I could use to my advantage, something everyone has at their disposal but either overlooks or isn’t quite disciplined enough to push that aspect of riding to the limit. The sport of cycling involves a large measure of pain and discomfort. At higher levels, it’s part of the sport, and you are constantly testing yourself by trying your damnedest and ride through the harshness. Whether it was riding five mountain passes in a day in Colorado to give me just that much more endurance and power than my competition, or purposefully riding in the midday heat in Texas, there were opportunities to push myself higher and harder. On race day, it had been forecast to hit 105 degrees accompanied by the usual high humidity. This brought that day’s “real feel” temperature to around 112 degrees. In that kind of heat, you could fry an egg on the pavement and the temperature just a few feet off the asphalt, as in on a bike, would hover around 125 degrees. People came to this particular event from all over Texas and New Mexico but most were simply unaccustomed to that brand of heat and most certainly, that kind of humidity. I’ve learned that with enough determination and something to stay motivated, you can force yourself to get used to just about any environment. Anyway, I was in a lot of pain that morning so I was ten or fifteen minutes late in leaving the starting line, which meant that I was to do as I’d trained for and be faced with chasing everyone down and passing those 2,000 other riders to post the best time. I had a great day on the bike and despite the heat, I was riding well. It had been a mass-start so I went on to pass at least 30 teams and hundreds of elite club riders on my way to the fastest time of 4 hours and 31 minutes. I was 53, opioids and all, and twenty to thirty years older than much of my competition. If you sense that I have some chip on my shoulder over the issue, it is because I do. I realize that this is not the kind of story you hear about concerning some dude on opioids, so perhaps you should revisit your perspective on the “Opioid Crisis” and broaden it. I’d never taken an illicit drug in my life and certainly didn’t deserve to be treated like a criminal everywhere I went to seek help for eight years of being “profiled” as someone exhibiting “drug seeking behavior”. The problem with that is that it looks precisely like a person who is in honest-to-goodness pain. I didn’t appreciate being turned away from some pain clinician’s office because they “thought” I’d come to their doorstep looking only to get a prescription to get some sort of a high or sell my prescription opioids on the streets. I was in other-worldly pain yet I managed to do incredible things that people without pain rarely dream of, but, through no fault of my own, I had embarked on what would be a tremendously lonely journey. Other than my wife and loved ones, I didn’t encounter anyone who wanted to help ease my pain and associated sadness, or give me the benefit of the doubt that I wasn’t somehow a part of the nefariousness associated with taking opioids. They only lumped me in with the worst offenders. So, you bet I have a chip on my shoulder. It’s taken me years to come down from the constant fight or flight situation I endured each time I was about to have an appointment with a “pain doctor”. I could tell you stories that would have you in tears, not necessarily for me, but for any fellow person who was made to endure such dehumanizing behavior inflicted at the hands of our fellow man. I was profiled and risked being turned away at the hospital, pharmacy, and by every doctor and/or his or her nurse or PA. It took me a long time to establish a decent patient/doctor relationship with these people but, mostly, I blame our fear-based American society for allowing these things to happen to millions of Americans on “their watch”. I was forced on numerous occassions to go through unnecessary withdrawal when I found myself between doctors. I had followed their protocols and to this day have never failed a urinalyis and I’ve been forced to do hundreds of them. The thing for me as an individual was that, no matter how much pain I was in or what kind of medications I was on, I continued to battle the associated anxiety by maintaining a high level of physical fitness. Even this would be used against me in hearing things from a pain clinician like “well, you look better that 99% of the people who work here in this clinic, so how bad could your pain truly be?”. For one thing, as long as I’m not doing anything illegal, it’s absolutely none of their business when it comes to how I choose to battle my pain. I couldn’t win for losing. Instead of seeing me as some sort of motivator for others in pain, that, yes, you too can beat this and a lot of it isn’t magic, it comes from taking good care of yourself (which, yes, is a lot of hard work) combined with an appropriate diet. But what is more likely to happen is that they ask me to leave because they didn’t think my story was plausible. When my medications were removed from my daily routine I would quickly slide backwards into loneliness, isolation, and despair. The way I saw it, these were legally acquired medications that have been available since the civil war to combat attrocious pain of the kind only a soldier knows after the addending doctor removed his leg. Why all of a sudden is in not OK to have serious mechanical pain that comes from having some sort of major injury? Why is that mehanical pain is viewed as a lesser variety of pain than people with people being forced to endure huge pain associated with their cancer treatments. Pain is pain. Our bodies can’t tell the difference associated with what is as the root of that pain. I guarantee you that, though it is derived from different reasons, they feel the same pain from the cancer that I do from having a really bad case of degenerative disk disease. Then why is it that they are treated with respect, in a dignified manner and I am only treated with doubt…doubt that I’m not in the kind of pain I claim to be in. Do you see the flawed thinking that is hard at work in the pain industry even today? The strain from battling to heard, to not be treated in such an inhumane way, to be able to hold onto my dignity and my strong sense of right and wrong, and to be a voice for so many others who don’t have the intellectual wherewithall to go head to head with highly educated members of the pain establishment, has left me so exhausted that I may not be able to make it through what I am faced with now.

I’m sure you see what was coming next. As a gift to myself for accomplishing my goal, I bought another guitar. This time it was a rare and beautiful Martin D-17M I’d been watching for two weeks on an eBay auction and waited until there were less than ten seconds to go before launching my bid. I won the auction and scored the brand new guitar for around half of MSRP. It remains as one of my favorite acoustics to this day and one of my all-time best buys.

The next few years had been fairly stable with my back but I knew it was just the calm before the next storm. My wife found a new opportunity working for an engineering firm headquartered in San Antonio. I can’t tell you the elation I felt in being able to break free from Houston and settle into a lovely home we’d found in rural Central Texas. The place was on a nice piece of property a mile, or so, from our closest neighbors. The builder had named the place “Lonesome Dove” as he had been involved in building the structures for the film, one of my all-time favorites. Among the things I was drawn to was a room he had built above the barn which would make for a perfect guitar studio and, with no neighbors, I could play as loud as I felt like playing. After moving in and getting my new studio set-up, I would regularly play for two to three hours each evening. By now, I was, in my mind, finally becoming a “guitarist”. We found a wonderful peace with this new place and neither of us had any intentions of making another move, unless it would involve Colorado or one of the states that comprised the Rocky Mountain region. We had purchased the place unfinished, which suited me just fine. I’d had a number of building projects throughout my life in Colorado and finishing this place was the best way to feel like it was truly ours, by putting our own touches not only on the house and barn, but to the property, as well. We just celebrated our ninth year here and still have no plans for ever leaving. It is our sanctuary, being at home at Lonesome Dove with our three wonderful dogs. What more could a person want?!

