Local fans sing the praises of rare, vintage, and collectible guitars By Mikael Krummel
Power down the PlayStation. Let’s talk about the real guitar heroes. True heroes are wellsprings of inspiration and reassurance. They are about substance, strength, and affirmation. The time has come to consider our true guitar heroes—not the overpaid, media-sculpted performers, self-indulgent rock stars, or recording studio technocrats. It’s time to pay homage to the object itself, and the masters who created it. The guitar. The inspirational source for a legion of musical visionaries, technical innovators, dedicated craftsmen, and uncountable artists.
Now we’re talking true heroes!
Guitar love
It would hardly be an overstatement to label Bob November as the most identifiable member of the Eugene-area community of card-carrying guitarophiles. His sizable reputation as a collector of rare and vintage stringed instruments is matched only by his prominent identity as the garrulous, good-humored, straight-shooting, 30-year proprietor of McKenzie River Music.
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See, November is an unabashed guitar-loving, guitar-strumming, guitar-hunting, trading, appraising, deal-making, advice-giving, history-knowing, story-telling, go-to guitar guy. To visit with him in his office or shop, surrounded by countless exquisite and rare stringed instruments, is to tap into a seemingly boundless stream of the Great Guitar Universe.
November found his way into guitar music as a teenager in rural Southern California in 1970. “Everything kind of conspired that year in my life,” he recalls, “to set the stage for a lifetime.”
He counts Country-Western picker Merle Travis as one of his early influences. And Jimi Hendrix. And Eric Clapton. But he describes his first exposure to French gypsy guitarist Django Reinhardt as “the AHA! moment” that ultimately inspired him to cobble together $1,000 to buy his first real guitar—a 1956 Martin D-18 flat top acoustic.
“It was an epiphany for me!” November recalls, his voice cracking with excitement as if he were still a pubescent kid standing awestruck in somebody else’s music store. “I’m looking at this thing, this guitar . . . It’s just the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. I start scrambling every way I can to make a dollar. It takes me a year to pay it off. But the greatest thing is, I’m 13 years old and my mother hates this thing! And I’m thinking: ‘My mother hates it. It’s gotta be great!’”
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If you ask November who his personal guitar heroes are, he draws a variety of distinctions. There are the legendary and sometimes neglected personalities and lesser-known virtuoso musicians. Then there are the iconic players—but he also heralds visionary guitar designers, unparalleled craftsmen, and guitar industry moguls. And not surprisingly, he also praises the guitars themselves: the superbly crafted, the iconic, the iconoclastic, the timeless, the overlooked, and the wholly original.
These days, November defines himself as less a player and much more a collector. His priorities, he says, are “piecing together iconic designs and rare variations on designs that are tried and true, or historically significant.” He buys and sells hundreds of what he terms “street-level guitars,” but personally owns dozens of unusual instruments that range from the inexpensive and kitschy to the exceptionally rare and valuable.
Yes, there are prizes in his collection that he reveres above the others: a “beat up,” extremely rare 1943 Martin D28; a 1923 mandolin signed by the legendary Lloyd Lore, designer of the 1920s-era Gibson Masters Series; and a “hyper-rare” 1950-vintage Bixby electric, designed and once owned by country music legend Merle Travis.
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“They are fabulous, fabulous, fabulous instruments,” effuses November. “To sit in a room and actually play these instruments is almost akin to a religious experience. I’m not sure I know what a true religious experience is, but that’s probably as close as I’ll ever come.”
The book on guitars
Figuratively speaking, if Bob November is a curator of artifacts in the Museum of Guitar Heroes, journalist, author, and UO professor Tom Wheeler is the principal archivist.
You’d be hard pressed to find anybody who has written about or speaks with greater authority on the history, cultural significance, or technical nuances of guitars. He has interviewed a grand orchestra of legendary guitarists and guitar industry giants. He also plays guitar, teaches guitar, and composes on guitar.
Wheeler doesn’t consider himself a collector, but concedes that he owns a modest collection of “very nice” guitars. Paraphrasing former Sen. Phil Gramm’s sentiment on guns, Wheeler jokes, “I have as many guitars as I need, but not nearly as many as I want.” He also has well-formed views on the vintage guitar collecting phenomenon.
