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Why Do You Have So Many Guitars? Part III

Posted on by abassford

Instrument Make and Model: Harmony Solidbody Electric Guitar

Color/Finish: Bronze

Arrival Date: 1968

Departure Date: 1972

Price Paid: $5

This was my first guitar. I got it from Mr. Maynard Lydiard, Marc’s father, for five dollars when he and his wife were splitting up. The seventh fret had a dent under the D string, so whenever I tried to play an A, I got Bb instead. This defect forced me to learn all the other places on the instrument where that A appeared, and resulted in my learning the fretboard faster than I otherwise would have.

The guitar (probably a Stratotone, a model that would find favor among blues revivalists thirty-plus years later), was finished in a lovely bronze, with one pickup. As nice as it looked, the finish was already damaged when I acquired it. Normally I would have left it as it was, but 1968 was the era of psychedelia. Creativity, illegible lettering, and unprecedented color combinations were the order of the day. Although I understood psychedelia only in theory, I decided that the prevailing cultural winds gave me license to wave my freak flag as high as possible. (Admittedly, “as high as possible” wasn’t very high, given my strictly supervised and decidedly unfreaky adolescent existence in rural Connecticut.) I had seen pictures of the great Eric Clapton of Cream sporting an SG with a fabulous psychedelic paint job courtesy of Beatle-approved art collective The Fool. I loved Cream, so why shouldn’t I have a psychedelic guitar too?

The path from thought to ill-advised action was short and swift. It was my guitar, my five bucks had paid for it, and my parents weren’t the slightest bit interested in what I did with it as long as it was legal. My father had large quantities of sandpaper in his basement workshop. He had taught me how to sand along with many other basic woodworking skills when I was very young. Dad was also extraordinarily generous about allowing my brother and I to use his tools, except for the table saw, which he insisted he be around to supervise if we wanted to use it.

I also had a number of small glass bottles of model paint, brushes, and thinner left over from my previous interest in model-building. As strict as my parents were about most things, when it came to artistic self-expression they were quite tolerant. I knew I wouldn’t get in trouble for painting a guitar as long as I kept the operation away from rugs and furniture. On the very next Saturday, after I ate breakfast, watched my Beatles cartoons, and mowed the lawn, I set to work.

I removed the bronze finish, which came off easily except for a few stubborn patches that I decided I would integrate into the design. I then painted the bare wood with yellow exterior house paint (the only color my father had lying around that was open) and let it dry, more or less, at least until after dinner. Then I scampered down into the basement again, opened up the model paints, and tried to channel the spirit of the Age of Aquarius.

About twenty minutes in, I realized that painting a guitar wasn’t just self-expression. Success required both a design and technical skill, neither of which I had bothered to develop before starting. It was already clear that the colors used to paint the grey and green fuselages of Army and Navy planes were not the palette of swinging London, something I had overlooked in the planning phase of my project. However, it was too late to turn back, so I dabbled on.

Several hours later I was finished, though I’d had to beg my mother for an extra half hour before bedtime to clean up. The results were hideous. I can see the bronze next to the navy blue on the headstock now. My precious new instrument, the gateway to a new life of hipness and belonging, looked like it had fallen on a Jackson Pollack painting. There was never an uglier guitar in the history of Western music. However, I did learn an important lesson from the experience: wishing for artistic success, even coupled with determined and swift action, isn’t enough to make it happen.

Not only was the guitar homely, and missing an A in the center of the fretboard, it didn’t sound great either. After I acquired a better guitar a bit later, by some miracle I was able to sell it for $15 to one of my classmates during my last year in prep school, so at least I made money on the deal.

The Real Housewives of Lostbrook Road

Posted on by abassford

I originally posted this on Facebook and the reaction to it I received was so strong that I’m reprinting it here, slightly edited. Lostbrook Road is the street in West Simsbury, CT where I spent the first eight years of my life. We lived in a small brown wooden house (#6). It had a gravel driveway and a small pond my father dug in the back yard in hopes of attracting birds, frogs, lizards, and other such creatures that he thought might interest small children. (It worked beautifully.) The house is still there, though it’s now blue and a later owner added a garage.

Yesterday,  in a moment of weakness, I looked at what was trending on Facebook and clicked on “Bethenny Frankel.” I have never seen Ms. Frankel on TV (I don’t watch much TV before 3 a.m.), so I have no idea what she does exactly. But I do know from reading the Daily News that she was on a show called “Real Housewives of New York.”

I’ve never seen that show either, but I do consider myself an expert on real housewives. My mother was one for the first fourteen years of my life, and believe me, she had no time to be on a TV show. She cooked, she cleaned, she did the laundry, she shopped, she chased my brother and me around and kept us from killing each other. She made us go outside to play every day, unless there was a tropical storm or worse. She answered every question we had as honestly and completely as she could, and there were a lot of questions.

