Big Bend National Park is a very special place located in Southwest Texas, several hours southeast of El Paso. It is a vast region, significantly different than any other part of the state. It looks and feels just like high desert found throughout portions of New Mexico and Arizona, except that BBNP occupies a portion of the Chihuahuan desert, which runs north to the edge of park and south, extending well beyond the border.
As everyone knows, Texas is a massive state. What people don’t know that east to west it changes from loblolly pine forest to the brush country of Central Texas (which, for hundreds of years was open Texas Prairie), to the Hill Country between Austin and San Antonio, to the juniper country which opens to the high desert of West Texas. To the deep south, there are the Coastal Plains and to the far north, the Panhandle area which has places like Palo Duro Canyon (several thousand feet higher than Houston and the Gulf region). This is my second favorite area of the state that extends as high plains into Tucumcari, New Mexico and beyond, reaching elevations greater than 4,000 feet. I enjoy spending time in places like Lubbock and Amarillo. Very much home to many large cattle ranching operations, wide and open. I simply refer to it as “Big Country”.
But with all of that to see, I still favor Big Bend which holds Emory Peak at well over 7,000 feet in elevation. In February of 2014, I did a solo mountain biking, hiking, and trail running trip lasting a week, camped at one of the park’s backcountry sites where I ran into just four other people, not counting the few park employees I crossed paths with. It was, at the time, one of the most remote places in the lower forty-eight. It is still remote but it has been discovered.
The following link captures some of the highlights I’ve experienced during my stay in 2014, and another trip I made to the park with a friend, in 2016.
Big Ride Near Cypress, TexasMy “Number 2” Farm Roads, Cypress, TexasMountain Biking, San Juan Mountains, Colorado
My love affair with the bicycle began at an early age, near the Adirondack Mountains of northern New York, during the 1970’s. Very few kids were chasing the sport of cycling, but I’d seen pieces and parts of the Tour de France, which, back then, was covered as much as a public interest story as a grueling team sport. But I could readily see why this bunch of diminutive guys should be respected. My dad must have noticed my fascination because I got my first, good quality, “ten speed” around the age of twelve, followed by a sky blue, French made racer as I entered college. By the time I entered my freshman year, I’d already logged thousands of miles, even notching my belt with a couple of “century rides” (hundred miles). In the time between high school and college, I’d managed to find just one friend who wanted to do that kind of riding. The late ’70’s and early ’80’s unfolded well before the bicycle craze of the ’90’s, so, and though I would play as well (soccer would be my specialty) American team sports like baseball, football, and basketball were still on top.
In college, I met a few like minded people who wished to be referred to as “cyclists”. There would be four of us and the atmosphere was very much as it was defined in the “coming of age” film “Breaking Away”, which featured a very young Dennis Quaid in his breakout role. “American Flyers” with Kevin Costner would come a few years later. My college town of Oneonta, New York had its “preppies” and “townies” just like in “Breaking Away”. I hung out with an eclectic crowd which included both factions, plus our small group of “independents”. The hills and mountains that surrounded town ran along the northern edge of the Catskills and were perfect training grounds for cycling hopefuls like us. We rode several times a week together, leaving time for longer rides on weekends. These rides typically hovered around sixty or seventy miles. While I had no real idea as to how “good” we were, we entered a couple of regional events during our junior and senior years and didn’t see any way that we could encounter riders who were far better. Some, yes. That level of confidence was about right, as we all placed in the top third finding ourselves better than most but lagging behind the best. It was a wakeup call, one we could use to push ourselves harder. As a group, we entered no more races. Had we put in more time than we already were, we knew it would affect our studies as we worked our way through to graduation. As I was carrying the heaviest course load as a dual major, it took me an extra semester and I would be the last to graduate. I haven’t seen or heard from my group of cycling buddies since but through the grapevine I came to know that I was the only one to take cycling to its pinnacle. By then, I was hooked and, after I headed west and landed in Colorado, I had become a rider to be reckoned with. The mountains of Colorado would become my training ground and I logged tens of thousands of miles climbing, often in the saddle for six or even seven hours and climbing and descending multiple mountain passes in a single ride. Some of these rides took me on a course where I would climb some 18,000 vertical feet in a day. In Colorado, that equates to four or five mountain passes. I have profound memories of many of those rides. One ride that comes immediately to mind came on a Sunday when I’d planned to head into the office and catch-up on a half-day’s work and do a forty miler in the afternoon, getting home in time to complete a few chores. Instead, I found myself riding from Golden, at roughly 6,600 feet, to the summit of Mount Evens at over 14,000, and back down those three big mountain passes. At 50+ mph and coming all-too-close to hitting a mountain goat, I got back to my office well after dark. I was racing, predominantly of the mountain bike variety, whenever I had the chance to breakaway for a weekend, typically finishing in the top five for my age group and category (expert/elite), one group removed from professional riders. It was about as good as you could do with a day job and no sponsorships. Not to take anything away from their talents, pro riders make a living. however meager of profitable, living in the saddle and don’t generally carry a career as a doctor, lawyer, or engineer on top. There are only so many hours in a week, and being a professional cyclist takes all of them.
