2019 AGS Magazine_V5

y John DetrickWhat a
by Dana Bourgeois
truly amazing
time to build guitars.
In January of 1964, I saw The Beatles on the Ed
Sullivan Show and had to have a guitar. Fortunately
for my future profession, I wasn’t alone. In my
hometown and across the nation, platoons of kids
persuaded parents to bring home all varieties of
no-name electrics and acoustics: Silvertones, Teisco
Del Ray’s, Guilds, and even a few Martins and
Gibsons. The movement was on. Offspring of the
Greatest Generation set about learning chords
and riffs, blistering fingers, trading songs, forming
garage bands and consuming all forms of popular
music. The guitar became my video game, at
times forcing my parents to stage interventions
just to get me outdoors. Looking back, I was never
an accomplished player. But I was always a serious
player. Guitar was fun, and it allowed me to occasionally
hang with the cool kids.
My first attempts at lutherie consisted of drawing
miniature Fenders, Gibsons, Rickenbackers, Hoffner
basses, etc., on little plywood paddle boards,
cutting the outlines on my dad’s bandsaw and
painting relatively accurate details with model airplane
enamels. My dad removed and hid electrical
fuses to prevent us kids from using his power tools.
I figured out how to hack the bandsaw by removing
the guards and persuading my brother to turn
the wheels by hand. He’d get up a head of steam
while I steered the cuts, one-eighth of an inch at a
time, until the blade literally ground to a halt.
When I started building real guitars, there were
no guitar schools and certainly no Google and You-
Tube. I knew of only one practicing luthier, Nick
Apollonio, who lived a couple hours away (and,
btw, is still going strong). I had access to a couple
books on the subject, but the methods they revealed
were either hopelessly unreliable (“boil the
sides in a tub of water, tie them to the mold with
string”), or hopelessly unachievable (“your milling
machine is the best tool for cutting saddle slots”).
Somehow I persevered, making and even selling
a guitar here and there. In retrospect, it’s amazing
what a little passion and determination can accomplish.
In the mid-seventies popular music roared to a
crescendo. Local bands played everywhere, and
the guitar was more popular than ever. Handmade
guitars didn’t yet pay the bills. All those Guilds,
Hummingbirds and D-35s that kids my age took
to college eventually needed maintenance, and
at one point or another many found their way to
my workbench. Having no local competition, I
could make a pretty good living producing what
I now know to be mediocre work. Back then, decent
apartments went for $300/month and a re-fret
brought in $75. So glad I’m not starting out now.
Along the way I began to meet a few pros whose
work, depth of experience and business models
rocked my little world. Through the Whole Earth
Catalogue I learned that Michael Gurian ran what
would now be called a boutique production shop,
in Hinsdale, NH. I made quite a few round trip,
eight-hour drives to Hinsdale for the privilege of
selecting and purchasing tonewoods, getting my
first peeks at a real guitar operation, and receiving
occasional words of wisdom from someone who
knew a lot more than I did. Walter Lipton built steel
string and classical guitars in Orford, NH, and also
sold wood. And Michael Cone built world class
classical guitars, using only hand tools, in an offgrid
house New Vinyard, Maine. Michael turned
me on to the Guild of American Luthiers. I became
a member and attended their 1979 convention in
Boston, where I met John Monteleone, Steve Klein
and David Russel Young. Wow.
By the time the 80s rolled around, I had saturated
my southern Maine market. I needed either to
project my services to a bigger community or relocate
from the area my ancestors had settled back
in the mid-eighteenth century. Fortunately, I didn’t
relocate. The Big Time came to me when I met
Eric Schoenberg and began repairing and restoring
real vintage guitars from his personal collection
and from The Music Emporium, the shop he coowned
in Cambridge, MA. The first half of the decade
was spent making bi-weekly or monthly treks
to Cambridge to pick up and drop off repair work.
Soon I and my apprentice, TJ Thompson, had a
serious backlog of vintage repair and restoration
work. During those Boston trips I got to meet and
later know a few of my acoustic
guitar heroes, including Russ
Barenberg, Tony Rice, Norman
Blake and Doc Watson. More
importantly, I got to hear them
play guitars I had built. The ideal
I strove for, and still do, was
the sound of a truly great vintage
guitar in the hands of a
great player. In no way is that
actually possible to achieve…
probably ever, and certainly
not back then. But it’s good to
have standards and even better
to understand exactly how
one measures up to them. Tony
Rice once told me, “This guitar
doesn’t quite make it, man.”
Though I still wince at the recollection,
Tony’s unique brand of
kindness and honesty probably
was, in the big picture, at least
as valuable as the last couple
digits on my right hand.
In the mid-eighties, Eric asked
Chris Martin if C.F. Martin’s new
Custom Shop would build a guitar along the lines
of a cutaway OM I had by that time developed.
Chris answered that it wasn’t anything they’d consider
building under the Martin name. And that’s
how Schoenberg Guitars was born, with me as a
founding co-partner. For a few years I selected
wood, made specialty parts, and voiced guitars at
the Martin factory like it was no
big deal. Based on my Schoenberg
Guitars experience, I later
got a gig with Gibson as a process
design consultant, helping
the company open an acoustic
guitar factory in Bozeman,
Montana. Then I got hired by
PRS to help develop a business
plan and product line for an
acoustic guitar division. Around
the dawn of the 90s, Paul had
decided that he wasn’t yet
ready for acoustics and I was
on my own again. That decade
flew by.
After spending two years
planning someone else’s acoustic
guitar venture, having a go
on my own seemed like the natural
next thing to do. The time
was right. By the early 90s, many
of the kids I grew up and went
to college with found themselves
living in better neighborhoods
and rediscovering the
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