My dad has always been creative - he’s painted since his early teens. He supported our family as a commercial artist and supplemented that income selling his paintings for most of his life. At one time his work was so popular that his two-week shows of thirty plus sheets would sell out in the first fifteen minutes of the run, but it doesn’t stop there. He built almost every stick of furniture in our house and has done everything from soapstone carving to decorative eggs. On top of that he is a magnificent chef! He excels at everything he does, which is why when he told me he wanted to try his hand at building guitars I didn’t waste a minute to put him in touch with Andy Nichol.
Andy is a Luthier at Nichol Guitar and offers a guitar-building course. You build yourself the guitar of your choice, under his watchful eye, and if you can’t finish it he will. I thought my dad would build one guitar and move on to some other new challenge. It’s now more than a decade later and he’s built to date 11 guitars and a mandolin for my 2 sons and I, all beautiful guitars that sound better than anything I’ve ever played in a guitar store. Of course with his artistry he’s done inlay in these guitars that are works of art. On the head of one he inlayed a hummingbird with Abalone. Just like a hummingbird, Abalone is translucent and just like a hummingbird as you tilt the neck of the guitar and the angle the light hits it, the colors change. He used over sixty pieces of Abalone in the feathers and its breathtaking to look at.
When I was in LA about four years ago at an ASCAP event, I was sitting in the courtyard at the Renaissance Hotel in downtown Hollywood playing one of my dad’s guitars by the pool. A guy sat down and listened for a while. Of course my ego kicked in thinking I was winning a new fan. What happened next is something that has happened several times over the years. It turns out he was a Luthier and was interested in my guitar. I showed it to him and let him play it. Before long, he said “how much will you sell it to me for?” I told him that it wasn’t for sale because it was built by my dad. He offered me ten thousand dollars US in cash, on the spot. Of course I declined. My dad only builds for his family. Too bad, he’d make a pile of money if he’d set up shop and built them as a business but he won’t.
P.S. As recently as a month ago George Canyon approached me in High River and yes we talked about songwriting and stuff but we talked more about the guitar I was holding than we did anything else. If my dad was interested, it was quite apparent, he would have put in an order right there on the spot.