By the time I hit my early-30’s, my career in mining and process development became more and more immersive. I would say that my chosen field was quite demanding, with more than a little pressure. With the amount of training (running, mountain biking, road riding, and skiing) I was doing on top of a 55+ hour a week commitment at work, I began to feel an overwhelming sense of daily exhaustion and was generally unwell. Like some insidious disease, the feeling seemed to have crept up from behind while I was unaware of its presence until it had taken root and begun to spread. I sought the help of a doctor who prescribed a stress-test and a suite of blood work. He found that my heart was fine (I think it was protocol to check on my heart relative to the symptoms I was presenting), but I was anemic, low on protein, and had high levels of cortisol and adrenaline in my blood. From those results, he also suspected that I had depression. It seems that I had “hit the wall”. The thing is that unless you push yourself to your personal limits, you’ll never know quite where “the wall” is for you as an individual. I began taking antidepressants because my brain was getting mixed signals and the major swings in serotonin were eating away at my mental health. My doctor thought that I’d benefit from counseling and I was accepting of the idea. I knew that my problems could not be handled from within because the matrix of variables was far too complicated for me to fix without qualified help. Not if I wanted to continue to have the kind of life I’d laid out for myself. I would go on to meet a therapist who would change my life.
Holding a master’s degree in counseling and fifteen years of experience, she seemed to “get” me from our first session on. Her name was Pie Frye, which made me smile. In the beginning, I would see her twice a week, after work. Though there wasn’t much information available at the time in the way of holistic medicine and what would later be known as living “mindfully”, this was her area of expertise and I was lucky to have met her. My first assignment was to read Stephen Covey’s “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People”. It was an eye opener and I used many of the suggestions in the book, including compartmentalizing my life to add structure and maintain achievable goals. Then there was a chapter on learning how to say “No”. Like many diligent and hard working perfectionists, I was all about “being all things to all people” and this meant that “saying no” to my boss was just something I didn’t do. With how busy I was chasing competing goals (like being both a top notch endurance athlete and the best project engineer at my place of work), I was the perfect example of the downside of being an “overachiever”. This cycle of push and pull had brought me to a level of extreme exhaustion and frustration where I began to see my boss as the enemy. After all, it was he who stood in the way of my taking my endurance sports to the highest possible level.
As with many people who move to a place like Colorado, the relationship between work and play can be a difficult one. Many people view adult athletes as kids that just never grew up. That we couldn’t possibly be any more driven than they were. I remember how I’d once said that it was easier to live life as a “workaholic” than it is to be a top level athlete while simultaneously managing a professional career. This was a time when I needed to do as my therapist would have me do and that is to begin to chip away by tactfully learning to say no when a chronic “yes” would continue to foster massive frustration. My boss was a religious man and I knew for a fact that he respected staff with families who were church-going, standup citizens. That is what he could relate to and he had absolutely no respect for my chosen lifestyle. I elected to live at 9,200 feet in the foothills of the Front Range and take on the hour-long commute to and from work so I could train at altitude in the same way many endurance athletes do, for precisely the same reasons. Colorado is full of them so I had no trouble finding like-minded people outside of my workplace. There is far less oxygen available at 9,200 feet and above than at sea level, or even at an “endurance athlete mecca” like Boulder, which comes in at a mere 6,000 vertical feet. I didn’t want to be “as good” as these highly-gifted, hard-working athletes who “lived below”, I wanted to be better. To this end, and not just in one sport, but a half-dozen, I trained like a maniac. If I wasn’t working, I was training. At one point (which lasted for more than a decade), I was focused on how long-distance running could be a boon to my mountain and road biking, so, along with riding a couple of hundred miles a week, I was running sixty. I had dropped so much mass that, at six-four, I was just 175 pounds and less than four percent body fat.