If we had friends over, she fed them. She made sure we ate everything on our plates, and that everything on our plates was worth eating. This wasn’t hard, because she was a master chef. She knew everything about spices and how they work together. My mother could cook in a variety of American regional culinary styles and make the cheapest cut of meat taste like the finest you could buy. Her pies were beyond anything I’ve ever eaten anywhere. (Her only culinary weakness was baking, apart from the pies, she never figured it out. She blamed the oven, though we had several.) She knew how to shop for maximum nutrition at minimal expense. She could can fruits and vegetables by hand, and even knew how to dress a freshly killed deer for freezing and storage. (Her father, who built guns from scratch in his basement, had been an avid deer hunter until the day he actually looked a doe in the eye.)

My mother taught us how to listen to music, and how to think critically, and how important morality is. She hated injustice with a passion and fought it wherever she saw it. Mom got us up for school and made us do our homework and got us to bed at a depressingly reasonable hour every night. (This may have something to do with why I went into music, where bedtimes are irregular and usually later.)

My mother shoveled snow and raked leaves. She kept a garden, could tell a bird from its song, and taught us the names of every wild flower in the woods. (I wish I could remember half of them.)

Our house was spotless. My mother got down on her hands and knees at least once a week and washed, by hand, every square inch of bare floor and tile. Scuff marks didn’t last 24 hours. Dirty dishes didn’t stay dirty for more than fifteen minutes after a meal was finished. There were complete place settings at every meal, and no condiment arrived at the table unless it had its own special plate and silverware.

My mother drove us to music lessons, to orchestra practice, to band practice, to the doctor, to the pool, to the library, to the museum, to everything that she could think of that might teach us something. She decorated the house like it was a museum, and rearranged the furniture monthly to keep things interesting. For all this work she got paid exactly nothing. My father worked and supported all of us, and he did things around the house too, but it was really all on her.

In addition to all of this, my mother took piano lessons, taught Sunday school, led a Great Books group and got a Master’s degree in philosophy. She also read five to ten difficult books a month, minimum. When she and my father decided I needed to go to private school, she took a job as a bookkeeper in a local music store to pay for it and became a part-time housewife. And NOTHING CHANGED. She still got everything done every day, just as she had when she was at home full-time. And she managed to stay married to my father for sixty-three years, so I know I don’t know the whole story!

My mother was a REAL woman and a REAL housewife. My mother wasn’t unique in this.  There are millions of real housewives all over the world doing even more than she did, with a whole lot less, and without a man to help them. These reality show housewives…all you have to do is look at their nails and you know what the deal is. My mother was a beautiful woman but she didn’t cut her hair for thirty years. She only wore makeup if she and my father were going out, and if she needed anything done to her nails, she did it herself. I wish they’d find something else to call these people, because “Real Housewives” doesn’t work for me. I find it disrespectful in the extreme.

The Coxsone I Knew: Memories of Studio One in Brooklyn, Part One

Posted on by abassford

 

Although, like all musicians working in the reggae idiom, I had known for a long time who Clement (Coxsone) Dodd was, I had never met him. During the years I worked in Kingston, Jamaica as a session guitarist, from 1980-1985, I had certainly heard about him. Lloyd Parks, the great bassist and bandleader of We The People, had made his first record for Coxsone at a young age as part of the vocal duo The Termites. Lloyd, I think, was somewhat embarrassed by the group’s name, and the title of their biggest hit, “Have Mercy Mr. Percy.” But he did have a copy of the Studio One “Presenting The Termites” album in a rack high up on his record shop wall, safely out of reach of anyone who might want to buy it.

Lloyd is not a verbose man, but when I pressed him about the album, he said, “Coxsone never want to pay. ‘Five pound a tune, that’s all me pay,’ him seh all de while. Me proud fe start deh still. Nuff artists come outa Coxsone stables.” He never would play the album for me, despite my pleading, and I never got around to buying it before I left Jamaica.

My friend Bernard Collins of the Abyssinians had taken me by 13 Brentford Road (just renamed Studio One Boulevard), where the studio was located, since it was near his home in Trench Town, but we never went inside. And none of the musicians I knew that did sessions ever worked there. When I inquired, I heard the same thing. “Coxsone only pay thirty dollars a tune. Me nah work for dem money deh. Him have him own musicians.” Many of us were not above playing for less than the forty or fifty dollars Jamaican per song that was the de facto recording scale at the time, but still no one ever admitted going there recently, although some had worked for him at the beginning of their careers.

As I got deeper into the scene, I realized just how much of reggae is built from the Studio One catalogue. For a typical American reggae fan like me, whose first exposure to the music was through the movie soundtrack to “The Harder They Come” (which contains no Studio One tunes) and believed that the reggae albums released on Island and Virgin in the seventies were the peak of the genre, this was a revelation.