I continued to ride and run and work on our place steadily for the next three years, but by 2017, I once again began to have serious difficulties with my back and by 2019 my overall health had steadily begun to decline. I’d opened an online guitar shop in 2014 on a platform called Reverb, where, along with Craigslist and eBay, I could immerse myself in buying, selling, and trading guitars and continue to build my collection. Now, I was having doctor’s appointments and back treatments multiple times every week, trying to root-out the problem. The trouble was that there were many. As if my back problems weren’t enough, I got hit with a real curve ball and ended up needing emergency gall bladder surgery. As usual, I had waited through the earlier symptoms for several months and by the time it hit with full force, my abdomen had become so distended you’d have thought I was nine months pregnant. Over the course of just a few days I’d gone from feeling poorly to extremely ill, and my wife rushed me to the hospital. They ran a few tests and found that my gall bladder was about to explode and spread infection throughout my abdomen. I already had sepsis (blood poisoming/gangrene) and was pretty far gone when they removed it. It would take me several months to recover. Near the end of that year, things had gotten so bad with my back that I was forced to have an “interthecal” pain pump installed on my left side upper hip. I’d been on a six-month waiting list only to find that this new gadget didn’t mitigate the pain nearly as effectively as the oral opioids I’d relied on in the past. My back pain effectively doubled when I was put on the pump in lieu of being prescribed the kind of pain medications I had been on since my 2012 fusion surgery.  Those medications were no longer available. This would mark the beginning of the end of my cycling and running pursuits which I’d done for over forty years, both because I loved them as activities and they obviously kept me fit, but I needed them to maintain my mental fitness, as well. Soon afterward, I would have no rigorous physical outlets and would, for the second time in a decade, fall into a period of deep depression and anxiety over my situation. The pain had gone from being horrible, 24/7, to untenable. I was at the Devil’s crossroads and would have given anything he asked if, in return, he cut my pain in half. The only thing besides my wife and dogs to keep me from losing it completely was my passion for playing and collecting guitars, which, aside from said wife and dogs, was about to become the single most important thing in my life.

In an attempt to combat the immense darkness and depression I was feeling, I stayed busy with my guitar collection, acquiring several more guitars to round out 2019. One was beautiful Furch D-31 SM acoustic, a high-grade sitka spruce top with a very nice mahogany back and sides set. I bought it ever so slightly used from one of the best shops in the Upper Midwest, Cream City Music, in Wisconsin. I also purchased a one-of-a-kind Les Paul, Jr. style custom from a boutique luthier, Landric Guitars, also in Wisconsin. It was a prototype and a finely built custom weighing just over six pounds. It is my lightest guitar. I enjoy buying both from the better” brick and mortar” shops as well as going through the online experience using sites like Reverb, C/L, and eBay. In the begining, when I was admittedly a neophyte to the world of guitars, I frequented my local (GC) Guitar Center, but I believe in spending my money in a responsible manner. When I began to read about and see for myself that many small to medium size “mom and pop” shops were failing because they simply couldn’t compete with the giant new kid on the block, I gravitated to those historic shops on Main Street. Over a period of just three years, GC had cannibalized hundreds of small shops around the country. Many of these shops had been running just fine before a GC moved in on the same block. Because at this point GC had become extremely successful by carrying more inventory and representing more brands, they didn’t spend a lot of money hiring knowledgeable people to go with them. It was essentially run as a large scale corporation and a player could get virtually anything they were looking for all in one place, but if you had questions that went beyond those asked by beginning players, you were unlikely to find answers there. It was difficult for smaller shops to carry more than a few brands and a limited amount of gear. Over the course of my journey, I would eventually stumble upon some of the country’s best known, longest standing shops. This came as a sort of epiphany, and each shop I found brought about a fresh opportunity to expand my buying options. These well-known shops had relationships with many higher-end brands and equipment that you won’t find at your local GC. The floor was staffed with far more knowledgeable and skilled musicians who were able to help guide me on a much more direct path to curating a nice collection of guitars and progress with my playing at a higher rate.

My next acquisition would be a difficult guitar to find. There was a period of time in the mid-1970’s through the mid-1980’s when Japanese luthiers (luthiery is a worldwide craft with many regions highly thought of in terms of the history of making stringed instruments. Japan was not new to building finely put-together acoustic and electric guitars. In fact, a number of better-known US companies had either constructed factories or made arrangements with existing factories to help in keeping up with the burgeoning production numbers of the 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s. Many US brands were operating at capacity so they contracted with facilities in Japan and elsewhere along the Pacific Rim. Takamine was one such company nestled in the foothills of Mount Takamine in a small village in central Japan. The most famous example of non-contractual building during this period of time was when Takamine used a Martin D-28, its flagship model in terms of sales, to build what were essentially very well made copies of the guitar to be sold right back to buyers in the US. I’m not sure why Martin afforded the latitude for Takamine to make what was virtually the same guitar, built to the same standards, but after doing so for a decade, Martin’s legal department sent a cease and desist order and Takamine complied but only in changing their headstock and Martin-esque label. Otherwise, they went on to produce very good guitars based on Martin designs. The guitars that were built before the letter have since been referred to as “Lawsuit Guitars” and are considered to be excellent guitars worthy of playing and collecting. Many good guitarists have a Takamine in their stable, including session guitarists who are looking for a tone that EQ’s well for vocal accompanyment. For some reason, these “Lawsuit Era” Takamine’s tend to fit the bill. My personal opinion is that they’re of a slightly heavier build compared to modern higher-end acoustic guitars. There may be some relationship there, but it’s just my own theory.