Push came to shove and I’d just had a successful mountain bike race to celebrate my 32nd birthday, which, that year, fell on a Saturday. I placed second and, after going out on the town that night with my wife (also an elite mountain athlete), we did the long drive home on Sunday. That Monday, my boss announced that we had just signed a big contract with a new client and were going to be running a pilot plant 24/7 for the next six months, seven days a week. Then there was the thing that completely put it over the top. We were to perform the process refinement work in the high desert of Nevada, two months on and seven days off. At another time in my life, this wouldn’t be a problem but at that time it would eradicate my plans for entering at least eight mountain bike races over that same period. As with most sports, the athlete has a finite window of six or eight years when they’re in their prime. I was smack-dab in the middle of mine and, good or bad, being a high-level athlete had become the most important thing in my life. It had taken an incredible amount of work, discipline, and sacrifice to get to where I was and I wasn’t about to blow it all off for one project at work.
I’d chosen a steel-toed boots and hardhat path in my field because it was safely within my capabilities and my plan was to simply work a forty-five hour week and be paid just enough from which to lead an athletic, adventure-driven lifestyle. The mountain sports I chased took years to cultivate and I was now good enough at each of them to never turn away. My career goal was to end up as a middle manager at most and continue to work well within my comfort zone, with a reasonable amount of overtime like most of my friends managed to do. I was capable of landing something in my field that was at a higher level, but I’d have invariably been chained to a desk, stuck in someone else’s idea of a life. This was the career sacrifice I had made to live a mountain lifestyle like I’d dreamed of since I was in my early teens.
I was exhausted from my weekend race in Gunnison and walked into my boss’s office to ask the hard question: “Was I to be appropriated to the team that will be spending the next six to eight months in Nevada? He answered “of course…you’re the best “float guy” (flotation is a chemically complex mining process) we’ve got”. I was slated to be a project lead. My head was spinning and before I knew it, I said “no thanks” and that I would be happy to work some long hours supporting the project from our facilities in Golden, Colorado. I knew that that would be a viable alternative, but he had already picked his “home team” and the reason given was that these were “family guys”. This presented me again with my thoughts on being a workaholic; that it was commendable to work long hours and make personal sacrifices for those with families to feed but could always use something like “Johnnie’s baseball game” as an excuse to take a pass when they needed one. They would receive no demerits for not pulling their weight in the same manner that some of the rest of us did. This particular manager had a dim view of dual income (“DINC”) husband and wife teams with no parental responsibilities. It was almost as if he thought of us as evil…seriously. Those of us who were either single or married without children were thus the backbone of his group in the company and were expected to rise to meet the challenge such that those who were fathers (or, in a few cases, mothers) could expect to work more standardized hours but enough time on top to be considered by their families, friends, and peers s “workaholics”. I had nothing but disdain for this wholly American paradigm. I knew something about European culture and most countries had a completely different view of what life should entail.
I couldn’t have ended up with a boss who was anymore different from me and it left me wondering if this was some sort of test from on-high. To make a long story short, I decided to regroup and make another run at him the next day. To me, the issue remained unresolved, though I’m sure that he already understood my sentiments.
I woke up the next day at my usual time of 5 AM to get some sort of workout in before I showed up at work by 7:15. A typical workday found me getting in a two hour ride or run before arriving back home between 8 and 9. My wife and I shared the responsibility in seeing that our two wonderful dogs got their exercise needs taken care of and that they were as well cared for as most people’s kids. We spent every available moment with them. I was also putting in some of my “spare time” as a volunteer firefighter and head EMT for our mountain fire department and rescue team. I was completely maxed-out. My boss knew of my commitment to community service but seemed to give me zero credit for it. To him, it was just one more reason I had to juggle my time. To him, I was nothing more than an enigma and not of the variety to empathize with. By now, we had a grave dislike of one another. I had zero respect for his life and he had even less for mine.
