At this writing, on a beautiful green-soft day in the spring of 2020, I have been building creative musical instruments for nearly 50 years.  It still amazes me that as a teenager I discovered this thing that has so filled my life, and that has continued to bring me joy and something of a livelihood for all these years.

 

Oddly, I came from an extremely unmusical family; my mom was genuinely tone-deaf; my dad liked to sing an occasional song and would generally end up in a different key than when he started.  One of my older brothers had a red electric guitar when I was very little, but I don't remember ever hearing him play it.  I do remember that he dyed his hair green once to perform with his guitar in the annual school talent show in Cabot, Vermont.  So he must have played that guitar, but it apparently didn't make much of an impression on me.  Another brother, who is quite passionate about music, tried out for chorus in high school.  The chorus director (rather cruelly, I think), told him he could be in the chorus as long as he didn't sing!

 

 Despite that inauspicious background, I was always very attracted to music (my Grandma always said I was the only one in the family who could carry a tune).  As a little kid I had (and still have) a good ear for learning songs.  I could hear a song on the radio a few times and know it by heart (and I still remember those songs I learned from the radio when I was 5 years old).  We had a portable record player, but only a very few records:  my Grandmother got a collection of "The World's Greatest Music" that she saw advertised on TV. It was all famous pieces by classical composers (I remember Debussey's La Mer), but since it didn't have words, it didn't make a big impression on me at the time.  On the other hand, I really liked the record that had "The Purple People Eater" on one side, and "I Told The Witch Doctor" on the other, and I loved a record of Roger Miller's Greatest Hits.  Although I haven't heard most of those songs since I was 8 or 9 years old, I still recall many of the words to "Kansas City Star", "You Can't Roller Skate In A Buffalo Herd", and of course, "King of the Road".  We may have had other records than those, but that's pretty much what music I remember from my early childhood: those records and AM radio, along with whatever bits of singing we did in school.

 

  I'm still that way with songs; the combination of words and music just hits my brain in a way that purely instrumental music doesn't.  My partner, Suzy, once had a young fiddle student who asked, "How do you know what the tune is if it doesn't have words?".  My brain sort of works that way, too!  Over the many years of building and playing instruments I've necessarily gotten better at hearing melodies, intervals and so on without the words attached for my brain to grab on to.  But I'm still amazed when Suzy and I walk out of a movie theater, and she'll be humming a tune.  When I ask her what music that is, she gives me a strange look and says, "that was the theme music of the movie we just saw!"  Oh...I guess I did notice there was music, but I certainly couldn't have hummed the tune!

 

 So, I'm no musical prodigy, but I have always had a love of music.  When I was 14, my mom started a commune with some friends in rural Vermont, and suddenly I was exposed to musical worlds I'd never dreamed of.  The various people drawn to the commune brought their record collections and some were musicians themselves.  I decided I wanted to learn to play the guitar; I saw one on a trip with a friend to Dude and Harry's junk shop in Lower Cabot.  It was a  Japanese steel-string acoustic, a "Tokai", and boy, I wanted that guitar!  They wanted $40. for it, which seemed reasonable, but there was a problem:  now we were living in this commune-thing, and one of the rules we were experimenting with was that we shared all our money.  That meant that I couldn't just ask my mom if we could buy that guitar, I had to ask the whole group, at a meeting!  Luckily, my mom was one of the people with a job, and was earning most of the money at that time, so no one objected.  I got my first guitar and started learning to play. 

 

A year or so later, a woman moved in to the commune who played banjo, and I was smitten (with the banjo!).  It was 1972; I was 16 years old and a student at a small alternative high school.  I asked the director if he could find someone to help me build a banjo.  I'd already done quite a bit of woodworking; we built all our own houses at the commune, and several of the members were professional woodworkers, who I learned from informally.  The school director was a musician himself, and took interest in the project, eventually finding a young local artist who was making lap dulcimers, and who was willing to work with me.

 

This turned out to be a pivotal point in my life; the artist, Ken Riportella, became a close friend and mentor.  He was probably not a whole lot older than me; he was in some ways kind of a wild guy, and was definitely very uniquely creative as an instrument builder.  He was also very kind and supportive, and a lot of fun to do stuff with.  We had some great adventures together, and he helped me build my first instrument, a dulcimer, and my second, a little square wooden banjo with a plywood top!