After looking for the “right Takamine” for several months, I scored a F-370 SK with solid high-grade koa for the back and sides off ebay from a seller who had it priced reasonably. I had some basic repairs done to the guitar as it showed signs of being played but never abused. I would place it in “Very Good” condition aesthetically and in excellent condition structurally. It was a drop-dead gorgeous guitar with highly figured koa with a lot of “flaming” to the woodgrain. The sitka spruce top ws of high qualitity and the guitar had turned a wonderful shade of amber, as old guitars tend to do. it was the perfect amount ao “ambering”. There were no cracks but some scarring both aboth and below the soundhole made by someone who took their srumming seriously. Perosnally, I’ve never seen to need to drive a guitar so hard that you lose control of the placement of your strumming hand. You can get the same amount of projection and volume without the pick striking the guitar a million times.

What made this 1987 Takamine so special was the koa back and sides. I spent hours trying to track down any information on a production run of koa Takamaine’s and was unable to find more than a couple of references on the guitar playing platforms UMGF and AGF about people seeing one at some point or another but nothing on anyone actually owning one or providing any sort of sales documenation or something such as a build sheet. There was plenty of information available on the 360 series which is comprised of sitka over solid rosewood, and the 340 series, which is sitka over mahogany. These model numbers are still in use today and have the same meaning. There were thousands of these two series built during the “Lawsuit Era” and finding one, particularly when I was searching for one, was fairly easy, with several of each being avilable on Reverb of ebay at any given time. But, a much hunting as I did, I never came across another 370-koa. This was a guitar that I’d never planned on selling. If something similar was made today, it would be priced well north of $5,000. But there came a time when I had my eye on another guitar. This time, it would be a Larrivee Legacy Series L-40 Special Edition with an alpine spruce top and master grade indian rosewood for the back and sides. It would be my only non-dreadnought-sized guitar as it is Jean Larrivee’s flagship design which is very pleasing to look at with its perfectly rounded upper and lower bouts and a waist that looks “just right”. Because it is slighly narrower than a full-size dreadnought, it is that much more enjoyable to play, whether seated, or standing. It rides squarely on the player’s lap without trying to slide in either direction. It is not only perfectly balanced physically, but tonally, as well. It’s got as much power on tap as a dreadnought with a more balanced midrange and high-end. It doesn’t have as much low end grunt but base notes ring authoratatively and clear. I was able to sell the Takamine on Craigslist to a master’s degree candidate in music. He and his father collect Takamine’s and have a complete recording studio at his father’s home where they play nothing but “Lawsuit Era” Takamine’s. The young man had shown interest in the guitar while I had it listed on Reverb for just a month before I changed my mind about selling it. The young player had given me his contact information in case I, again, decided that I could part with the guitar. Several months after pulling it from Reverb, he contacted me and we struck a deal. It gives me great satisfaction to find happy homes for the guitars I sell and this young gentleman was beeming with delight over the acquistion, as was his father. I shipped the guitar to them in Illinois and heard from him several times on how great the guitar was. Another happy buyer!

Within a day or two, I went into the San Antonio guitar shop that had the Larrivee and bought it. It was the prettiest guitar in my stable, with its near white alprine spruce top and gorgeous rosewood back and sides. This was also the easiest playing guitar that I’d ever owned and I would often play it for several hours at a time. This was a time when some of the better known brands were applying an open-pore satin nitrocellulose lacquer in lieu of the typical high-gloss finish. I fell in love with the aesthetic but wasn’t sure about claims being made that this form of guitar finish offered slightly more sound when played. I’m still unsure of the claim, but I do think the finish allows the guitar to breath, thereby allowing it to age and “bloom” more quickly than a guitar finished in full gloss.

I’m not exactly sure when I first found Red Rooster Guitars, but I think it was somewhere in early 2016. I used to spend hours online checking out various “Boutique” guitar builders, both acoustic and electric. There was a period of time between around 2010 and 2016 that the number of luthiers who decided to go out on their own to start their own guitar making venture had skyrocketed. Dozens of qualified individuals got into the business during this period and I would attempt to keep abreast of who was doing what, where, and when. One evening, I stumbled onto a new brand called Red Rooster Guitars, based in Southern California. The fellow behind the brand was both a musician and a luthier and his concept was to build high-end Telecaster and Les Paul, Jr. style guitars with a 1950’s/60’s muscle car theme. I think he had found a deeply pocketed investor because he’d filled his workshop with the latest wordworking equipment and CNC machining, and went about building a line of electric guitars that utilized the same paint codes that were used on vintage cars of the above referenced period. He used the finest materials money could buy and fitted his guitars with beautiful perforated aluminum details like the surround, pickguard, and control plate, all recessed into the guitar for a modern, technical aesthetic. Pickups and hardware were top-tier, and his handcrafted necks had a 50’s robust feel to them, like those found on the earliest Les Paul’s and Telecaster’s. He also kept the weight of his builds to a minimum, many guitars coming off the bench at under six and a half pounds. Everything about his guitars spoke to me on a level that I’d not felt before. I had to have one and ordered what would be his fortieth guitar. It was a one-off, finished in Shelby Racing Blue with cool white racing stripes. It is the most beautiful electric guitar in my collection and has incredible tone to match its good looks. I feel pretty lucky to have been able to acquire such a guitar. It is the flagship guitar on the electric side of my collection.