I’d asked that he meet with me at 9 AM that Tuesday morning. I would have just 20 minutes of his time to try to get an impossible point across. When I asked if he’d had time rethink anything, like my being able to remain on “the home” team in support of the field work in Nevada, he simply replied “no”. From my perspective, and from experience, I knew there would be plenty of work to be done for the same project at our facilities in Golden. He gave me a clear picture of his intentions for me and I felt the wall behind me closing in. I sat there for five minutes and he didn’t budge. My back was now against that wall. I sometimes wondered if, in some twisted way, he was trying to “break me”. But, I had a certain level of confidence in that I was well thought of within the greater company and had already met with executive management on my struggles with my current boss, who’d already been having his way with me for three years. John’s (my boss) responses to anything I proposed in lieu of spending the next six months in Nevada were to the negative. I remembered the book I’d read and just this once I was going to hold my ground and say “no” to the Nevada project, particularly if it meant virtually never being home for half a year. In saying “NO!” I had followed through on a promise I’d made with myself. I let him have it with both barrels and he threatened to have me fired. I did him one better and quit. I refused to allow him to have free reign over my time. I was already averaging 55 hour work weeks and was very good at my job. I’d proven myself as a performer within the company and had acquired a broad based skill set in terms of the business of mining and minerals process development and could confribute effectively to any of the six or seven groups within the company. Not even 24 hours after I’d walked out I got a call from our VP of operations asking me to layout the things that would make my job more enticing, if I were to be assigned to a different program manager, one whom I happened to know well and with whom was a personal friend. We came to an agreement, which came with a promotion and a raise and I was told to take the rest of the week off, with pay. You could have knocked me over with a feather!
Near College Station, Texas
Thus, a new chapter opened in my life and I would never again have to fight so hard for what I believed were my rights. The biggest change came after seeing my therapist for about a year and reading several more self-help books on living mindfully and “how to live your best life”. For the rest of my career, I worked my but off and was happy to do so as long as my needs as an individual were respected. Sure, there would be gaps in my training at times when I believed work needed to come first. It was always a difficult balancing act, but somehow I managed to become a top notch cyclist, riding (and being ready to ride at the drop of a hat) at any opportunity that presented itself. The key was in being effective with the time I had and, quite often, being short on sleep. I would continue on this insane path, being so driven that I absolutely had to be among the best at whatever I did. Ultimately, I would begin to have problems with my back which would lead to my demise not only as an athlete, but as a professional person. Regardless of not wanting to end up in some executive level position in my career, that is where I landed. My last mountain bike race was just days before my 44th birthday. I placed second. I continued to pursue mountain sports at a high level until I hit 50 and all hell broke loose with my lumbar spine. Somehow, I made comeback after comeback, from one surgery to the next. I’ve had five spine related surgeries, an emergency gall bladder removal, and several near-death hospitalizations. I was able to recover and continue to remain on the bike until my 58th year. I had a final road cycling event that I went on to win in 2014. I was 53.
Between my first major spine surgery in 2012 and the second in 2019, I rode over 30,000 miles. I have what I call “100,000 mile legs” in terms of my lifetime on the bike. I have been forced to quit every sport and activity that ever meant anything to me and am currently having difficulty walking. The pain is otherworldly. I do not know everything that the future will bring, but, at 63, it isn’t looking good.
I still have dreams of riding again but my back is diminishing faster than I can maintain it. I have learned to let a lot of things go and focus on a simple life, living with my beautiful wife and incredible three dogs in rural Central Texas on some property. I am thankful for the amazing times I’ve had throughout my life and am attempting to live alongside the depths of the unknown in terms of how much time I have left on this earth. But, having known the highest of highs and the lowest of lows is something I signed up for with such high expectations of what can be accomplished in one person’s life. There is a cost to even the best decisions we make. On balance, I will die a happy man.
After an exhaustive search for the right Gibson Las Paul, I finally came across one that met my criteria for this make and model. No guitar collection can be complete without this icon of blues, blues rock, and rock music. It has been copied many times by other manufacturers, changing their particular take on the guitar in subtle ways to distance themselves from copyright infringement, and, though some have gotten close or even comparable to Gibson’s original version, I have found nothing better than the venerable Gibson Les Paul. As is the case with virtually all goods and services over the COVID pandemic, prices have skyrocketed for some Les Paul models, Gibson has shown itself to be a socially conscious company and has kept the price on its flagship “Standard” model down relative to some of its other Les Paul models. Always perceived as an expensive guitar, the Les Paul Standard of today is priced as a real value amongst myriad competitors.
The link is to a photo spread and write up on the specifics of this particular addition to my collection.