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“The superior quality of vintage guitars is what started this mania,” says Wheeler, adding that it was mid-century innovators who conceived the majority of now-classic guitar designs. ”Guitar players like to think they are modern, cutting-edge—except we like 1950’s technology. If you go look at a new Fender Stratocaster, there are refinements top-to-bottom that you can point to. But that’s still Leo Fender’s original design. That’s a 1954 design.” Gibson guitar mogul Ted McCarty, “the other giant in this field,” says Wheeler, also pioneered major changes in guitar manufacturing during the same era. “And we still revere those guitars to this day.”
Players and their special guitars
Guitar players sometimes jokingly refer to an ailment that—at one time or another—afflicts most members of their musical fraternity. The disorder is known as G.A.S., Guitar Acquisition Syndrome: the uncontrollable compulsion to search out and possess multiple guitars for personal use.
Dan Neal, a local singer-songwriter, prefers to carry quality modern instruments into recording studios and performance settings, saying he doesn’t consider himself a guitar collector. But he clearly knows a lot about the history of vintage guitars. And he acknowledges that he owns acoustic and electric instruments that “are kind of old and rare and iconic.”
One of his most prized instruments is a 1956 Fender Stratocaster. “People say there’s a certain voodoo in the old Strats that isn’t present in newer ones,” Neal says. “Those distinctions are so subtle as to almost defy detection. But there’s truly a vibe about them.”
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Steve Perry, frontman for Eugene’s Cherry Poppin’ Daddies, is also a big fan of classic and vintage guitars. He, too, has several noteworthy examples in his personal collection—including some acquired through Bob November.
“When you play a guitar with a certain sound, you play to that guitar,” explains Perry. “When you write a song, you get a certain guitar and you write that certain way. It’s nice that collectable guitars retain their value and get more valuable as they age. But for me, it’s really about the sound.”
Justin King is another familiar Eugene guitarist who favors vintage guitars more for their sound than their cachet. Nonetheless, his collection includes several 1950-era Martins that he highly prizes, in part, because he knows the curious history and provenance of each instrument. He also readily acknowledges that vintage instruments provide their owners with other, less tangible elements that add to their power of attraction.
“There’s a certain gravitational pull between an individual and his instrument—I can’t really explain what it is,” King says. “But if I see an instrument that really calls to me, and it has a sound that really speaks to me, or resonates in me, I won’t be able to think about anything but that guitar until I find a way to get it.”
Modern vintage craftsmanship
Dennis Berck got his first guitar from his folks when he was in junior high, and he immediately started playing classic ’60s rock ’n’ roll in neighborhood garage bands. After high school his interests shifted to folk rock and other popular acoustic guitar styles. He played sporadically until 1978, when he heard about a guitar-making school in Arizona. “That’s when all the lights went on,” says Berck. “I knew I had patience. I knew I was good with my hands.” He dedicated the next three years of his life to learning the basic skills of a luthier and building electric and acoustic guitars.
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These days, Berck’s contemporaries consider him a master luthier. He is one of only three folks doing major repair work on guitars locally, and he is one of two local luthiers authorized by C.F. Martin & Company to repair their lifetime-warranted instruments. Though he maintains a low profile, Berck’s reputation for high-end work attracts more repair jobs—from the U.S. and throughout the world—than he can accommodate. “It’s real important knowing what not to do,” says Berck about repair. “And using correct materials. I try to repair guitars in the same manner, and with respect for, how they were originally built. If they were made with hide glue and used ivory appointments, then I use pre-banned ivory and hot hide glue—the old method.”
He illustrates his point with a 1935 Martin model 00-21 from his workshop wall. The ultra-rare flat top—one of only seven or eight known to exist—is downright funky. Green and orange mold-like discoloration covers the body like leprosy; dirt and nasty crud bulges from the joints. The bridge is badly scarred, nearly unattached. “Yeah, it’s a mess,” says Berck. “It was in an outdoor shed forever.”
He is halfway through the cleaning process, and plans to make a duplicate bridge and re-fret and reset the neck. But he’s not going to refinish the wood. “That,” he says, “would detract from the value.”
Berck holds the great American guitar makers in extremely high regard—especially the Gibson and C.F. Martin companies and their legacy guitars. “Basically we’re all just caretakers of these great guitars,” says Berck, his hand sweeping past the dozen or so instruments scattered across his workshop. “If these are treated well, and repaired well, they are going to outlast us by hundreds of years.”