With each passing year, I was getting more and more serious about buying a vintage Martin or Gibson acoustic. Right around the mid-2010’s, the market for vintage guitars of all kinds was on fire. Investment managers were including them in specialized portfolios as there was good money to be made, both short and long-term. This meant that each year I waited on pulling the trigger on one was a year closer to being priced right out of the market. In a period of just five years, many vintage guitars that were in “good” or better condition had doubled in value. When I began looking, I was, as a lot of people are, primarily interested in acquiring a “birthyear guitar” which, for me, would be a guitar which was manufactured in 1961. There were several opportunities but I wanted to know more before I made that kind of commitment. I also came to relize that in order for a vintage guitar purchase to meet all my criteria, honing in on a specific year was effectively decreasing my chances at finding precisely what I was looking for, other than the somewhat arbitrary year. I then opened the hunt to include the 1950’s to late 1960’s. The biggest dilemma that I faced was that my favorite neck profile was more 50’s than 60’s. For a variety of reasons, guitar necks began their descent into being thinner and thinner with each passing decade. After playing enough guitars with varying neck profiles my most sought after neck was a ‘V’, modified “V”, or a robust “U” shape, 0.88″ to 0.90″ at the nut to slightly over one-inch thick (in depth) at the 12th fret. I also gravitated toward a 1-3/4″ wide measurement at the nut and a string spacing at the bridge of 2-5/16th’s. There aren’t many contemporary guitars with a neck of such girth and the fatter-necked guitars tended to be on the more expensive 50’s era guitars. By the time the early 60’s came around, guitar necks had become to thin for my liking. If you wanted a larger neck, be it on a Martin or a Gibson, I needed to be looking at 50’s models. In the meantime, after I’d waited nearly eight years for it to happen, the Gibson Custom Shop in Bozeman, Montana, had finally listened to the many thousands out there in “Gibson-land”, and came out with a new model based on 1950’s J-45 spec’s which included an antiqued white binding, pearloid tuning head buttons, a 50’s era overall antiqued aesthetic, and last, but not least a much more robust neck depth and profile which got away from their contemporary “slim taper” design. I was salivating when I first laid eyes on one and, for Christmas, I found one that was being sold by a Gibson factory luthier in Bozeman. It had been hand-picked by a 12-year Gibson staff member. For one reason of another, he’d barely played it and infused a bit of “Christmas Spirit” into his price. I bought it off of his Reverb shop during the wee hours of Christmas morning. I wanted him to wakeup on Christmas morning to see that it had sold for his full asking price! We were both overjoyed as he’d had something special in mind for his young kids over Christmas break and I, of course, found great pleasure in helping him make it happen! On my end, a hand-picked Gibson isn’t something that comes along everyday! I suppose the old adage “things happen for a reason” contains more that a little truth.

As I progressed through my playing and collecting journey, I began to need a larger space to play and store my guitars. When we were searching for a new home in Central Texas, I had a number of important criteria, not the least of which was finding a place with a separate space that I could turn into a guitar studio. Before that, I had a standard office-sized room which had become cluttered with guitars and gear, leaving no room for other uses or enough space to play without potentially damaging my ears. We found a wonderful country home on some land with a couple of outbuildings. Though it looks like a barn, it’s really a couple of extra rooms and a carport and area for me to store my tools. My guitar studio occupies the top level, an office and workout room, the lower. Having a dedicated space to play as loud as I like and where I can keep everything close at hand is something that has made things far easier. I simply plug-in and play and can switch between guitars without missing a beat. It is a space that I much enjoy hanging out in, whether I’m doing some morning writing, reading, or playing some evening guitar.

I continued on my vintage guitar hunt over the next few years. These guitars aren’t cheap, so this was going to be a once in a lifetime acquisition and I took my time reading about vintage Martins and Gibsons. 50’s era Gibson’s also had the chunky necks and, as was the case with Martin, were well built compared to other decades. Part of the problem with making a decision was that I had the same fondness for these brands and my list of models that I was interested in had grown considerably. The targeted guitars were the Martin D-18 and the Martin D-28, and on the Gibson side, it was the J-45, J-50, and the Southern Jumbo. Complicating matters was the burgeoning market for “Boutique” guitars. In the late 2000’s, there was a new spin on handmade guitars using the finest materials, hand tools (wherever possible, thereby minimizing high-tech, production-oriented, automation) and finding a happy medium between productivity and quality workmanship. The number of guitars a boutique manufacturer might produce in a given year is commonly between 200 and 3,000. Obviously, the larger a company gets, the higher the production rate becomes, and more and more automation is required to meet the annual sales quota. When small builders with just a handful of skilled craftsmen (known as luthiers, with the craft being luthierie) are involved, annual production is obviously much lower than companies using dozens of employees and state of the art production equipment. The numbers I’m using here are the currently agreed upon figures, but the question of what defines a boutique brand is hotly debated.

Iris Guitars out of Burlington, Vermont, is one of the most recent brands to be inducted into the big-time. Around for just five years or six years, the brand was developed by two highly recognized master luthiers, Adam Buchwald and Dale Fairbanks. Each continues to build their namesake brands but they also formed a company called Circle Strings which is the umbrella company for Iris. I beileve they are now building ulra-high-end guitars under the Circle Strings moniker while overseeing operations at Iris, which now has a team of experienced luthiers cranking out the five, or so, models falling under the Iris name. Dale Fairbanks has been building his own brand of boutique Gibson -style acoustic guitars for decades and is known for his jaw-droppingly gorgeous finishes. I believe Iris is in its sixth year of operations and, because of its well-known owners, has already acquired a lot of recognition and has enlisted a good number of dealers to represent the brand. Iris is one of the fastest growing companies in the boutique market segment, due, in large part to their extremely high quality build criteria which uses quality materials and hardware along with tremendous fit and finish and a workable blend of being hand built with some use of high-tech machining equipment. They are also reasonably priced, putting a boutique guitar in the hands of those who otherwise couldn’t afford one. I have an Iris AB (an Adam Buchwald design based on a Gibson J-185), a small jumbo with huge tone. Because of its slightly smaller than dreadnought size, it is my most comfortable guitar to play. Many of this new age of builders have a small jumbo in their lineup and are finding solid success with the design. I believe Iris is a brand that we can expect to hear more and more about in the years to come. I love my AB. Not too far from Iris in Burlington is another my favorite builders known as Boucher Guitars, based in the heart of Adirondack red spruce country, Quebec, but I have a good number of brands that I would be pleased to own.

Some of the “boutiques” go back to well before there was a term applied to them, which came about just a decade ago. There were only a few well known names associated with small luthieries back in the day, long before companies like Martin, Gibson, and Taylor sat up and took notice. There simply weren’t enough guitars being made by these small compnies to have an impact on the bottom line for the large producers, so these smaller brands enjoyed a short period of time operating under the radar, which was a tremendous advantage for them as compared with “Boutique Builders” new to the scene just ten years later. It’s difficult enough to learn the craft of luthiery and build guitars out of your garage until (if you’re lucky) you’ve gathered enough momentum to have built your brand and can invest in both the equipment and the staff to build and sell enough guitars to have achieved a modicum of a profit margin. This is not an easy business. But, over the last decade these boutique brands have been collectively selling enough guitars for an impact to be felt in a broader context. Today, the market for boutique brands has swelled considerably such that the larger brands have all come to the conclusion: “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” , and, if they hadn’t already have invested in “Custom Shops” of their own in order to compete in what was now the new “high-end” market segment, they were busily at it. Building gorgeous creations with the finest materials isn’t cheap and requires a substantial financial commitment from both the manufacturer and its buyers. Let’s just say that crafting guitars predominantly by hand is a costly endeavor. This has markedly opened-up the high-end market for custom built, boutique guitars, seemingly with whomever’s brand name or logo is on the headstock. As long as the quality relative to price is there, it seems now that it takes less time than has been historic to build your brand. I’m sure a lot of that has to do with the once novel internet marketing capabilities with social media playing a part in how fast word travels. It is a fascinating time for players and collectors alike, and the choices are virtually endless.