Much is written in guitar webzines, music publications, guitar forums, and blogs about various guitarists throughout the history of modern music and, in particular, how these guitarists compare over what is now a seventy year period. I need to pick a reasonable starting point, so I’ll begin with the blues craze of the 1950’s. Many of the blues guitar greats were poor black men from the deep south and each of them had to develop their own unique style and musicality. The pain in their songwriting was palpable, and they had only each other to learn from. Those were competitive times, with relatively few black musicians acquired a much coveted recording contract. Even fewer owned a decent guitar. There was little money available to these artists, including those at the top of the food chain. What they had was a love of playing guitar melded with a strong sense of wanderlust. Various forms of blues music evolved ranging from the Deep South’s Delta blues to Appalachian blues, to Chicago blues, and some of these bluesmen drifted to LA, where everything seems to happen in the music world. There was even what became a pilgrimage-based studio in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, which recorded all sorts of artists from Etta James, Aretha Franklin, Buddy Holly, and, as time went quickly by, Southern Rock bands like the Allman Brothers and Lynard Skyward, to trendsetters from across the pond, the Rolling Stones and singer-songwriters like Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell. In this crucible where greatness fused with musical direction, many stars were cultivated, people who would go on to become music icons. Even the session musicians who worked for the studio became well known in their time.
It was a time of predominantly healthy competition, before the big named record producers got a rope around this hopeful few to launch the next big names in music, which was quickly evolving from blues to rock n’roll and the folk craze of the 1960’s. The music industry was evolving at an unprecedented pace and agents and managers were fast becoming an important aspect of the business. Unfortunately, for the musicians themselves, they were struggling to understand things like contracts and royalties while at the same time attempting to navigate this “brave New World” where virtually everything was caught in the throes of constant change.
As a guitarist in some of the big-named bands of the time, you were being pulled in different directions, the most complicated of which was how to build your name as an individual with a very important role to play in the overall context of a band. How to be successful as a guitarist while playing a sort of side role, or role as a “sideman” to the “frontman” (usually the singer). Every guitarist had to wrestle with how to keep everyone happy, including themselves. Each had to figure things out for themselves and it could be a tricky road, fraught with crossroads that might lead to nowhere. I can’t imagine being a twenty-two year old musician trying to navigate such complicated and potentially hazardous waters.
Chuck Berry, Albert Collins, Les Paul, and Jimi Hendrix (Public Domain)
Early on, many incredible artists chose to take on opportunities as session guitarists. For a period, even famed guitarists like Don Felder, Duane Allman, and Jimmy Page took regular paying jobs to make ends meet. Fortunately for us, some of the best answered the call to arms and went on to join some of the greatest bands of all-time. Today, rather than take the likely long road to success, numerous guitarists choose to report to their day jobs at the studio. For those with families to feed, this is a viable option in terms of getting paid for being a musician and it is from this perspective that throughout guitar-god history, there have been many session guitarists who are just as talented, if not moreso, than their hard rocking counterparts. What you should understand about being a session guitarist is that these guys (and gals) need to have the ability to morph their chops to accommodate multiple musical genres, and they need to do it at the drop of the hat, day in and day out. But, without the associated fame, they seldom become household names or make capricious lists of the “Greatest Guitarists of all Time”. While this is a shame, it is the way things work in the business of making music.
Jimmy PageRobert Johnson Eric Clapton and Keith Richards (Public Domain)
In my mind, the first guitarist to come along armed only with the early blues artists to learn from was Chuck Berry. It is only after his moment in the sun that others like Keith Richards would come onto the scene. Richards has stated many times that his greatest guitar heroes were among the blues artists of the 30’s, 40’s, and 50’s and that early rock n’ roll artist Chuck Berry was his biggest influence. There are several videos on YouTube where you can see them collaborating or simply performing an impromptu jam session. I think it suffices to say that Chuck Berry’s influence was as great as his success. I would be curious to know if the fresh crop of up and coming guitarists today tap into Chuck Berry’s playing, style, and performing capabilities that made teenage girls everywhere scream with delight. Many would follow, but he was the first.
Certainly the brightest star to emerge into the limelight of Chuck Berry was Jimi Hendrix. Clapton, Page, and Beck would come just a bit later and all three are on record stating that Jimi Hendrix was among their greatest influences. Since Hendrix’s tragic death came at what was only the beginning of his prime, we will never know just how far his gift would have taken him. But virtually every guitar great credits him with being the valedictorian of his class.
Greg AlmanBonnie RaittJohn Forgery and Nancy Wilson (Public Domain)
There are simply too many “Guitar Gods” to list and that’s not the objective of this feature. What is, is the problem with comparing them. Perhaps there are lists of great artists of all flavors but I haven’t seen them. The analogy is that comparing history’s best writers, painters, sculptors, and the like would be impossible; that is, to the extent that these comparisons would be viable. It can be argued that great musicians are just as gifted as artists of any kind. How could we possibly compare Bach to Mozart, or Mozart to any of history’s virtuoso composers. What about Van Goh to Monet? There are centuries to sift through.
