I saw this guitar being built. I held the raw wood in my hands and pinged the ancient European white spruce panel that was made into it’s sound board, marveling at the richness of the ringing. I watched as the luthier shaved a little here, a little there, from the neck, finding a perfect fit to my old friend David’s hands. I watched him learn to play it to its potential, as formidable a guitarist as he already was. And now, nearly forty years later, I witness the end of that dream. The Keller has broken irretrievably. The silence is wrenching.
Guitars can live decades–many decades–longer. My own 1966 Martin D-18 is a decade and a half older and just aging into its prime. A mid-1930’s dreadnaught of similar heritage would bring a rummage-saler to Valhalla and riches. But when this guitar was young, so was the luthier who built it to my friend’s specification. He was full of ideas and experiments of how to put together an enduring instrument. And yet, not all experiments endure. So when I was at David’s house recently after he had told me that the design for attaching the neck to the body–a point of maximal stress in any stringed instrument, bearing the entire force of the tension from the steel strings–was fundamentally flawed, and that even other renown luthiers had inspected and had deemed it irreparable, I needed to see it’s carcass. And more, I needed to document the demise of a wonderfully inspired, yet ultimately doomed, piece of our collective history.
We were not long out of high school when David commissioned this. The rest of us were, candidly, shocked. An extravagance that seemed both out of place for David, and out of reach for any of us. And yet, clearly, he had a vision for a particular guitar. And unlike most of us at that stage of life, David actually devised a way to make that vision a reality. And into our collective musical exercise came this unique and much beloved axe. The nut and saddle are of ivory from a wooly mammoth, dredged, apocryphally, from a harbor in Alaska that was being deepened. Finest rosewood and mahogany complimented the spruce top. I could never play it. The neck is too wide for my hands, and it always felt more like a classical than a steel string to me. Out of reach. But for David, it slayed. It was his Mjölnir, his Excalibur, his Bucephalus.
The case opened with a creak, and lying on the floor in front of me it looked naked and post-autopsy. The strings were absent. Tape held a tension key to the fretboard. It was stripped of its tuners. Our other longtime friend and fellow musician, Curt, was there as well. Nobody said much for a moment. “Pick it up,” I said. “Hold it.” David reclined onto the sofa, and the guitar laid across his lap. “No,” I prodded, “like you would play it.” He cradled the soundless body under his arm, but the neck somehow stuck out at ninety degrees from where it should. Appropriate, perhaps, for a final image I initially intended as documentary. But the backlight streaming in through the window highlighted David’s graying hair, and a look of profound resignation came across his face. I pulled the aperture of the Sony 85 prime wide open to f/1.8, shallowing out the depth of field to a knife-edge across his eyes, and squeezed off a couple of frames.
Pretty soon, it was tucked back into it’s case with little further pomp, and we went back to playing music, the three of us. Reminiscing through some old melodies that, intangibly, somehow felt a little different.
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The End of a Dream
TECHNICAL DETAILS
Sony A7ii, Sony FE 85 1.8
1/60 @ f/1.8, ISO 400
THE END OF A DREAM
I saw this guitar being built. I held the raw wood in my hands and pinged the ancient European white spruce panel that was made into it’s sound board, marveling at the richness of the ringing. I watched as the luthier shaved a little here, a little there, from the neck, finding a perfect fit to my old friend David’s hands. I watched him learn to play it to its potential, as formidable a guitarist as he already was. And now, nearly forty years later, I witness the end of that dream. The Keller has broken irretrievably. The silence is wrenching.
Guitars can live decades–many decades–longer. My own 1966 Martin D-18 is a decade and a half older and just aging into its prime. A mid-1930’s dreadnaught of similar heritage would bring a rummage-saler to Valhalla and riches. But when this guitar was young, so was the luthier who built it to my friend’s specification. He was full of ideas and experiments of how to put together an enduring instrument. And yet, not all experiments endure. So when I was at David’s house recently after he had told me that the design for attaching the neck to the body–a point of maximal stress in any stringed instrument, bearing the entire force of the tension from the steel strings–was fundamentally flawed, and that even other renown luthiers had inspected and had deemed it irreparable, I needed to see it’s carcass. And more, I needed to document the demise of a wonderfully inspired, yet ultimately doomed, piece of our collective history.
We were not long out of high school when David commissioned this. The rest of us were, candidly, shocked. An extravagance that seemed both out of place for David, and out of reach for any of us. And yet, clearly, he had a vision for a particular guitar. And unlike most of us at that stage of life, David actually devised a way to make that vision a reality. And into our collective musical exercise came this unique and much beloved axe. The nut and saddle are of ivory from a wooly mammoth, dredged, apocryphally, from a harbor in Alaska that was being deepened. Finest rosewood and mahogany complimented the spruce top. I could never play it. The neck is too wide for my hands, and it always felt more like a classical than a steel string to me. Out of reach. But for David, it slayed. It was his Mjölnir, his Excalibur, his Bucephalus.
The case opened with a creak, and lying on the floor in front of me it looked naked and post-autopsy. The strings were absent. Tape held a tension key to the fretboard. It was stripped of its tuners. Our other longtime friend and fellow musician, Curt, was there as well. Nobody said much for a moment. “Pick it up,” I said. “Hold it.” David reclined onto the sofa, and the guitar laid across his lap. “No,” I prodded, “like you would play it.” He cradled the soundless body under his arm, but the neck somehow stuck out at ninety degrees from where it should. Appropriate, perhaps, for a final image I initially intended as documentary. But the backlight streaming in through the window highlighted David’s graying hair, and a look of profound resignation came across his face. I pulled the aperture of the Sony 85 prime wide open to f/1.8, shallowing out the depth of field to a knife-edge across his eyes, and squeezed off a couple of frames.
Pretty soon, it was tucked back into it’s case with little further pomp, and we went back to playing music, the three of us. Reminiscing through some old melodies that, intangibly, somehow felt a little different.