There are just a few reasons that I survived our three years in the Houston area, as I am a “Westerner” through and through…hence my 30-year stint in Colorado before reluctantly landing in Texas by way of Pennsylvania. I suppose not unlike a wild animal, I seek wild places and my senses are offended if I stay for more than a day or two in any urban environment. Where I live has a deep impact on my overall well being and, to me, Houston is at the top of my list of least favorite places. First was the lovely little house I’d found (my wife and I both felt that it was preordained), my beautiful and brilliant wife, our two incredible dogs, hitting the gym and piling the miles on my road bike, and playing guitar during any spare moment in-between. We were now an hour equidistant from both Austin and San Antonio, so anything we might need that a city provides was right there. For a variety of reasons that I’ve learned over time, I’ve become somewhat of a fan when it comes to San Antonio but don’t have quite those same feelings about Austin. While still new to CenTex (Central Texas), I spent a great deal of my time on not only my physical wellness, but my mental well being, as well. It had been a dozen years since I called where I was living home. And I wouldn’t consider it a stretch to say that playing and collecting guitars has saved my life, more than once, particularly when factoring-in my bout with pulmonary embolisms following the 2012 surgery. It gave me something we all need and need dearly: something to look forward to. The ability to absolutely lose myself and all sense of time, making music for hour after hour was a sort of blessing that I’d never dreamed of. I can remember the first time I nailed some of my old favorites note for note and loud as my ears would oblige, and it was very much like ripping around on my motocross bike or finishing well in a mountain bike race. Those wonderful, “natural high”, endorphins would again find the inner-workings of my brain. After being forced to give up my beloved “adrenaline sports”, I never thought I could feel that way again. It didn’t happen often, only when I was in the right frame of mind and was able to match the guitar work on a favorite rock song, with plenty of power chords thrown in and semi-intricate but hugely inspiring solos. Songs like “Hotel California”, “Won’t Get Fooled Again”, and “Sweet Home Alabama” come immediately to mind. This is not an easy thing to do but neither is getting second place in the Iron Horse Mountain Bike Race, in Colorado. Either way, you’ve got to do what it takes to earn that sort of feeling. The other thing that is almost a certainty is that once you’ve felt it, you’ll want to feel it again. This is the kind of thing that is motivational on a natural level as opposed to attempting to cheapen the experience by buying illicit drugs that impact the brain in a similar manner but also quite differently. By now, I’d been on many prescription pain medications and never once did I feel anything but a reduction in pain. I didn’t get anywhere near feeling some sort of “high” like I would as brought upon by intense exercise, or now, playing guitar. Only then did I get that special feeling of endorphins running around in my brain. The two means of getting to the same place couldn’t be any more different. One is uplifting and wholly positive while the other leads only into darkness and bestowing unneccesarily hard times times on those of us who are, in fact, suffering from severe, chronic pain.

By the time we made the move from Cypress to Lockhart (a rural Texas town of just 14,000 people), I was doing much better all the way around. I focused on finishing our new home, riding the Texas countryside, which included long rides out and back from the famed Hill Country, hiking with our dogs, and spending quality time with my wife. I had recovered both physically and emotionally and was, for the most part, enjoying my new life. No, it wasn’t Colorado, but as far as alternatives go, and, for the first time in years, I felt at home.

During our first few years in Lockhart, I was buying and selling guitars on a regular basis. Austin is considered by many to be the “Music Capital of the World” and for me, that meant that we were living in the heart of “Guitar Country”. There are close to two dozen guitar shops in the Austin-San Antonio corridor, as well as a number of boutique builders, all top-tier. This is a good segue into why I still haven’t acquired a vintage acoustic guitar. The other reason was as I mentioned, I fell in love with the search and the means to an end. Once I purchase a vintage guitar, the pleasure of seeking just the right one goes away. I’d by now passed-up on at least five or six opportunities with any one of those guitars meeting my search criteria. All that happened in the first half-dozen years was in witnessing the price double in that period of time. The main reason that I hadn’t yet pulled the trigger on one is that I now found myself equally interested in eventually purchasing a boutique-made guitar and, as the two categories, “Vintage” and “Boutique” were surprisingly close in price given that my search criteria were essentially the same for both. I had been aware of boutique guitars for a number of years but, in the price range I was looking in, my preference had been vintage. For one thing, buying a vintage guitar is an investment that, in all likelihood, will rise in value considerably over a relatively short (five to ten years) timeframe. While the finest boutiques by the best known builders hold their value relative to the production-oriented majors, they still depreciate, just more slowly. I dove in on a search no different than that I’d been on with vintage guitars. I poured over reviews, builder websites, and hit virtually every guitar shop within a 150 mile radius of Lockhart in an attempt to test drive as many boutique brands as possible within the search area. I was hooked. The thing is, I’m retired and am forced to be smart with my spending. I simply couldn’t afford both a vintage and a boutique guitar, which obviously means that I would ultimately need to choose. This made the two searches that much more intensive and, therefore, time consuming. Before I knew it, a few years had gone by. To be clear, this came as no sort of hardship as I’ve been overwhelmingly pleased with my collection at each of its stages and already had a number of very good guitars. I could take my time and, knowing from experience, the last thing I wanted out of it was a bad case of “buyer’s remorse”, which, with all the guitars I’ve bought and sold, has happened to me just once. While I quickly got over it, it left me a bit tentative on other prospective buys for probably six months.