There are also the performing aspects of being a guitar god. There’s an athletic component to quickly moving around on a stage while wielding the guitar like it’s some sort of specialized martial arts weapon. Granted, being extremely athletic isn’t a prerequisite to being a great guitarist. For, whatever reason, guitarists like BB King and Jeff Healey have been relegated to seated performing for decades, Still, they are among the most gifted musicians that come to mind. I think you get my point. For the most part, being a guitarist is being a performance artist, at least inasmuch as being the lead guitarist in a rock band. Chronicling through time and taking a good look as to whom we vote for on any of these guitar-great lists can be like witnessing high-level circus acts, where an incredible amount of work goes into creating fluid, graceful movement. If these performances are set to some really powerful music, which suits the type of performance, all the better. It is a thrill to go to a Cirque de Soleil show and watch such performers in action. I think it’s equally as thrilling if, like me, you’ve had the opportunity to go to a Who or Led Zeppelin concert and watch Pete Townsend leap from atop his twin Marshall stacks or bear witness to Jimmy Page setting the fingerboard ablaze while flying up and down the neck of his Les Paul. It also takes more than a little hand-eye coordination to elevate one’s self to being among the best. On top of that, there are the thousands of hours of practicing the craft and making difficult choices in how to spend one’s time. This is what I think of when the word “sacrifice” is put on the table. Heck, I get excited watching the antics of Joe Walsh moving around on stage while making some of the best “guitar faces” known to man.
Joe Walsh Kenny Wayne Shepherd Peter Frampton and Keith Urban (Public Domain)
Among the pitfalls in comparing guitarists who have achieved demigod status is the plethora of differing musical genres they represent. Though closely related, playing blues is quite different than playing jazz and metal is worlds apart from country. So just how is it that some guitarists are comfortable joining a great player (from a different genre) who’s going to be playing well within their comfort zone while the invited guitarist has an altogether different background? It’s because the invited guitarist is so good that they can play across multiple genres with equal aplomb. Think about how intimidating accepting such an invitation would be to a mere mortal guitarist. I also find it intriguing that this sort of thing is reminiscent of one gunslinger standing out in the street in a carefully chosen spot and “calling out” another infamous shootist from within the relative safety of a crowded saloon. There has to be some serious level of competition felt by each of the gunmen and some giant egos hidden behind their cold, black eyes. Yet, far more often than not, the egos in a guitar-based “calling out” seem to be left at the door while both guitarists go at it with equal looks of concentration and sheer joy for those few precious moments or an entire set, or more. I love this about musicianship!
One of my criteria for someone to be referred to as a guitar god is that they can play across multiple musical genres without missing a beat, as discussed in the above paragraph. Another of my criteria is that in order for someone to consider themselves as among the best (a truly complete player) they should be able to play both guitar modalities, electric and acoustic, equally well. I think you’ll find that many of your guitar favorites can do this, as they long ago realized the value in playing both, each form lending prowess to the other. But I also think you’ll find just as many guitarists who find their way to making some list without bearing that medal of honor. I have played both electrically and acoustically since I began my guitar journey, and I can offer testimony as to how much more difficult (but rewarding) it is. Not one of my guitar heroes plays one form to the exclusion of the other.
Nancy WisonJohn Mayer Joe BonanassaStevie Ray Vaughan John FogertySusan Tedeschi Derek TrucksDuane Allman Mark KnopflerGreg Koch
(Public Domain)
Another key component that I have a ton of respect for is those guitarists who add slide guitar to their arsenal of skills. For those of you who have tried (as have I) to learn slide, you well know how difficult it is. I would equate it to learning an entirely different instrument. Guys (and gals) like Duane Allman, Dickey Betts, Derek Trucks, Warren Haynes, Bonnie Raitt, and Joe Walsh are tremendously gifted. If they’ve got this form of playing under their belts, I tend to view them in a brighter light.
I’ve mentioned but a few guitarists who have rightly been bestowed the guitar god title. These are players who came off the top of my head. I used no list in coming up with names, though I am sure I’ve missed a few that I would have liked to include. Vince Gill has already popped into my head. The guy is certainly good enough to make anyone’s list, from his masterful picking skills and overall musicality to his gilded tenor voice. The latter brings to mind another criteria that raises the bar. Singing and playing simultaneously is extremely difficult, particularly at the level that Vince is able to do it. It is very much like playing two instruments at the same time and finding more and more novel ways to weave the two together.