 

 We didn't have any money, or even really know much about appropriate woods to use; Ken's real gift was     creative design; that was the most important thing.  We would pillage the dumpster at the Weyerhauser         hollow-core door factory, and get scraps of 1/8" thick plywood (known as "doorskin") to use for our   instrument bodies.  For necks we got Asian packing crates from Bevin's Speed and Cycle in Montpelier; the   crates that the Kawasaki motorcycles came in were made out of  woods like Philippine Mahogany, and we   scavenged what we could from them.  I think for that first banjo I used a piece of cherry-wood for the neck,   probably a scrap from the communal workshop.

 

 I worked with Ken in a sort of very informal apprenticeship for several years.  At age 19 I knew making   stringed instruments was what I wanted to do with my life; I also knew that while I had a lot of creative   inspiration, and had learned some ways to channel it into instrument-making from Ken, I would really need a lot more technical knowledge and skills to take that work to places I wanted to go with it. 

 

 On cue, as if by magic, I came across a little brochure on a bulletin board in a local health-food store,   advertising a guitar-building school.  Imagine that....a school that taught guitar-building!  It turned out that   it was one of two in the entire country at that time, and amazingly it was situated about an hour south of   where I lived in Central Vermont.  Things continued to fall into place as if by magic:  I wrote a letter of   inquiry to the school and very shortly received a phone call from the teacher/director, a man named Charles Fox.  He had an opening in an upcoming six-week session; could I come in November?  It was a dream come true, but of course there was a catch: the six-week session cost $800.  While that would be unimaginably cheap these days, I literally had no money.  By then, the commune had given up on the trials of income-sharing, and I couldn't just ask the group to pay for it.  But, about that time my father, who I hadn't had a lot to do with since my parents had separated when I was 12, wrote to tell me he'd saved up a little money to go towards my college education.  I asked him if I could use it to go to guitar-building school.  I imagine he was a bit bemused by the notion, but he agreed readily, and it turned out the $2,000. he'd saved up was just enough to pay for the school and get me some wood and a basic set of hand tools.  Talk about being taken care of by the universe!

 

When November came, my brother drove me down to Charles Fox's little school, outside the town of South Strafford, Vt.  There I spent the next six weeks with five other guys, mostly older than me, living in close quarters in three rather small, wooden yurts.  We ate and slept in the yurts, otherwise all our time was spent in the workshop, each building an acoustic, steel-string guitar.  I was lucky to have already had significant woodworking experience, and even made a number of instruments with my mentor Ken.  While the other students were spending 14-hour days in the workshop trying to keep up with the building schedule and Charles' lessons, I often had time to take a weekend walk in the beautiful, late fall woods.  I found Charles to be a great teacher, and he provided me with the key information I needed to be able to turn my instrument ideas into functional musical tools.  I kept copious notes in a blue notebook, and for years afterward I would refer to those notes, until I finally internalized the lessons, or discovered ways of doing things that worked better for me.

 

When the six week class was over, we students parted ways, each going back to our own homes and lives, most of us with completed guitars.  I knew this was what I wanted to do with my life, and I figured the best way to reinforce what I'd just learned from Charles Fox  was to teach my brother (who was willing) to build a guitar.  We got wood and tools, and set up in a corner of the workshop that the commune's woodworkers were sharing, and each built a guitar, using that magic blue notebook to guide us through.  

 

That's the beginnings of my life as a luthier.  After learning from Charles Fox the basic rules to follow, I found that I could actually build a nice instrument on my own.  That meant, however, that my instruments were rather normal guitars, and were necessarily designed around those rules and parameters that would ensure that they worked as musical tools.  My earlier, very creative and free-form influences from Ken got put by the wayside for quite some time, while I refined those basic skills.  But I always wanted to go other places with it.  I found that I could be creative in a limited way, as long as I made my creativity conform to the basic set of rules.  It took a long time before I internalized the rules, learned from them what was really necessary and what areas I could play around with, and began to transition to a place where I could make instruments that had their basis in my own creative ideas, rather than beginning with The Rules.

 

But once I got to that point, things began to really get interesting!