I use just four platforms in terms of my guitar collecting activities. Reverb, a well known online exchange for buying and selling guitars and gear, eBay, which speaks for itself, as does Craigslist. The fourth is getting in my truck to pay a visit to one of the few guitar shops I do business with. I’ve bought many guitars from a number of different guitar shops online and have gotten to know quite a few people who are in the business of selling guitars. Once I’d garnered sufficient knowledge about guitars, amps, and other gear, I learned how to conduct business online without ever having a single bad experience. As with buying a home, a car, or any large financial acquisition, being  knowledgeable about what your purchasing can’t be overemphasized. There is one promise that I made to myself when I got started in creating a collection that I would be happy with for the rest of my life, and that was to have a collection that has paid for itself. Pulling off such a lofty goal would  require a lot of work. This “promise-to-self” would require buying only the best of buys and becoming extremely knowledgable on the subject in order to recognize a great opportunity when it comes along. For instance, if you can train yourself to be patient and not always go for that feeling of immediate gratification, I’ve bought a number of guitars up for auction on eBay. Like any sort of process, it becomes a lot easier to understand once you break it down. I’ve gotten good enough at winning these auctions that I’ve scored brand new guitars at half-price, or gently used, mint or excellent condition guitars for even less. But these kinds of opportunities are rare so you need to stay on top of what’s available. This can be time consuming, but if you keep your mind fixed on the long-term objective, eBay is a viable means for collecting just about anything and saving yourself money while at it. I’ve read that the number one most popular item being sold on eBay is the guitar. There are thousands of guitars that are listed at any given time. It is through the process of buying low and selling high that my collection has always paid for itself. This is not as easy as it may sound. It involves constant attention and, sometimes making some difficult deisions in terms of selling one of what might be your favorites in order to enhance the colletion as a whole. When you’re operating on a fairly strict budget you need to constantly be thinking two or three moves ahead (as with chess) in order to aquire some of your most expensive guitars. When the work is complete, I’ll have a collection of my dreams with at least one guitar to fill any “hole” that might need to be filled in taking the collection where I ultimately wanted it to go.

Over the years I’ve purchased over thirty guitars to end up with the seventeen I currently have. I’m sure to most people, that number sounds more than a little excessive but as far as guitar collections are concerned, mine is sort in the middle both in terms of size and value. To put things in perspective, at over 200, celebrated country musician Vince Gill has the largest collection of Martin guitars in the world with certain individual examples being valued at $100,000 and up. But, for a regular guy like me, there are many who own collections of between ten and twenty guitars. I wouldn’t want to have anymore guitars than I already do because I have what I refer to as a “player’s collection” which basically means that I play all of my guitars. I am at first a player and do not wish for any more guitars than I can play and maintain. With a few exceptions, I also perform much of the necessary maintenance on my guitars but, when it comes to something more difficult like a neck reset or a complete fret-job, I’ll take the guitar to a professional. Because I’ve made a tidy profit on every guitar I’ve sold, I can afford to have the next guitar that comes into the fold to be that much nicer. This looks easy on paper, but the amount of success I’m having has to do with the state of the market at a given time. Do to a variety of factors including COVID, it is currently a robust buyer’s market and has been for about four years. In the last couple of years I’ve bought and sold more guitars than I ever have over a span of three or four years. I’ve had some serious health problems that have complelled my to accelerate the flow of guitars I’m buying (and selling) in an effort to “complete the project” while I still can. Some of my more recent acquisitions have included a 2023 Gibson Les Paul 50’s Model in a stunning “Cardinal Red”, an incredible Taylor 517e round shoulder, and a Fender Telecaster American Pro Series II, in a gorgeous “Miami Blue”.

Over thirteen years of guitar hunting, I am currently left with a collection that pleases me greatly. I feel extremely fortunate to have had the opportunity to spend so much time on what is essentially a retirement hobby. But, to me it is much more than that. I have a certain relationship with each and every one of my guitars and, while it’s true that they’re all guitars, it is not true that they’re all the same. Aside from the more obvious differences like acoustic versus electric and guitar size and shape, there are sonic differences such as tone, projection (loudness and sound direction), note to note separation, and intonation. The tonal spectrum is comprised of lows, mids, and highs, and, then there are the actual sounds associated with each of these frequencies. My hearing has always been above average (I worked in noisy industrial environments where an annual hearing check was required and paid for by my various employers). A “tester” would almost always comment on my hearing as being paricularly keen and I took good care of my hearing in the course of working or playing (shooting, for instance, motocross for another, and operating heavy equipment and chainsaws when I was running my forest thinning business, for the cherry on top). We all interpret sounds differently and when I began playing I started hearing terms like having a “seasoned”, or, a well-trained “musical ear”. I didn’t think much about it at the time but it wasn’t long before these words meant something to me. I went my entire life, to the age of fifty, anyway, never knowing that I has a special talent and that talent was to be able to “play by ear”. What I’ve since learned is that, not unlike most of the skills we are born with, there is a spectrum behind such things and, while I can’t directly compare my “playing by ear” capabilities with others, I think it’s safe to say that my particular gift was limited relative to that of some others that I have spoken with. Perhaps somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. For me, it meant that on my first day I noticed that I could listen to someof my favorite music and intuitively find places on the fingerboard that matched the notes I was hearing. The more I played, the better I got at this one very important aspect of playing a musical instrument. I found myself feeling extremely thankful that I at least had one building block from which to get started and help me learn just a bit faster than I otherwise would have. As I began playing scales, things started to click and made sense to me from a spatial and mathmatical perspective. I was able to put this skill to use when practicing lead guitar but when it came to figuring out chords, I would need to see chord charts and diagrams. This innate ability did one really important thing for me, as it made what is typically a long-term struggle to play along with music and have “your music” mesh with the music you were listening to a the given time. This meant that I found a certain sense of enjoyment and satisfaction which came to me much earlier in the game than would be typical. It got me past the place where many people quit before they find a modicum of enjoyment in listening to themselves play. I can say that getting past that point is extremely difficult for most people and learning to play without help is virtually impossible without some level of innate ability to begin with. Now, I don’t purport to be some sort of prodigy whose talents weren’t discovered until they were fifty years of age (whan I started playing). On the contrary, I have been practicing and playing diligently for fouteen years and would say that my chops fall somewhere between intermediate and advanced, and I remain a long way from calling myself a muscician. Still, I play well enough to lose all track of time and find myself in some musical hinterlands when I pickup a guitar for more than fifteen minutes. I like my playing, which is good because if I can continue to enjoy hearing myself play, it’ll make things that much easier as I attempt to perform at higher levels of difficulty. I have my own set of handicaps among which is that I am self-taught and don’t know how to read music and know even less about the music theory behing it.