Last, you may not recognize one of the guitarists in the final four photos, but, to me, his trademark skull cap and wry smile are dead giveaways. His name is Greg Koch. He was classically trained and I believe holds a master’s degree in jazz from one of the finer music schools in the Midwest. He is, perhaps, best known as test pilot for Wildwood Guitars in Louisville, Colorado. There are literally hundreds of videos showing he and his chops while playing the latest in high-end guitars from Gibson and Fender. His prowess on the fingerboard is unmistakable, as he makes run after run showcasing the tonal spectrum of each guitar. He does this with humor and humility, seamlessly flying up and down the neck covering a half-dozen genres at alarming speed and somehow making them sound like they belong together. On a list of the most underrated guitarists, I would place him in the number one slot. Do yourself a favor and jump on YouTube to search Wildwood Guitars or Greg Koch, and, after seeing him in action, I am certain you’ll agree.
I hope that I’ve done a decent job of getting my point across such that the next time you peruse a list compiled by some music publication, you’ll do so with an open mind toward the thousands of guitarists everywhere, grinding it out one small venue at a time all the while dreaming of the day when they’re named. Or, dive into the world of those session guitarists I spoke of. It is as likely as not that they already have the chops to make it. Let’s hope that the next, latest list is based more on merit than on popularity.
Greg Koch“The Professor” Jimmy PageMark KnopflerBrad Paisley
I didn’t start playing guitar until I retired twelve years ago. I had moved from my long time home in Southwest Colorado to my last job as a regional director for a large engineering company in Pennsylvania. I’d been having back trouble for years, but it was during that move that things got serious. I was terrified of starting a new, high profile job as my back quickly began to spiral and I’d seen enough specialists over the years to know that sometime in the near future, I’d be needing surgery.
I began my new post and could immediately tell that it was going to be hell. Loads of responsibility and pressure trying to turn water into wine. By now, I was in serious need of seeing a pain specialist and getting some help with the worsening pain. Soon my situation became untenable. I’d come from Colorado a well conditioned athlete and elite mountain bike racer but now it was all I could do to sit through my fourteen hour days. I would be needing to find a place closer to work to mitigate the commute, which meant more sitting. By far, the most uncomfortable thing I could do to my body was to sit for long periods. The walls containing my life were collapsing all around me. I finally found a pain management clinic that would squeeze me in. Unbeknownst to me, there was a war going on and it was called the “Opioid Crisis”. At least in Pennsylvania, with some of the harshest laws covering the transfer and sale of oral opioids, it was like playing musical chairs and when the music stopped, I would be left standing. Clinics were booked solid and doctors were being forced to discern how much pain a given patient might be in while interrogating them to see if their pain was real or whether they were exhibiting “drug seeking behavior”, which closely mimicks being in severe pain. I was refused by two clinics before a doctor agreed to take me on as a genuine pain patient. At this point, I’d only been in Pennsylvania for three months and was already fighting to be able to perform well enough to keep my job and all that I had gambled when I left Colorado. We were deep in the throes of the”Housing Crisis” recession and virtually every industry, including mine in oil and gas, was hurting and laying people off left and right. I was fortunate that I’d found a pain clinician who, after seeing X-rays, MRI, and a CT-scan could see how badly I needed surgery, as my lower lumbar spine was completely decimated from years of concussive sports. He wrote a script for enough medicine so that I could sleep at night and continue working until a surgery had been scheduled. But, make no mistake, the pain was still bad enough that I could barely sit at my desk, let alone travel to and from Houston on business, something I hated.
It was at this time that I knew I needed something pleasing to concentrate on to keep my mind off the pain. Since I’d always looked to mountain sports and activities for stress relief but I could no longer even go for a walk, what I was looking for needed to relax me and help me with the intense anxiety and depression which were a byproduct of the pain. One Saturday and still several months from surgery, my wife and I drove to the area Guitar Center whereupon I spent the entire day trying different guitars and amplifiers. Years ago, I’d played a bit of acoustic in college and decided that this guitar was to be of the electric variety. By the end of the day. I settled on a reclaimed, old growth redwood Telecaster, an amp, and everything I would need to get started. I was after some high quality gear as my instincts told me that this was something I’d be doing for a long time. It literally took the entire day and when I got home I set everything up to get an early start the next morning.