Over and over, at sessions and rehearsals, the other musicians would jump on a tune and play it instantly, before I could even catch my breath. I’d say, “But you know it already,” and they would look at me pityingly and say, “But Andy, a Studio One riddim dat. Oonu fe know dem ting deh if yu a deal wid reggae.” But how to learn them? The records were easily available, but I was living a bare-bones existence at that time and did not have a turntable. Nor did my funds allow for many mix tape purchases.

Soon I realized that the oldies shows on Jamaican radio were veritable gold mines of Studio One tunes, although they never announced who any of the artists were. Every night that I wasn’t recording or rehearsing, I would sit on my mattress and play my electric guitar, unplugged, along with the radio, trying my best to copy the tone, timing, and feel of the guitar parts exactly. When I realized that the bass lines were actually the defining element of the songs, I learned them too.

After I had played Skateland, (a roller rink in Half-Way Tree that also served as a concert hall and dance venue) with We The People a few times, I finally got up the nerve to attend the sound system dances held there. Living in Kingston, one could hear the sound systems in the distance almost every night. But once I went to a roots dance myself and saw how the selector and DJs interacted with the dancers, I began to hear the true power of Studio One. Every Coxsone tune generated excitement no matter whether they were dropped early or late in the evening, years after they had been originally released.

So I knew Coxsone’s music long before I met him. But that did not happen until I joined Winston Grennan’s band in New York shortly after I moved there in 1986. Winston had played drums on many of the Studio One classics, and felt that Coxsone owed him a favor (if not also some money). So he approached Coxsone about recording the band. Coxsone agreed, and so it was that I went to Coxsone’s Music City, 3135 Fulton Street in Brooklyn, for the first time, along with the rest of the Ska-Rocks Band.

Music City at first glance looked like just about every other Jamaican record shop I had ever been in. Glass topped counters with CDs and reggae paraphenalia inside, records mounted in wire racks on fiberboard, and stacks of 45s behind the counter near the cash register. Two things were different about it.

The first was the fact that at this point in history the corner of Fulton and Norwood was one of the worst crack dealing centers in the city, and the street scene was absolutely intense, even for Brooklyn. The second was the gray-haired, stately Jamaican gentleman wearing a cricket cap behind the counter. He regarded me gravely with large, deep eyes, evaluating.

Winston introduced us. “Andy, this is Coxsone. Coxsone, Andy. Andy plays guitar in my band.” I extended my hand. Roots Jamaicans do not readily shake hands, so this was a test on my part to see how used to non-Jamaicans Coxsone was. As I expected, he was not at all uncomfortable and met my grasp.

“Pleased to meet you. I’ve heard a lot about you.”

“The pleasure is mine.”

“Are we cool parked out front?”

“Yes, mon. Those people don’t allow anything to interfere with dem business. It’s daytime, you’re fine for now.”

During the session that followed, Coxsone said little, either about the performances or the recording. This did not surprise me since it was Winston’s project. He did mention liking one song that had a boogie-type bass line. At the end of the session he asked for my number. Being new in the city, I was of course pleased, but didn’t expect anything to come of it.

Several days later he called. “Can you come out to do a session for me?” Of course I could. After we agreed on a price, the engineer fired up the twenty-four track tape recorder, I tuned up, and plugged in.

I must take time out to describe the studio itself, which was a source of never-ending visual fascination. It consisted of a small control room, and beyond it a larger recording room, both connected to the front of the shop by a tiny passageway. When I first started working there, there was an actual door separating the control room from the recording room, as is standard practice. After a few years, the door was taken out, which meant that studio chatter in the control room could leak onto the recording. This happened more than once, but never seemed to bother Coxsone much. The door was supposed to be replaced, but no one ever got around to it.

This passageway, like the rest of the studio, was made even smaller by the tape boxes, keyboards, electronic equipment in various stages of repair, boxes of albums and 45s, and whatever treasures Coxsone had recently acquired at auction, waiting to be shipped to Jamaica to be sold. Coxsone loved auctions, and often spent Sundays attending them. I could usually tell if he’d scored something of interest, as it would appear at the front of the shop, waiting to be packed and shipped to Jamaica.

Over the years I worked for him, the piles of junk grew higher and higher as more and more work was done in the control room. If he had recently been to an auction, there would hardly be enough room to get into the studio and set up the amp and mic. Coxsone always insisted on miking the amp with an old Neumann (which he used on everything). He was open to different mic techniques, many of which I would try depending on the patience of whoever was engineering, but he disliked the sound of the guitar going direct. He also insisted on putting guitar on nearly every track he recorded. (Bless him!) Without it, he said, a tune sounded like a demo and not a finished record.