I learned the art of guitar making from Michael Millard of Froggy Bottom Guitars as a result of a fortuitous hitchhiking encounter in August 1973, when I was picked up by his mother. Times were different then.

Several months earlier I had loaned someone my beloved EKO 12 guitar, and it came back seriously broken. I used to hitchhike all over the country with that guitar, so I was equally crushed. I had first heard its silver voice while trekking in Kenya several years before, and life was never the same after that. Almost fifty years later, I can still distinctly hear my first shimmering strum across the strings. Though the guitar was now gone, I still hitchhiked with its case, as I discovered that carrying a guitar case while hitchhiking greatly improved one’s chances of getting rides, whether or not there was a guitar in it. Ever since the accident I had dreamed of learning how to bring it back to life.

So, on that hot August day I had my thumb out on Interstate 95 just north of New Haven, Connecticut, with my empty guitar case, heading to my parents’ 25th anniversary celebration at a place they had rented on Nantucket. Just returning from walking down the embankment to a gas station for a drink of water, I was picked up by one Peg Millard, and a rather amazing conversation began to unfold. She was the mother of a guitarmaker named Michael Millard, who had just finished his first Froggy Bottom 12-string guitar that a musician friend of his, George Gritzbach, was playing in a concert that night. Word was that it was a pretty amazing guitar, so the family was gathering to hear it.

It can happen in life that you find yourself having to unexpectedly make a life-altering decision on the spot, based on pure instinct. For me this was such a time - continue on to my parents’ anniversary party, or stay in the car. I chose the latter. I ended up buying that 12-string guitar, which I could not stop playing, and four years later my parents divorced. So I had stumbled upon a fissure in the curtain of life, and managed to slip through.

I dropped out of college for a year to begin working with Michael, and the deal was that the price of an apprenticeship would be to build a stone foundation for the shop I was to apprentice in. No new shop – no apprenticeship – very simple. So I lived in an 8-mil plastic teepee up in a hemlock woods behind Michael’s place in Richmond, New Hampshire, and over the Summer and Fall I built 50 meters of stone wall 1.5 meters high and half a meter thick, finishing just before the show fell.  During that time I collected all the stones by hand from ditches and stream beds wherever I could find them, and carried them back to the site in an old 1953 Dodge pickup with a broken-off shift lever. I hand-carried all the water to the site from a stream down the hill, mixed all the mortar by hand in a wheelbarrow, and did almost all of it barefoot.

At Thanksgiving the wall was done, and there was a big framing party to get the shop up before winter. Never had a new floor felt so sturdy underfoot, and never before or since had I been in such good shape, or lighter on my feet.

After several years working one-on-one with Michael I had learned enough so that there came a time when my growing confidence began to turn into arrogance. One day there were angry words, and my anger ended up serving as the perfect propellant to drive me on to the next step of the journey.

My partner Cheryl, who was from Iowa, convinced me to try out the Midwest as a place to have my first guitar shop, so we drove out to Ann Arbor, Michigan, just making it between the two huge back-to-back Blizzards of January 1977. We rented a small house in Stockbridge, Michigan, where I set up my first shop in a little upstairs bedroom with a low ceiling, using the workbench I had built and learned on at Michael’s and brought along with me in the truck. I didn’t have a lot of tools, just the essentials, and a beautiful but unfinished cutaway guitar.

This picture was taken by Cheryl that day, just as I finished setting up my workbench, and I was on fire. 

This April, Cheryl and I will be having our 44th anniversary together. Something about 12-strings….