As exhausted as I was, I couldn’t wait to wake the next day and try my hand at playing. That day turned out to be as epic as one before, as I played until my fingers bled and played some more. It was nightfall before I quit for the day. But what a day it was! I managed to remember more than I’d have thought from my bits of playing acoustic guitar in college and found something I’d never known about myself. At the ripe mid-age of fifty, I found that if I really paid attention to the sounds coming off of the fingerboard and the music I was attempting to follow, I could play by ear. I never knew what that meant until I played to a bunch of old favorites and turned Pandora to a blues-rock station where I attempted to play lead along to each song and found myself putting together many of the notes and fitting them in nicely to match the lead guitar on the song. It was a promising start, but, as with virtually everything else there is a spectrum when it comes to playing by ear. Let’s just say that I could do it well enough to thoroughly enjoy what I was doing. Most people spend months, or even years, working on music theory and learning basic chords before enjoyment takes the place of frustration. Aside from what many people seem to think, guitar is no different. But, at least for me, frustration would come much later when I’d gotten to be a reasonably good player but was now attempting more complicated things, so the learning curve slowed considerably and got heinously steeper. Time was coming up on my surgery date and the surgeon had instructed me to prepare myself for a long and painful recovery. I was thankful for getting into guitar when I did because I would need it for what would end up as years of chasing pain and having other surgeries, six in the course of the following twelve years. Times got pretty rough and I’ve all but completely lost myself several times now, at times falling into deep despair from the pain and associated depression. On a number of occasions, I’d even thought about taking my own life, but as bad as things got, I continued to play and began buying, selling, and collecting guitars to an extent that my fascination with “all things guitar” would become an obsession. At times I found myself reading long into the night about the history of guitars and learning all I possibly could glean about vintage acoustic guitars. I became an “enthusiast” and, while now more difficult, my playing continued to get better.
I’ve been playing for almost thirteen years now and have developed an equal love of playing acoustically. Today, I’m roughly 50/50 with equal time playing both modalities. My war with pain and what would become the “pain industry” had come to feel like a series of personal affronts and the only reason I was getting anywhere with these people was in advocating for myself and learning everything I could get my hands on about the mechanics of lumbar spinal pain and about pain itself. I would push pain management doctors to the edge of dismissing me as a patient and stop just short of alienating them. In some ways it was a plea for compassion and understanding, and I felt that I didn’t have much to lose if I was getting nowhere with a particular provider. If it weren’t for the constant support of my lovely and silly smart wife, I’d have been booted from every pain clinic I was seeing. She was always feeling me in during these appointments before the truth of the matter is. I did have a lot to lose if I lost yet another doctor for whatever reason. “Pain Management” is a horrible branch of medicine which is populated by doctors who couldn’t cut it in other fields like cancer research or surgery. Aside from my wife I had but one thing keeping me sane and above ground, and that was making music.
Retirement came earlier that id anticipated due to back problems, which forced me to the sidelines simply because I could no longer sit for prolonged periods and maintain an attention span that ultimately landed me near the top of the game. This all happened smack in the middle of my working prime, where I was at my best and earning a substantial income. I’d worked my tail off for nearly thirty years to get there. I endured the pain for as long as I possibly could and went and got that much needed surgery. Unfortunately, I was forced to leave my job to get it.
Aside from problems with my back, I would have a half-dozen major health scares with three playing out as near-death experiences. I have spent long periods of time where it was only by the grace of God and my love for making music that I made it through.
I had three surgeries in 2023 and have still not recovered. I had to relearn how to walk and have to use a cane to get around. But through it all, there were my guitars standing at the ready to help me through these hardships. But there would come a time that the pain that came from sitting for long periods of time or standing in one place with ten pounds hanging from my neck became untenable and I had to take a four year hiatus from playing. It was only after recovering from my sixth surgery that I made a pact with myself and that was, come hell or high water, I was going to play again. I started in again last August and, while it continues to cause my pain to be worse then if I didn’t play, I continue to push through it and refuse to stop again.
Over this entire chapter in my life, there has been my wonderful wife and three fine dogs to provide much needed emotional support. I’ve spent a lot of time learning how to live mindfully and being thankful for all the things I should be thankful for…and, as rough as I’ve had it, there have been many. But nothing has gotten me through this thirteen years of hell like remaining positive and playing the guitar like there’s no tomorrow. I would go so far as to say that guitar saved my life several times over.
Our pond in rural Central Texas
A beautiful memory of Sage, one of our lovely dogs who passed away in 2021
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