An invariable aspect of getting better at anything worth doing is that there is a constant desire to find equipment that will showcase our talents to the best of our abilities, or even then some. I knew from experience in chasing other activities as I made my way through life that upping the ante on my equipment and attempting to grow into that new equipment, was always motivational. To acquire only high quality gear and challenge yourself to be good enough to deserve it. I had gone about learning my very expensive sports in this way and I don’t recall ever once not making it to the next level where I would require all the more better equipment until I found myself purchasing the best technology available at the given time. I used this same approach with playing and collecting guitars and I can’t imagine that what works for me can’t work for others. I feel the same way about buying a new guitar that I’ve had my eye on for a long time as I did when I was spending thousands of dollars on new bikes and skis. I used to say, sort of tongue in cheek, to my friends who might buy something quite advanced for their current level of skill and it would be something like this: “Remember, now you’ve go the rise to the level of your equipment or you’ll risk being called a poser!”. It was that way with a new road or mountain bike being a strong motivator, why would it be any different with a new guitar calling out to me everytime I walked past?

It had now been six years since my last major back surgery and, as I knew would eventually happen, I was again backsliding toward the cliff of untenable pain and perhaps a forever period where wellness would evade me altogether. I had just recovered from first having a pain pump installed in my left flank, as oral opioids had finally been removed from the table for pain patients everywhere. It had been a war (the “Opioid Crisis”) for more than a decade and after losing the last doctor who had been decent enough to mitigate my horribly debilitating brand of pain with pills that the entire country turned and considered to be evil, the government dropped the other shoe on pain patients and exiled them from having legal access to these much needed medications. I’d been a competitive athlete for my entire life, never once touching “recreational drugs”, but had gotten to the point with my pain that, as much as I didn’t want to, I reached out for pharmacological help. For eight years of being profiled and treated like some sort of drug addict, I was able to find a few decent doctors who believed my pain was on par with certain cancer patients and treated my incipid pain with drugs like oxy and hydrocodone, and near the end, hydromorphone. I also took drugs to reduce the muscle spasms I chronically had for years. Oral opioids were literally pulled from pharmacy shelves and pain clinicians were disallowed from prescribing them. Now I had to choose between having no medication at all or to have this pain pump inserted into my back and ever so slowly release a bit of morphine into some somewhat randomly targeted location in my lumbar spine, the whole of which (and not just one disk or two) caused me tremendous pain. After the change and loss of my prescription opioids and I began using only the pain pump, my pain effectively doubled and, though I tried all manner of pain mitigating procedures, nothing had helped. The pain got so bad that it put me in bed for almost 18 months, at which time the doctors and I had decided that all of this new pain had to be addressed and I would have yet again another surgery, this time fusing my SI joint to my sacrum. I’d had another surgery just the year before to fuse L-3 to L-4 such that now I was fused from L-3 to my sacrum and down to my SI joint, a span of roughly 12-inches. It was a miracle that I could still stand let alone be able to bend and touch my toes. This range of motion was made posible on after thousands of hours of doing yoga and body-weight oriented mat-work. Later that same year I would almost die from an emergency gall bladder surgery where things were so nefarious that I’d gone into the ER with sepsis. This infection had gotten into my brain and almost saw me dead while landing me once again in intensive care for 21 days straight. Between that infection and the series (not just one, but hundreds) of pulmonary embolisms I had from the SI joint surgery, I was hospitalized for 34 days from mid-January to the end of April, 2023. The worst part in all of this has been in being forced to quit playing guitar because there was nothing more painful for me than to sit or stand in one place with little movement. This obviously precluded me from playing and, given that I’d already been faced with saying goodbye to at least a dozen beloved sports and activities, I thought I’d taken my final blow and fell precipitously into a deep, dark place. But, somehow, and I have no idea as to what I did to pull it off, I slowly came crawling out of that hole and began what would be the recovery of a lifetime. I went from being chained to a bed, to walking around he house with a walker, to walking up and down our long driveway with the walker, to starting to walk on my own again, with the aid of  a cane, to doing two hours of yoga seven days a week, swimming a mile four times a week, and dropping the 80 pounds I’d gained from being sedentary all in the span of about eight months. At that point, I didn’t care how much it was going to hurt, I was going to play again. I pressed the “restart” button and, though little had changed in terms of the pain I endured in order to try, I willed myself into playing again. It took me about four months to get back what I’d lost over the four year hiatus. I started with just twenty minutes a day and worked my way up to two hours, five nights a week and a total of six to eight hours over each weekend. Though it continued to hurt as much as it did before I stopped, it helped with the depression and I picked up on the playing goals I had in place before the four year break. It was something and I needed that something in the worst of ways.

At the turn of this year, to try fend off the depression even further, I began to write for two or three hours a day and got to the point where, though I was unable to do anything really physical, I did enough yoga to regain a modicum of fitness. For me, writing is a lot like taking up guitar. It is something I had always wanted to do but never had time for. Now that there was no question as to my slowing down, I thought it was something I could do during my SI joint surgery. I was also back at it buying and selling guitars and was attempting to catch up on a huge list of things I’d fallen behind on with our house and property. Primarily to nail down the title,  lessonsfromastone.com, I started a blog but after writing just two pieces, I shelved the idea thinking that a better time would reveal itsel. I don’t get going again until four years had passed. I would find that the end to my health struggles was nowhere near over. It wasn’t three months and the same abdominal infection that nearly killed me once was back with a vengeance. What would happen next will sound unbelievable, but a month after learning that the liver abscess was back (the abdominal infection at work), I was diagnosed with Stage 2 bladder cancer, which brings me to today, fighting both the cancer and abdominal infections simultaneously. My back pain rose to another level as a side effect of the cancer and I am now living from one day to the next, with no future plans except to beat both health conditions.

The two pictures below capture my condition after my extended hospital stay a year before (2023) the bladder cancer and abdominal infection diagnoses in 2024. The picture next to it shows my much improved condition just a month after being discharged from the hospital. Moving forward from my current condition, I really have no idea as what my future looks like. But I do know that I’m facing something that no one should ever have to envision. The odds of having to battle two such nefarious conditions at the same time are astronomical. Knowing me and everything I’ve been through over the last six or seven years, my pain clinician nearly hit the floor upon hearing that the abdominal infection was back and just as pernicious as in 2023 and that, coinciding with its return I’d been informed by my urologist that I had bladder cancer. I’ve come to know him fairly well and he just couldn’t believe that anyone with my (good, not bad) health history could possibly be faced with such things on top of all else that has transpired and having a horrible future when it comes to my pain (the kind that can only be partially helped but will always be significant…even with pain medications).

I needed something to look forward to, so I revisited my hunt for either a “Vintage” or “Boutique” guitar.  I’m just not affluent enough to rationalize the purchase of both. For what I was looking at in terms of materials and specifications, the price of a new boutique from one of the premier builders and the price of a 1950’s Martin D-18, or Gibson J-45, in very good (VG) condition was about the same. I had exhaustively researched both types of guitars but wasn’t thinking that that had made the decision any easier (the more I learned about each, the more it seemed to be a toss-up, and I’m not much for “toss-ups”. I am much more comfortable with a “definitive” answer. I’d put a couple of vintage Martin’s in my Reverb “watchlist” and had done the same for the boutiques, except that, over the next couple of months, I had between three and five to choose from on that side of the coin. I had noticed that Furch, perhaps my favorite contemporary builder, had come out with a small production run of guitars with an alpine spruce top and gorgeous cocobolo back and sides. It so happens that this is my favorite tonewood combination. A few years earlier, I’d spec’d out an almost identical guitar on the Furch website to see what it would cost as a custom built guitar. That figure was roughly $1,000 more than the price on one from this small production run that had set the internet on fire. Cocobolo is a type of rosewood known for its beauty and extraordinary tonal signature. It has also become quite rare due to over-harvesting, which is why most guitar brands have stayed away from using it over the last four or five years. I would have thought that any cocobolo to see the light of day would have been of a lesser grade, but Furch had somehow sourced master-grade material. I’d found it….this was the guitar! Throughout the entire country, there were just five or six in stock, salted amongst Furch’s best dealers. A couple of years prior, I had been very close to buying a Furch from a fellow named Bill Covington, owner of the Fretted Buffalo, in Buffalo, New York, Furch’s most successful dealer. At the time, Bill and I spoke at length about Furch and other boutique brands and, for some reason, I don’t recollect why, I passed on the Furch model Vintage 3 that I’d inquired about. I’d felt badly about it and now had a chance to make good on a purchase. I phoned him and we discussed the Furch coco run and how it came about and just to make absolutely sure that this was the guitar I wanted, I took the weekend to peruse his website as a matter of due diligence . I was in for a surprise. Bill had just recently become a dealer for Gallagher Guitar Company out of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, a stone’s throw down the road from Nashville. I was only topically familiar with the brand as it is the epitome of a one-man-show, producing only a fifteen to twenty guitars a year, all completely hand made. J.W. Gallagher had been a furniture and cabinet maker when in 1965 he opened Gallagher Guitars. A bit of luck would strike and Doc Watson, the most revered country and bluegrass player of his time would somehow get his hands on what was likely the first Gallagher to come out of J.W.’s small shop. It had a crack in the top but that didn’t matter to Watson who had played the guitar enough to know that he wanted it. J.W. was reluctant to sell a guitar with a crack in it to a player such as Doc Watson so they came to an agreement and Watson was to keep the guitar only for long enough for J.W. to build him another. While they were at it, Watson took the opportunity to weigh-in on a few specifications and a month or two later, the first Gallagher “Doc Watson” signature model came off J.W.’s workbench. As they say, the rest is history. While the Gallagher name had been turned overnight into a recognized brand, J.W.’s vision was to remain small and build “the best guitars out there” for a who’s who of local bluegrass players. His sons would everntually join in and production went up some, but was being self-limited by J.W.. Over the years to come, the Gallagher name grew larger than the Gallagher brand but the company was strategically growing from year to year. In 2019, Gallagher’s youngest son decided that luthiery was not his chosen path and the company quietly closed its doors. But it didn’t last. An area luthier who had grown up playing a Gallagher wasn’t about to let the brand disappear from history and bought the company which is doing extremely well, still under the Gallagher name. I believe the company is now crafting over 300 guitars a year and it is predicted that they’re soon going to double that number. Many great players were familiar with the Gallagher name, but there simply weren’t enough Gallaghers to satisfy demand. The new owners, David and Reina Mathis have been hard at work building the brand and upping production so that more of these great guitarists could now get their hands on one.

When I was trying to decide on the Furch, Bill had two Gallaghers in stock. I ended up with the BS-30, a beautiful slope-shouldered dreadnought with an Appalachian spruce top and sinker mahogany back and sides. It is the best boutique guitar I’ve ever played and I couldn’t be any more pleased. I took a bit of a chance, buying it before playing it, but I was confident with the sound clip, photos, and Bill’s help. I didn’t see how I could go wrong. I went with my gut and it didn’t disappoint, nor has the guitar which is in a class by itself while taking up residence in my guitar studio. It is a joy both to listen to and to play. A truly unique and great playing bluegrass machine. I play mostly blues, blues rock, and 70’s Southern Rock, but any top-tier bluegrass guitar is going to be an apt weapon in the hands of someone who plays other genres.

We’ll have to see how the coming months unfold in terms of my health but, at least one thing is for certain, I will be playing my new Gallagher ’til the cows come home! My hunt for a vintage Martin or Gibson has been put on the back burner, at least until I know a bit more about what the future might hold. I’m hoping that the day will come when I can resume and complete my search, and finally pull the trigger on a vintage Martin D-18 (or, possibly a Gibson)! If this story ends with the acquisition of vintage acoustic guitar, that in and of itself will mean that I made it to the other side of my most recent health scares. In the meantime, I’ll be playing my heart out on my new Gallagher and rotating through the collection of my dreams. I thank God for bringing guitar into my life. I’ve long suspected that he had more than a little to do with it!

Last, I’d like to shout out a big thank you to my wife. Without her neverending love, patience and understanding, I could never have accrued such a collection of incredible guitars. A collection of a lifetime…my lifetime! In fact, without her, I probably wouldn’t still be around to talk about it!